Authors: Héctor Tobar
The days pass, and the pessimism grows, threatening to envelop even the most lively and hopeful and determined of the miners’ wives and girlfriends. Susana Valenzuela, the other woman who lives with Yonni Barrios, hears some of his estranged relatives at Camp Esperanza say he’s probably dead already. Susana has been going to the mine with Marta, Yonni’s wife, and it’s quite awkward, because Marta’s family is there, too, including the adult children Marta had before she met Yonni.
Later, at home, Susana serves her boyfriend’s wife a cup of tea as Marta talks about the news from the mine, which is very bad. “Listen, Susi,” Marta begins. “Look, this is as far as you go. I’ve come to let you know. Because Yonni is dead. So I need you to give me Yonni’s things.” Marta wants Yonni’s documents, his pay stubs especially, which she’ll need to receive his death benefits from the mine owners and the government. Susana listens to this and thinks that Yonni isn’t dead, and that this woman is sort of crazy, and if she wants his papers, why not? Those material things aren’t important to her, she’s worked her whole life and has her own savings and pension, so who cares? But as she leaves to climb the stairs to their bedroom, the one she shares with Yonni, she stops.
“Show me Yonni’s body and I’ll give you those things,” she says. “Prove to me that he’s dead.”
“You’re really stupid,” Marta replies, in Susana’s account, because Marta will deny this conversation ever took place. “How am I going to get him out of the mine? Am I Superman?” Yonni is, after all, buried under a mountain of stone as far as anyone knows.
“If he’s dead, go ahead and keep your money, but hand over his body to me so that I can have a wake for him,” Susana answers.
“You’ll have to talk to his sisters about that,” Marta says, in Susana’s account of this moment.
“Get out of here,” Susana says. “Leave, and don’t come back to bother me.”
When Susana goes to the mine, she hears people say the miners are all dead. She hears one of Yonni’s relatives talk about collecting his death benefits, too. This is the way she remembers those dark days: Yonni’s relatives treat her like a nobody, because her bond to that flawed, womanizing, and well-paid man is now broken and meaningless. Perhaps Yonni’s relatives see a kind of justice being done: Susana was able to manipulate Yonni and his need to be loved to claim his paycheck when he was alive, but if he’s dead she won’t be able to take from him any longer. But Susana feels that Yonni is alive. “He was down there, fighting for his life. He wasn’t handsome, but…” she will say later, her voice breaking off as she begins to cry. “He was fighting. I could see him down there, buried, buried in mud.” She imagines him being swallowed up by that same gray, gritty slime that she cleaned off his boots and his clothes when he came home.
“They’re all dead,” she hears someone say again, and she goes back home and throws herself on the floor and begins to weep. “I felt like dying.” Then she hears a voice. “Chana,” it says. That’s what Yonni called her, “Chana.” “I swear it, to the little mother who’s in heaven, I swear I heard it,” she says. Her love for the missing Yonni Barrios is so strong, she projects it into the sounds and objects inside the house they shared, seeing a series of “miracles” that fill her eyes with wonder, because she believes that each one has placed her in the presence of the Holy Ghost. She feels the entire house tremble, but when she asks her neighbors if there was an earthquake, they say no. The flames on the votive candles she places at a small shrine for Yonni go out and then start burning again all on their own. One day she comes home from the mine and sees police gathered outside her home. The neighbors say that they called the Carabineros because there were noises inside Susana’s house, as if someone were taking the house apart—they suspected that Susana was being robbed. When Susana opens the door and goes inside, however, she finds everything in its place. She’s convinced that the noises were Yonni’s spirit sending her a message:
I’m alive, Chana! I’m fighting, don’t forget me!
Some of these things she tells to the psychologist who comes to visit her later, but others she won’t: “Because I could tell he thought I was crazy.”
