Authors: Héctor Tobar
Two of the miners are awaiting the birth of their children to pregnant girlfriends. There is Ariel Ticona, a spry twenty-nine-year-old, who already has two with the same girlfriend. Richard Villarroel is a tall mechanic. His pregnant
polola
is called Dana, and he lives with her in Ovalle, several hours to the south of Copiapó, a place that fancies itself as a kind of Eden, a haven of palm trees and flowing waters amid dry, barren hills. Tonight his girlfriend is a pregnant Eve in that oasis while he, her Adam, is stuck in a hole paying for their recent carnal sins. He remembers her swollen belly, and the baby swimming inside, and those first few faint kicks he felt when Dana brought his hand to that hard shell of skin. Those kicks, he now realizes, might be the closest he ever gets to knowing his son. Richard’s own fisherman father died when he was five, in an accident on a lake in Chilean Patagonia, leaving Richard with a lifetime of unsettled thoughts and shifting homes, and finally a teenage rebellion against his widowed mother in which he actually ended up in jail, briefly, angry at the unjust world that would deprive a boy of all but the faintest memory of having a father. It was as if his father’s life had been taken by a lightning bolt, and Richard’s death will feel that way too, to Richard’s son, if he dies here. It’s an act of chance, the absurd hand of fate at work, because Richard wasn’t even supposed to be underground. He signed up to work aboveground, and he knows that his mother will be confused when she sees his name on a list of missing men, because as far as she knows, he doesn’t even work in a mine. The idea that Richard will soon leave his son an identical legacy of absence to the one he knew, a lifetime of suppressed suffering, now looms over him.
That’s the cruelest thing about this August 5, a day whose final minutes are playing out in the Refuge with the sounds of men moving about on their makeshift resting places: the knowledge that they will be missing to all the people who love and hate them, who depend on them and who are frustrated by them. They won’t be there to protect or provide, to be fed, to be listened to, or to hear the complaints of mothers-in-law or face the angry wordlessness of their adolescent children. The miners won’t be there for the party for the baby,
la guagua
, or at the cemetery to place sunflowers and marigolds on the graves of the men who raised them to be something other than a miner, someone other than a man who could die this way.
Omar Reygadas, the scoop operator who was at the bottom of the mine when it collapsed, was at the cemetery in Copiapó just a few days earlier. He was in the sunshine, walking past the roofed portal into a space cluttered with crumbling crosses and monuments, the nearby dun mountains visible in the distance. He’s a widower, and during these last seven days off he had gone to see the grave of his late wife, the mother of his children, a woman he left while she was still alive. And next to her, the grave of their adult son, who died in an accident. During those same days off, he had gone to the lawns at El Pretil Park, under the pepper and eucalyptus trees, for a party and barbecue in honor of his seven-year-old grandson, Nicolás. “All my children were there, my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren.” And he had gone to Vallenar, the town where he had grown up, an hour to the south of Copiapó, to see his brothers. All of this during just a few days of rest, perhaps his last. Remembering this, and being of a sentimental age, it now looks to Omar as if all these events were foreordained: as if God had given him the chance to say goodbye to everyone before leaving this Earth. It’s a thought at once comforting and devastating, because it means facing the fact that this really is his end.
Omar thinks:
God, if you’re going to take me now, at least let them find my body eventually
. He begins to weep. “I’m not embarrassed to say I cried, a lot, at that moment, thinking that I wouldn’t see my family again, and thinking of the suffering they would go through outside.” He doesn’t want his fellow miners in and near the Refuge to see him broken, so he steps out of that place and begins to walk, alone, in violation of a mining code that says you should never walk alone underground. Safety doesn’t matter anymore, the rules don’t matter, and he walks downhill, following the light of his lamp, until he finds a front loader like the one he used to operate. He sits inside the cab, a quiet place to think, but after a few minutes he remembers the moment of the collapse. Tons and tons of rock fell on top of them, and yet “there wasn’t anyone who was hurt, not even a scratch.” They are thirty-three trapped men, suffering with their fears and their memories, yes—but they are
alive
. Omar realizes that the improbable fact of their survival also carries a hint of the divine. To be alive in this hole, against all odds, speaks to Omar of the existence of a higher power with some sort of plan for these still-living men. He decides to go back to the Refuge, and to wrestle with his own fears and to be a strong old man instead of a weak one. He thinks that maybe if he can transmit strength to those men and boys up there in the Refuge, that will be good for something. And if it’s all part of a plan from his Creator, then maybe Omar’s prayers, his thoughts, and his will can reach up to the surface, too, and make the people who love him strong, because they must be suffering, out there in the night, wondering if he and thirty-two other men could still be alive.
