Authors: Héctor Tobar
The capsule slides down out of the shaft, and into the cavern at Level 135. Yonni Barrios, shirtless and wearing white shorts, is the first to move to the door and greet González, who steps out in his pristine orange jumpsuit. Yonni has tears in his eyes, González notes, and the two men quickly embrace. Turning to the rest of the men, the rescuer declares: “There’s a shitload of people up there waiting for you guys!” As the rest of the men move toward him to shake his hand and embrace him, the rescuer makes a nervous joke: “You guys better not take advantage of me! Because there are two navy special-ops divers coming down after me and they’re really good at fighting!”
To the men who have been trapped for nearly ten weeks, the tall González looks impossibly clean and fresh-faced. With a winning smile, big cherubic cheeks, and skin that’s been colored by the days he’s spent in the Atacama sun, he looks like a visitor from an impossibly bright and distant world. “We felt no other people existed,” one of the miners says, and now a real, fully alive member of the human race is here among them.
To González, the thirty-three men look like primitives. Several of them are bare-chested and are wearing rolled-up shorts that look like “diapers” and cut-up boots, he says. “It was like they were a bunch of cavemen.” González will be inside the mine for twenty-four hours, and later he will have a chance to explore a bit: Around the corner, he’ll see a shrine to a man killed in an accident, and as he wanders more it’s as if he’s stepped back in time, to a simpler and more dangerous era of mining history. “They were completely without protection,” he says of the men. He sees no respirators or safety glasses, and the heat and humidity are unlike anything he’s felt in a mine before. The everyday working conditions are “inhuman,” he says. One day in this mine would be a test of physical endurance, and yet the men here survived sixty-nine. How in God’s name, he wonders, did they do it?
Now he must work to get them out. “I’m Manuel González, a rescuer from El Teniente mine,” he says in a calm but authoritative voice. He tells them what the trip through the shaft will be like. “Look, you’re just going to feel a little swaying, don’t be afraid of it … The change in pressure will be noticeable.” The final preparations include checking Florencio’s blood pressure and pulse. “Ah, it doesn’t matter,” González says as he notes the high readings. “This is all for legal purposes anyway.” He runs through a checklist and connects monitors to the harness Florencio is wearing and another to his finger. Less than fifteen minutes after González’s arrival in the corridor at Level 135, Florencio Avalos is ready to step into the Fénix capsule. “We’ll see each other up on top,” he tells the other miners as he enters and González closes the door. A few seconds later the Fénix begins to rise, as smoothly and evenly as an elevator, and the capsule disappears into the shaft. As he rises, Florencio feels as if he were entering a body made of stone. “It feels good!” he yells down to the men below.
¡Se siente rico!
“It feels good in here!” The men yell back, their voices beneath his feet as he rises away from the caverns that were his home and his prison for ten weeks.
On the surface, Florencio’s wife, Mónica, and his son wait for him near the opening: Mónica who once sleepwalked over this very mountain, and his seven-year-old son, Bayron. Farther down the hillside, in Camp Esperanza, María “the Mayor” Segovia watches the rescue on the giant television and thinks of those adult men squeezed into a stone channel and concludes: The mine is like a woman that’s giving birth to them. Like many of the women who’ve been living on the property of the San Esteban Mining Company, she can feel the analogy inside her body. “If you’re going to have a baby, you know that the baby might be born, but with complications, or the baby might not make it at all.” A baby can be strangled by an umbilical cord, or he can get stuck in the birth canal and suffocate. As the men rise up through the stone, the capsule carrying them might fall back down into the mine, or the mountain might rumble again and destroy the borehole, causing it to crack and trap the Fénix and its passenger inside. María Segovia has given birth to four children, and now the men whose lives she’s been fighting for will rise up through a 2,100-foot birth canal carved into the mother mountain. If the Earth doesn’t want to let them go, they won’t be able to leave, she thinks. But maybe the Earth doesn’t want to hold on to them any longer.
Inside the capsule Florencio is awake for this birth, watching as a small light illuminates walls of carved stone that pass before his eyes. He’s wearing the same faded red helmet he put on when he entered the mine on August 5. It’s a few minutes before midnight and on his slow journey upward, October 12 becomes October 13. He can hear only the rattling of the capsule: It sounds as if he were riding an old roller coaster. He feels the swaying back and forth, but Florencio stays calm for the thirty-minute journey, because his long ordeal inside the mountain is nearly over. He is alone, but on the surface an audience of 1.2 billion people is waiting for him, their eyes focused on a cylinder jutting out of the mountain.
