Authors: Héctor Tobar
The second time I go to Yonni’s home, several months later, it’s after his wife, Marta, has sued him. I arrive with the screenwriter José Rivera and the film producer Edward McGurn, and we ask Susana about her boyfriend’s wife, and she suggests that we go talk to her. “Marta lives on the next block,” Susana says. “Yonni can show you where. Yonni, go show them,” she commands. When Yonni looks reticent to do so, Susana calls out with a hearty laugh: “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hit you!”
Yonni walks to the end of his block and crosses the street. The man famous the world over as the Don Juan of the San José Mine points at a house a few doors away, with a faint smile that’s either meek or devious, I can’t tell which.
We talk to Marta Salinas for a few minutes, as she stands behind the candies and sundries lined up under the front counter of her neighborhood store, the one Yonni took out a loan to pay for. Marta says she took the letters Yonni wrote to her from inside the mine and sold them to an American journalist. When we’re finished talking, she asks, “Did Yonni get the money from the movie yet?”
“No, señora,” I answer. “Not yet.”
* * *
Few people besides the thirty-three miners know precisely what José Henríquez said when he was underground, but around the world he’s earned the name the Pastor. A few weeks after he emerges from the San José Mine, Henríquez gives a talk to a rousing crowd of believers at an auditorium-size Evangelical church in Santiago, with several of his fellow miners present. “I could see before me, thirty-two men humbled before God,” he says from the dais, briefly describing the prayers he led underground. “Now, I thank the Lord for this opportunity to testify to the great power of God. What God did in that place is undeniable. And let no one rob God of that glory. That’s why we’re here,” he says, and he raises his fist defiantly, like a man who’s won a great victory for his cause. In the days and weeks to come, José Henríquez could very easily transform his fame as El Pastor into a lucrative speaking tour, because the agreement the thirty-three men have signed allows each man to give talks as long as they don’t reveal the essential secrets about their first seventeen days. But Henríquez stays home, mostly, and downplays his role. When he does speak, he takes pains to say that he is not really a pastor. “I think what God saw in the mine and what convinced God was humility,” Henríquez says in an interview with a Christian broadcaster. Humility requires Henríquez to recognize he is not a pastor, because men who have that vocation suffer to bring the word of God to others, as his grandfather did, bicycling for many years from one place of worship to the next. “I’m just a man who went into a mine knowing what the consequences might be.”
Florencio Avalos, the foreman who was the first man out of the mine, turns down all the trips to which he is invited, including one to Great Britain at which his presence was specifically requested. On the anniversary of the accident, there’s the dedication of a new exhibit about the miners at the Atacama Regional Museum in Copiapó, but he doesn’t go, even though the president is speaking and has requested Florencio’s presence, and the location is just a ten-minute drive from his home. “Those things don’t interest me,” he tells me. I visit his home three times to listen to Florencio recount his experiences in the San José Mine. He speaks with a sense of wonder and gratitude, though he doesn’t appear to suffer with these memories as much as his colleagues do. Florencio has settled back into a routine, taking an aboveground job with a mining company, while his sons go to school. “I work so that my sons can study,” he says. “If I don’t work, they can’t go to school.” We sit and talk in his living room, in his two-story condo-style home in a middle-class Copiapó neighborhood. He invites me to sit down and have lunch, at the same dining room table where his wife prepared soup for him on August 5. Later his teenage son, César “Ale,” leaves for school, and I watch as Ale stops to give both his mother and father a kiss on the cheek goodbye. North Americans don’t often see teenagers treat their parents with such affection, and even though it’s a common gesture in South America, there is something moving about seeing the foreman of the A shift share this moment with his son. Like all family rituals in the Avalos home, it’s taken on a deeper and richer meaning in the months and years since Florencio was resurrected from the mine.
When he was beginning to die of starvation, Florencio imagined his sons growing up and becoming men and leading the rest of their lives without a father whose cheek they could kiss goodbye. This empty and tragic future has not come to pass.