5
RED ALERT!
Down in the Refuge, Darío Segovia, the miner who said goodbye to his girlfriend with a long, silent embrace, says very little as the hours pass from night into morning. Darío has crevices that cut across his sandpaper cheeks, and his expressive face speaks for him: He might narrow his eyes to say
I am determined
, or allow his otherwise steady brow to retreat into a silent statement of worry. During his first twenty-four hours trapped underground, a wrinkling of his leather brow says, very clearly,
I am confused and afraid
. He’s always been a man of few words, as his big sister, María, can attest. She spent much of her childhood looking after her little brother and four other siblings, and like the rest of the Segovia family she knows him by his middle name, Arturo. When Darío Arturo Segovia was a teenager he worked in a mine carrying rocks in a leather bag called a
capacho
that slipped over his torso. His relatives smiled and laughed at the eagerness with which Darío accepted his job as a beast of burden, and they made “Capacho” his nickname.
When they were little, growing up in the Atacama Desert, Darío Arturo spoke little and María spoke a lot, defending her little brother and their siblings against the vicissitudes of a life with parents who often left them to fend for themselves. Today all the Segovia siblings are deep into middle age, approaching or just past the landmark of fifty, but María, small and squat and sunburned from many days and years working in the open air, remains the one who takes charge in a crisis. So it will be today, even though she is on the other side of the desert, more than three hundred miles from Copiapó. María Segovia is at the city hall of the port city of Antofagasta, and she’s there for the same reason Darío is in the mine—trying to win one of the small victories that give her a dignified existence. Her life has been this way for as long as she can remember. When she was a girl of about nine taking care of Darío, who was six, they lived in the desert town of San Félix, in a home built of river stones, wire, and wood scraps in a ravine. La Quebrada de los Corrales, the ravine was called, because there were corrals for animals nearby. Drops of water began to fall from the perpetually dry skies, drumming on the nylon tarp that was their roof, followed by rivulets that snaked along the floor in the spaces where they slept and ate. A torrent knocked down the stone walls of their home and carried away their belongings. Later, María was pregnant at fourteen, and today, at the relatively young age of fifty-two, she is a happy great-grandmother, but memories of poverty, of living in places that can be literally swept away in a moderate rainstorm, lead her very often to be a pain in the ass to anyone who gets in her way.
María Segovia has been bothering the people in Antofagasta City Hall for years for the various permits required to sell ice cream and stuffed empanadas on the street and by the beach, from baby carriages and from metal carts. If you don’t have the proper permits, the Carabineros can haul you away, and María knows what it’s like to be tossed into a jail cell for the crime of selling baked snacks. She’s in line to renew her permit to sell candies when her cell phone chimes with a call from the wife of her brother Patricio.
“Hey, María, has Patricio called you?”
“No.”
“You don’t know what happened to Arturo?” her sister-in-law asks, referring to Darío by his middle name.
“No.”
“I think you should call your brother.”
A few moments later, Patricio breaks the news: Darío Arturo had an accident in the mine. He’s trapped.
María gets off the phone and decides she needs to find out more, and fortunately there are computers in city hall for public use for her to search the Internet. She finds a news report about the accident, followed by Darío’s name on the list of trapped workers, and finally, and most disturbingly, his face there on the screen. Darío has been working in mines since he was very young, and standing there staring at his face, she thinks the accident must be a very serious one to leave him without the means of an easy escape—because Darío always manages to get away and come home.