Florencio begins to remember the events that unfolded inside this mountain and then other memories come, from his life outside: the day he met the woman who would become the mother of his children, the days those boys were born, the days his sons headed off to school. He’s had a good life, he realizes, and today he’s been blessed again, rising from the stone caverns of the mine in a capsule, being pulled up by men and women he cannot see. He feels the air turn thinner and lighter. His ears plug up, and then they pop. A breeze from the surface flows into the capsule as it enters the final section of the shaft, and for a few moments he is surrounded by steel walls and the rattling sound disappears, replaced by an eerie quiet. The radio squawks to life, and he hears people, the shouts of men calling out instructions to him and to one another, voices on the surface floating above his head. There is a sudden burst of applause. With the Fénix still slowly rising, light and color flood in from the outside, and Florencio looks up to see a sunburned man in a white helmet peering at him through the steel mesh of the capsule door.
PART III
THE SOUTHERN CROSS
18
IN A BETTER COUNTRY
On the night of August 5, Bayron Avalos pronounced his father, Florencio, dead, but on October 13, he sees him resurrected from the rumbling mountain just a few minutes after midnight. With the world’s cameras trained on him, Bayron breaks into tears and begins to bawl uncontrollably. The First Lady of Chile, who is standing alongside him, tries to comfort him. Florencio Avalos emerges from the Fénix capsule and falls into a silent embrace with his wife and son, and clasps the hands of the president, Minister Golborne, and the other leaders of the rescue team. While hundreds of reporters and anchors from around the world watching the events comment on the rescue unfolding before their eyes with breathless enthusiasm, the scene around the capsule itself is subdued and sadly quiet—especially compared with what will come about one hour later, when Mario Sepúlveda rises toward the surface. The man with the heart of a dog can be heard yelling when he is still twenty meters from the top. “
¡Vamos!
” he cries, with a disembodied caveman’s shout that spills forth from the top of the cylinder jutting out from the shaft. “
¡Vamos!
” he shouts again, causing the rescuers and his wife to laugh, and when the Fénix finally rises up out of the shaft, he gives an animal screech that causes everyone to laugh more. The door opens and Mario quickly embraces his wife, then reaches down into a bag he’s brought from the interior of the mine. He passes out slate-colored rocks from Level 90 as souvenirs to Minister Golborne and the leaders of the rescue team and to President Piñera, and he takes off his helmet, like a gentleman or knight errant, and bows his head to greet the First Lady. Moments later he’s embracing a group of rescue workers with shouts of “
¡Huevón!
” and then he leads everyone present in a “Mineros de Chile!” chant, raising his arms with liberated, frenetic energy until one of the rescue workers finally stops him and tells him to take off his harness, please—there are, after all, other guys down below waiting to be rescued. Finally Mario is lowered onto a stretcher and carried away to a nearby triage room, and will later be flown (as will all his other colleagues) to a hospital in Copiapó.
Juan Illanes is the third man out, followed by Carlos Mamani, who is greeted at the top of the shaft by the president of Chile, and later at the hospital by President Evo Morales of Bolivia. He is followed by the teenager Jimmy Sánchez, who is met by his father, and then Osman Araya, who led so many prayer sessions, and José Ojeda, who crafted the famous note about “Los 33.” Claudio Yáñez, who looked so weak he was like a newly born colt, emerges with his chiseled young features in the soft, muted light of an overcast morning, and clasps his girlfriend and the mother of his children in a rocking embrace. He’s followed by Mario Gómez, the truck driver who went back down to make a few more pesos from an extra load and who now insists on taking a few moments to fall to his knees in prayer before the capsule. When the tenth miner comes out, the sun has burned through the morning overcast, and the men and women at the top of the shaft call down to Alex Vega: “Put your sunglasses on!” Alex once wondered if the darkness in the mine would make him blind, but now it’s the potential damage caused by desert sunshine he has to worry about, and he has his sunglasses dutifully on as the capsule emerges. His wife, Jessica, who refused to kiss him goodbye on the morning of August 5, gives him a kiss and a hug of cinematic passion and length, and filled with so much longing and sorrow that all the people around them stop applauding and the sound of Jessica’s tears can be heard by everyone present.
“Don’t cry,” Alex says.
No llorís
. “It’s over now.”