Others will also report odd and seemingly paranormal occurrences. A miner’s cell phone calls home even though he’s still trapped with that phone deep underground. Others report seeing the spirits of the thirty-three men wandering around northern Chile. In a section of the Juan Pablo II neighborhood of Copiapó, where many Bolivian immigrants live, a neighbor of the miner Carlos Mamani says she sees him in her front yard one night. In the traditional beliefs of Bolivia’s Ayamara people, the spirit of a man who is near death will walk at night in the days before his death. The neighbor tells Mamani’s wife, Veronica Quispe, and Veronica’s mother that she saw Carlos sitting on the patio in front of her house one night. Carlos was wearing a cap, looking off to the side, the neighbor says, but when she approached him to talk he disappeared. Veronica and her mother get very angry at the neighbor who tells this story, because to an Ayamara ear it can only mean one thing: Carlos is dying. Why are you saying that, they tell her. Stop sharing your ugly stories with us!
The miracles and the visions of death and suffering are spreading. María Segovia imagines her brother putting on a brave face below. Quiet Darío Segovia, with his square face and stoic disposition, and the rugged countenance of an indigenous warrior. Once he was a little boy who needed his loud big sister to stand up for him. From her tent in the camp, she can hear the machines drilling for Darío and his thirty-two colleagues. There are now many more families around her, growing circles of brothers, cousins, from cities near and far away: from the opposite ends of Chile, and from nearby Vallenar and Caldera, towns where miners’ families know what it is to wait while men dig in search of other men. There are more than one thousand people at Camp Esperanza now, so many praying people “it was like Jersusalem,” Jessica Chilla, Darío’s girlfriend and life partner, will remember.
María Segovia often climbs above this growing city in the desert to look for and listen to the drills that are searching for her brother. She learns the noise patterns of each rig, the habits of the drill crews: what a diamond-tipped drill sounds like, when they stop to change shifts. At night each drill rig occupies a pool of light in the ink-black cloud of total desert darkness. The noise and the light and the energy of the drill crews is reassuring. But then, after a few days, one of the drills stops, and then another. For several hours she hears nothing. María hikes again to the nearby bare, rocky mountain that looms over the mine site, and begins to climb. Looking down from the top, she confirms: There is no dust coming from the machines. She climbs back down the hill to the camp to let the other families know, and several women rush up to the gate by the guard shack. “You’ve stopped drilling! You stopped!” The women hit the pots and pans they’ve brought to cook meals, making as much noise as they can. Finally, Golborne comes to the gate to say, No, they’ve just broken one of the diamond drills, we just need to replace it. Please, be patient. In the days to come, María Segovia climbs the mountain more than once to check on the drillers and Golborne’s promises. She’s a grandmother of fifty-two, climbing this hill as if she were a Girl Scout, with other women following after her, scratching their way up the slope. “We became like wild pumas running over the mountain,” María says.
Finally, Cristián Barra’s police supervisors post Carabineros at the base of the hill to keep the women from climbing it. But the next time María Segovia decides she needs to see the drillers working for herself, the officer who sees her coming looks the other way. She reaches her post on the mountaintop, sees the masts of drill rigs standing nearly perpendicular, the clouds of diorite turned to dust rising into the air.
She takes precarious, sliding steps back down the mountain, to the camp of tents and tarpaulin where the families of three miners are camping together. At the Segovia-Rojas camp, where the families of the miner-cousins Pablo Rojas, Darío Segovia, and Esteban Rojas wait and sometimes sleep, the nights do not pass quietly. They sing songs under the southern stars or in a swirling fog, and sometimes a chant of “
¡Chi-chi-chi, le-le-le, mineros de Chile!
” is taken up. And sometimes stories are told of three cousins, all in their forties, who grew up in the valleys nearby when there were still days when water could be found flowing through the river.
8
A FLICKERING FLAME
For the first few hours the sound of those drills coming toward them is at once calming and exhilarating. Víctor Segovia can’t sleep, listening late into the night and into the next morning. At 4:00 a.m on Monday, August 9, more than eight hours after he began to hear the drilling, he drifts into a dream. He’s home, asleep in his own bed, and he hears his daughter calling to him: For a moment Víctor is in a bright and open space, free of the torment of the mine, until he opens his eyes and finds himself on the floor of the Ramp near the Refuge, lying on cardboard, and he’s swallowed up again by fear and longing. At least now there are two separate drills headed toward them. A few hours later he takes note in his diary of the lightening mood around him: “We are more relaxed,” he writes. “Down here we’re all going to be family. We’re brothers and friends because this isn’t the kind of thing that can happen to you twice.” All thirty-three men attend the daily prayer session, followed by the meal of the day: today a single cookie and perhaps a spoonful of tuna, or an ounce or two of condensed milk mixed with water. Afterward, for the first time, someone mentions the need to sue the mine owners for making them suffer like this. It’s a subject that will come up again and again in the days to come. Juan Illanes, a well-read mechanic from the south, has suggested that if they’re rescued, they should keep a “pact of silence” about the accident, telling only their lawyers what happened so that they have a better chance of punishing the mine owners in court. Esteban Rojas, a forty-four-year-old explosives expert, reacts angrily. “What’s the use of talking about money and lawyers while we’re still trapped down here,” he says. “That’s crazy.”