A few minutes later, María is walking out of the Antofagasta city hall, headed to the bus terminal for the long ride south. The bus takes several hours to cross the Atacama Desert. By 4:00 p.m. she’s arriving in Copiapó. She heads out to the hospital, where miners’ wives and children and girlfriends are all waiting for news, but of course there isn’t any. María decides she has to travel to the mine and get as close to her brother as she can, but one of the hospital employees tells her: “They’re not letting anyone go there. It’s all closed off. You have to wait here.” They say this again and again—“You have to wait here … You have to wait here”—but their insistence only makes her more determined to get closer to her brother. She calls her son Estebán, who lives in Copiapó.
“Of course, Mami, I’ll take you there,” he says. But first he takes her to his home, and she prepares by getting a good strong coat and blankets, because her son says, “Mami
,
it gets cold out there where the mine is.” She takes a thermos of coffee and sandwiches, too, because she knows she’s going to have to wait, because more than likely she’ll have to face another trial of patience. That’s been the lesson of María Segovia’s life up to this moment: You defend your humanity with patience and determination, by making your voice heard to those who judge you a lesser being for your timeworn clothes, your callused hands, and your sunburned skin.
Duly wrapped against the cold, María arrives with her son at the San José Mine at around midnight, almost thirty-six hours after the accident. She sees families gathered around bonfires, wandering about the dusty, dry ground, or sitting on piles of gray rocks the size and shape of bread loaves, the worry thick on their faces, staring into burning flames, standing with their hands in their pockets underneath posts where cones of weak light are swallowed by the immense blackness of the Atacama night. The mine presents an instant sense of collective tragedy, of loss that’s spread across the landscape like some kind of infection. “
Un panorama horrible
,” María Segovia says later. “I can still feel that sensation in my body, that grief, that feeling of being sick to my stomach, the worry that came from having my brother close to me, and having him be far away in this terribly deep place.”
There are fire trucks present, and a few police officers, but no rescue taking place, not yet. She finds a major in the Carabineros, Rodrigo Berger, and he is very polite and respectful but has little information to offer. Everyone is waiting for a new rescue team to assemble and enter the mine. All have come and will come from other mines, because the San Esteban Mining Company itself has no rescue crew. Several dozen helmeted men linger before the mine opening, and all the nearby relatives can do is wait. Wait, wait, wait as each minute passes, living with a kind mourning, because the idea that the men may already be dead, or dying, is sitting there among them all, unspoken, the possibility they’ve learned to deny all their lives, suddenly here, so real in that mine mouth which even the hardened miner-rescuers seem reluctant to enter.
Darío Segovia is down below in the Refuge, saying very little. On the surface, on this cold night, his big sister María feels that he is alive. Today, when they are both middle-aged, she will defend him, just as she did when they were children in San Félix, in a home that flooded when it rained hard. Soon she will begin speaking, telling everyone what she believes: Darío Arturo “Capacho” Segovia and the other thirty-two men are still alive, and they need their families to fight for them.
* * *
José Vega is a fit, wiry man of seventy with smoky brown skin and curling sideburns who began to work in mining when he was a teenager. All four of his sons have worked in mines, though by the time the August 5 collapse hits, three of those boys have mercifully quit that dangerous work. Only one, Alex, is still working underground.
“We’re going to rescue him,” José tells his adult son Jonathan. “Let’s get our equipment and get ready to go inside.”
José gathers the equipment he has left from his working days: a compass, a GPS receiver, a device to measure depth, an emergency oxygen device. Two of his sons will join him in the search for their brother, meaning that three Vega men who left mining are going back into a mine to save the one member of the family who was too stubborn and hard up for money to quit. When the Vegas arrive at the San José they find police officers, firemen, and groups of rescuers from many other mines. The rescuers are going to enter in groups of six. But suddenly someone announces: “We’re not going to let any relatives of these guys go in there.” When it’s his turn to sign in, José Vega gives a false name. They’re told they’re going to have to wait for several hours before entering, and since Jonathan looks very tired, his father says he should go home and take a nap: “We’ll send for you when it’s our turn to go in.” But when José gets word at 4:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon that he’ll soon be going in, he doesn’t call Jonathan’s house to have him woken up. “I already had one son in the mine,” José will say. “And now three more Vegas were going in. That’s too many Vegas in that mine.”