* * *
By the end of my third trip to Chile I’ve met all the miners save one. Víctor Zamora is not only hard to reach, he also wants a little extra money to talk to me and the men and women producing the movie about the miners. When we finally arrive at his home, just off the highway that leads into the town of Tierra Amarilla, we find a smashed car in the dirt driveway. Zamora opens the door and comes out. The contrast between the confident man who thanked his rescuers in that first video sent up from the mine and this disheveled and disoriented man couldn’t be greater. He says he’s pawned his wife’s jewelry, and the pawn has come due, and he doesn’t have the 1.2 million pesos ($2,400) to get the jewelry back. Leopoldo Enriquez, one of the film producers, is also one of Chile’s more successful financiers, and he takes a look at the pawn agreement and declares: “This is usury.” He agrees to help Zamora pay off the loan, and we enter Zamora’s cramped living room.
Víctor Zamora explains that the crashed car outside is his. He’s been trying to start a business, buying and selling fruit (there’s a load of rotting fruit outside), and this involves a lot of driving back and forth. Recently he was driving on the highway and he blacked out and crashed into a truck. Víctor has been sleep-driving. His subconscious, in an absurdly literal way, is trying to take him back to the mine: He’ll start his car and head out for one destination, and slip into a daze, and when he opens his eyes he finds that he’s driving on the road to the San José. Víctor explains that his memories of what happened inside that mountain have not stopped their assault on his psyche. “What affected me the most was … seeing my own death, and seeing how my companions were dying, slowly,” he tells us. At the same time, in the close quarters of the Refuge, he saw the humanity and vulnerability of his fellow workers clearer than he’d ever it seen before. This only made it harder and more painful to watch them approach death. “You see the capacity of human beings to be sensitive in critical moments, how a kind of love is born, a bond [
cariño
], a brotherhood within a moment of danger.” Víctor lights a cigarette and smokes steadily as he speaks, and the act of smoking, and of speaking, seems to calm him just enough so that he can tell us what he saw and did in the mine, especially on that first night of hunger.
A few months later, I’m interviewing Luis Urzúa in Copiapó when his phone rings with a call from Zamora. He asks Urzúa if the association of the thirty-three miners, an informal group which Urzúa leads, can loan him a small amount of cash. It’s not the first time Zamora has requested such a loan, Urzúa says. When he lived on the streets as a young man, Zamora depended on the generosity and kindess of others, and for some months after his escape from the San José Mine, he returns to that childlike state, reliving his orphanhood—only now with a wife and two children in tow. Eventually, he leaves Tierra Amarilla and returns with his family to the city where he lived on the streets, Arica, some 800 miles and twenty-four hours to the north. He finds work there.
The distance from Copiapó and the mine helps Víctor Zamora. When I speak to him again a year later, he is a man transformed. Long walks on the beach, he says, and listening to friends and relatives speak about their own problems have brought him back to the here and now. I talk to him on the phone, and he sounds like the confident and centered man he was on the first video sent up from the mine. “When someone wants to talk to me, I never say no,” he says. He’s begun to understand how he can shape his mine memories into something that makes him a better father and husband. “
Queda mucho para vivir
,” he tells me. There’s still so much left to live.
* * *
As deep as Zamora’s crisis was, it wasn’t as dangerous as the whirlpool of depression and drinking into which Edison Peña has fallen. “One mistake is that we didn’t have anything to occupy ourselves with, all that free time wreaked havoc on us,” Edison tells me, as he begins to recount the moment he reached a nadir. Since August 5, Edison has been on many journeys, inside the thundering earth and to the cobblestone streets of Jerusalem, among other places, and each time he returns home he drinks. “It’s my understanding that the guys who went to the moon afterward just wanted to hang out at a bar, alone. That’s the worst thing there is, drinking alone.” As the first anniversary of the rescue approaches, Edison’s excessive drinking and his statements about wanting to kill himself lead to his confinement in a Santiago clinic. “For my own safety,” he says, he was not allowed to leave the well-appointed but small facility, which from the outside resembles the kind of mansion a wealthy Chilean family might call home.