It’s madness to think about your problems in the outside world when you’re still buried and half-dead. “The drilling is going really slowly,” Víctor Segovia writes in his diary a few hours later. “God, when are you going to end this torment? I want to be strong but I have nothing left to give.”
Omar Reygadas notes that the air seems to be growing heavier and hotter. Before, the air in the passageway next to the Refuge seemed to be moving, but now it is still, making it harder for him to breathe. He has long white bangs that fall over his forehead, and that have the odd effect of making him look youthful and old at the same time. Now he’s starting to feel his fifty-six years. “
Estoy mal, estoy mal
,” he says. I’m sick, I can’t breathe. Is it his imagination or is the air not flowing anymore, he asks another of the older men, Franklin Lobos. Franklin has his own problems: He’s elevating his knee, injured ages ago during his professional soccer career, and has wrapped it in a rubber mat taken from the floor of one of the pickup trucks. Humidity causes his knee to ache, and in the past few days a stream of water has started to run past his sleeping area, transforming everything to mud. “I need to keep this as dry as possible,” he explains to the men around him. Franklin hears Omar’s question and answers, Yes, the air is heavier, it seems to be circulating less than it was before. Maybe one of the hidden, open passageways in the mine was sealed up by one of the constant rockfalls they’ve been hearing. Omar takes a few breaths from one of the two oxygen tanks in the Refuge, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Mario Gómez, the sixty-three-year-old miner with the missing fingers, has been using this oxygen because his silicosis-weakened lungs are struggling against a lifetime of damage done by working in passageways like this one; and he’s been further weakened by a daily diet now less than one hundred calories.
The drilling continues unabated into the next day, Tuesday, August 10. At noon, their midday prayer ends with a recognition that it’s the Day of the Miner, a national holiday. The Day of the Miner falls on Saint Lawrence’s day, because he is the patron saint of miners according to a Catholic tradition that goes back a millennium. In Chile it’s a day when mining owners pay tribute to their workers with a big feast for their employees and their employees’ families. There will be no feast today, but they do take a moment to say a few words in honor of themselves and their labor, and to stop and think about how proud they should be to be miners. Chile was built on the labor of men who risked their lives and suffered inside mountains, and mining is tied up with Chile’s national identity: Pablo Neruda wrote poems to the miners of the north, and Chilean students still grow up reading books such as Baldomero Lillo’s
Sub Terra
, a collection of early twentieth-century stories about mining work. The men of the San José are miners going hungry inside a mine on the Day of the Miner, and the feelings of pride-tinged suffering this simple truth brings lead them to end their talk by singing the national anthem.
Víctor Segovia is moved by the sound of all thirty-three hungry men joining their voices together. “For that moment I forgot that I was trapped in a mine,” he writes in his diary, but the sense of being his free and ordinary self is only fleeting. As the hours pass, the sound of drilling strengthens and then fades inside the rock, and it’s hard to tell exactly where it’s coming from. It begins to disappear into the stone. Where is it going? Is it still headed toward us? A couple of other miners join Mario Gómez in taking blocks of wood and objects and pressing them against the cavern walls to listen, trying to pinpoint where the drill sounds are coming from. As the possibility that the drills might not reach him starts to feel more real, Víctor begins to reflect on his life again. He’s never traveled beyond the valleys around Copiapó, but he’s rich in family, and a growing circle of relatives takes residence in his sorrowful thoughts. In his notebook he makes a long list of in-laws, cousins, and uncles, thirty-five people in all, including a few estranged members of his family he hasn’t spoken to in years, asking forgiveness of the reader if he’s forgotten anyone, because at this moment, “I really only have half a mind.”