* * *
Jorge Galleguillos ascends next, followed by Edison Peña, who comes out saying: “Thank you for believing we were alive. Thank you for believing we were alive.” He repeats these words a few times more, even as he falls into the arms of the woman who’s asked him to marry her. (He will not.) A short time later word will come from Memphis that Edison has been invited to Graceland. Carlos Barrios, who joined a pair of expeditions seeking a way out of the mine, is greeted by his wailing father: “
Tranquilo, ya
,” Carlos says. Next comes Víctor Zamora, the poet. The psychologist, Iturra, has made good on his promise to deputize Zamora’s son Arturo as a “junior rescuer,” and the boy is wearing a white helmet with a Carabinero police symbol on the front, and unlike the other children at the site, he’s allowed to walk up to the capsule itself and help open it. Just after noon Víctor Segovia emerges, the precious diary still in his possession, followed by the tall, quiet truck driver Daniel Herrera, and Omar Reygadas, the man who took a flame to the bottom of the mine. The eighteenth and nineteenth men out are the cousins Esteban Rojas and Pablo “the Cat” Rojas, who was in the mine doing makeup work because he had missed time for his father’s funeral. It’s midafternoon by the time Darío Segovia emerges. His sister María, the Mayor, is not present (she’s remained in Camp Esperanza below), and he’s greeted instead by his partner, Jessica Chilla. She holds his face, and touches his limbs, something she will do again and again when she sees him at the hospital, like a mother checking on the health of her newborn baby. “I wanted to see if he was whole,” she says. “I don’t think he was aware of what was happening, he was so nervous.” The magical and surreal sense that she’s witnessed the birthing of a middle-aged man colors those first hours Darío is back with her. “It was like he was starting a life he never thought he would live.”
* * *
Yonni Barrios hears cries of “Doctor!” when he reaches the top. He doesn’t see his girlfriend, Susana Valenzuela, right away, but she’s there, standing next to the minister of mining, following several days of private family drama, a few elements of which have played out in the world media. Yonni told Susana in their final videoconference not to worry, that he would make sure she was there to greet him on the surface. He will be like Tarzan, king of the jungle, he said: He will simply speak and all the animals in the jungle will work his will. And so it is. The rescue team tells Yonni’s legal, estranged wife, Marta Salinas, that Yonni wants his live-in girlfriend to have the honor of greeting him. Marta is left to make statements to the press lamenting her husband’s choice. “She’s welcome to him … I’m happy for him.” On the morning of Yonni’s rescue, Susana finishes her work at the camp kitchen frying up fish, changes into fresh clothes, and gets a police escort up to the rescue site.
Susana watches Yonni step out of the capsule, noticeably thinner. He’s taking off his harness, and has his back to her when she calls out to him, in a low voice: “Hey, Tarzan.”
* * *
Samuel “CD” Avalos is the twenty-second miner out, followed by the young Carlos Bugueño, and then José Henríquez, the Pastor, who is greeted by his wife of thirty-three years, Blanca Hettiz Berríos. It’s late afternoon and the rescue site is in shadows when Florencio’s brother Renán Avalos reaches the top next, followed by Claudio Acuña, who emerges to the sound of his infant girl crying loudly. Next is Franklin Lobos, the soccer player, who hugs the twenty-five-year-old daughter whose tears helped bring the federal government into the rescue. She gives him a soccer ball signed by his family members, and Franklin takes a moment to juggle it with his feet. Night falls over the site as the final miners come out: Richard Villarroel, who will not leave his soon-to-be-born son to grow up fatherless, as he did; Juan Carlos Aguilar, the head of the mechanics crew; Raúl Bustos, the man from Talcahuano; and then Pedro Cortez, who notes how sweet and fresh the air tastes, up here where people are meant to live. The thirty-second man out is Ariel Ticona, who will have to wait just a short while longer before meeting his baby daughter for the first time. Luis Urzúa is the last man of the A shift to leave. On August 5, he went deeper into the crumbling mine to make sure all the men in his shift were accounted for, and tonight he’s completed an everyday supervisor’s ritual: He’s left his work site only after all the men in his shift are out of the mine and accounted for. His arrival at the surface is greeted by horns and sirens that echo across the mountain. Urzúa is embraced by his son, and then by the president, and he begins to speak to Piñera in a low, exhausted voice that the nearby microphones struggle to capture. “As the
jefe
, I hand over the shift to you,” he tells the president. “Like a good
jefe
,” the president says. With those words, the public ordeal of the thirty-three men of the A shift of the San José Mine comes to an end.