“I’m sitting there for an hour and I want to die … I started to feel the horror of being locked in,” Edison tells me. He can’t help but equate the locked doors of the psychiatric clinic with the stone walls of the mine. “I asked if they would let me out for the September holidays and they said, ‘No, the risk is too great.’ So I spent my second Eighteenth of September, the second Independence Day of my country, in confinement.” At some point, he was placed in a padded room and in restraints, he tells me, to keep him from hurting himself.
“How long were you restrained?” I ask him.
“I don’t remember,” he answers. “Don’t make me remember. I hate needles and all those things.”
His emotional collapse, and the humiliation of the forced treatment that followed, are another challenge to overcome, he says. “After an experience like that, I don’t know how it is you’re supposed to be in a good mood and show people the positive things about yourself. I think that being able to do that is a gift that comedians have, but I’m not a comedian. What I do think is that Edison Peña is trying to show people something else about himself, something positive … The most important thing is being able to talk about these experiences, and to understand that it was something you lived. A lot of people who suffered through an experience like that wouldn’t be able to talk about it. If you can talk about it, that’s a gift. If you can sit here and talk to a person you don’t know very well, and talk about all these things you’ve been through—that’s something. That’s courage. It’s knowing yourself.”
Edison Peña clearly knows himself as well as any of the thirty-three men of the San José Mine, but that doesn’t make it any easier to live a healthy life. Months after talking to me he gets drop-dead drunk during a day of meetings with the movie producers at the beach resort of Algarrobo. Several months after that, he travels to Copiapó for a meeting with the other miners convened by Luis Urzúa and the leaders of their association. They see a different Edison Peña, one they’ve never seen before. “He wasn’t drinking,” says Urzúa. The man who summoned the will to run inside the mine, to complete a marathon without any preparation, to sing Elvis tunes for strangers in a language he can’t speak, is trying to summon the will not to drink. Watching Edison try to live a sober life is, in its way, more impressive than watching him jog in the caverns of the San José Mine.
* * *
After months of negotiating, the government grants the oldest miners a retirement pension. It also offers a pension to the younger men, but for them it’s not enough to live on, and they turn it down. A few of the younger men get coveted aboveground jobs with the national mining company, Codelco, though these jobs require that they move to southern Chile. Ariel Ticona, whose daughter, Esperanza, was born while he was in the mine, is not prepared to leave the town where he was born and raised. He stays in Copiapó, without a job. Even though he rarely left home, “I didn’t want to be in the house, I’d get angry with everybody,” he says. Eventually, the man who a year earlier was the most famous new father in Chile leaves his wife and baby girl. “We were separated three, four months. I was always conscious of how I was failing them. I tried to change, but I couldn’t,” he tells me. After some solitary reflection, “I realized that going back to work was going to be my therapy.” Ariel returns to his wife and children, and hears about a local job while playing soccer, from one of his teammates, the miner Carlos Barrios. The job is to operate a vehicle that raises up men using perforators—in an underground mine.
Less than eighteen months after being pulled out of the San José Mine, Ariel Ticona is riding a truck back into an orifice carved into a mountain. “The first day, I felt a little strange,” he tells me. “I wasn’t scared. I don’t know, I just didn’t want to be there.” Adding to the otherworldliness of the experience is the fact that all his coworkers treat him like a celebrity. “The second day, I got scared. I’d hear machines drilling, and it reminded me of when they were looking for us. By the third day, I started getting used to it.” After many sessions in which Ariel has talked to therapists and psychologists about the trauma of being trapped underground, he’s forced to enter the dark once more, and after a few hours more in the mine, the undeniable dangers of subterranean work and his ability to conquer his fears (he does not panic and run away) feed the sense that maybe this is really where he belongs. It helps, too, that this is a better and safer mine, one that “isn’t too big and isn’t too small.” “The fourth day, I was starting to like it,” he says. Underground mine work has rewards, too, and soon he’s earned enough money to buy the house he’s been renting, and to start making improvements on it.
Ariel Ticona has come full circle. He is risking his life again to provide a comfortable life to his family. What he has to show for the sixty-nine days he spent in the San José Mine is a top-of-the-line baby carriage from Spain, assorted flags and other mementos, a medal issued by the Chilean Congress, and memories of once-in-a-lifetime visits to Florida, Israel, and a cavernous soccer stadium in Madrid.