Authors: Héctor Tobar
“I looked at this guy, who was older than me, and I thought:
If I, the young ram, beat up this old goat, I’ll have a lot of explaining to do. And if this old goat beats up the young ram, then I’ll have even more explaining to do
.” As they face each other by the pool of water, each man’s helmet illuminating the other man’s face with a beam of light, Mario breaks into a mad grin. He shares his observations about young rams and old goats, and apologizes to Omar and wraps the older man in a sweaty and heartfelt embrace. They’re starving and they’re going crazy, but they’re still brothers. “I’m sorry,
viejo
.
Perdóname
.” Forgive me. Omar looks relieved, exhausted. They walk back to the Refuge. As they approach, the other miners stand or sit up straight at attention, expecting to see two men who’ve pummeled each other. Instead they see two bare-chested, soot-covered, hungry miners laughing and joking like fast friends.
* * *
Juan Illanes has installed lights near Level 105 and Level 90, but the sense that the men are surrounded by forbidding darkness grows as the days pass and many of their lamps dim and go out altogether. The prospect of being surrounded by complete darkness causes Alex Vega to remember a miners’ legend: Men left in the dark for too long will eventually go blind. And Jorge Galleguillos remembers a few times in his mining career when his lamp stopped working and he found himself in total darkness: You can get disoriented quickly, and it can be frightening to be lost and helpless, reaching out with your hands to try to find the cavern wall you remember is nearby. Finally, Illanes discovers that he can charge some of the batteries of their lamps using the generators of the vehicles trapped below, and the dark isn’t quite as forbidding after he returns the light-giving devices to them.
Eventually, the doers among the men decide they just can’t sit and wait for the drills to reach them. The rescuers will eventually give up without a sign of life from below. So the trapped men renew their efforts to send a message to the top. They have dynamite and fuses, but not blasting caps, since no blasting had been planned for the day they were trapped. But Yonni Barrios and Juan Illanes come up with a plan to make blasting caps by extracting the black powder from the fuses and using the foil inside the discarded milk cartons to collect and concentrate it so that it will ignite and set off the nitrate-based explosive they use for everyday mining work. They walk up as high as they can in the mine and set off Yonni’s homemade detonator, waiting for 8:00 a.m., when the drilling stops every day for what is clearly a change in shifts up there on the surface. When the silence comes, Yonni lights a fuse leading to his improvised blasting cap. It works, the dynamite explodes, and the explosion is a powerful one—but no one on the surface hears a thing.
We’re seven hundred meters underground
, Juan thinks.
How could they hear anything?
When the drilling starts again, the sounds get closer and closer, the vibrations and the pounding palpably close in the rock. The miners say things like “This one belongs to me” and “This is the one that’s going to burst through.” They go up and down the levels of the Ramp and the side passageways looking for where the drill might come out. Then the drilling gets farther away. It stops.
On August 15, their eleventh day underground, Víctor Segovia notes in his diary the many signs that he and others are losing hope. “It’s 10:25 and the drilling has stopped once again. Again they sound really far. I really don’t know what’s going on up there. Why so many delays?… Alex Vega yelled at Claudio Yáñez, who sleeps all day and doesn’t cooperate with anything…” There’s still work to do: primarily, gathering water from the tanks at the upper levels. The next day Víctor writes: “Hardly anyone here talks anymore.” On August 17, he sees miners gathered in a small group, murmuring. “They are starting to give up,” he writes. “I don’t think God would have saved us from the collapse just to let us die of starvation … The skin now hugs the bones of our faces and our ribs all show and when we walk our legs tremble.”
The drilling stops for several hours, and the men wander the mine searching for any sound, and then it starts again. The thing inside the rock pounds and grinds for a day, and suddenly it’s quite close, and the men start to talk about the preparations they’ve discussed before. They find a can of red spray paint, used in routine mine operations to paint a red square or circle on the mine wall indicating the path to the surface. If the drill bit breaks through, they’ll paint it, and when the drill bit operator pulls it up, he’ll find that unmistakable proof that there are living men down below. José Ojeda once worked at El Teniente mine, the largest underground copper mine in the world, and in the safety training he received there he was taught to include three pieces of basic information in any message left for potential rescuers: the number of trapped men, their location, and their condition. With a red marker and a piece of graph paper, he now prepares such a message, boiling it down to seven words. Richard Villarroel, the expectant father, hunts about his tools for the hardest piece of metal he can find, and comes up with a big wrench. If and when the drill bit breaks through, his job will be to pound on its steel casing with this tool, making a sound loud enough to travel up the two thousand feet or so of metal leading to the top, where some rescuer might have his ear to the pipe, listening for a sign of life from below.
After a day it becomes clear the drill they’re hearing is actually beneath their feet, and they try to follow its sound, walking and driving deeper into the mine, listening in one of the twisting passageways farther down, going lower and lower until it fades away. On August 19 the diary keeper, Segovia, writes: “We are getting desperate. One of the drills just went by the walls of the Refuge but it didn’t break through.” The following day he notes, “Perri’s spirits are very low.” The only sustenance for the men that day is water, because the food is running out and there’s only enough now for a cookie every forty-eight hours. “The drill does NOT break through,” Segovia writes the next day. “I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a black hand up above that doesn’t want us to get out.”
The trapped men have now heard at least eight different drills approach them, only to stop, or fade away in the distance. Several of the miners follow the last drill down several levels, and listen, disbelieving, as it passes below the lowest spot in the mine, Level 40. “That was horrible. That was like a second death,” one of the miners says. The idea that they’ve been doomed, again, by the mine’s owners becomes a real possibility: The San Esteban Mining Company’s blueprints are so unreliable that the driller-rescuers up on the surface will never find them. “The mine’s blueprints are shit,” they shout.
La planificación de la mina es una hueva.
The thirty-three men now sit in the dark, wondering if they’ll die suffering this final assault on their dignity: trapped here, starving, with other mining men working to reach them, their efforts betrayed by a company too cheap to even know, with certainty, where its own tunnels are.
9
CAVERN OF DREAMS
Laurence Golborne, the minister of mining, is desperate, and he’s getting all sorts of crazy advice. His drills are missing their target, or the drill bits are breaking before they reach the level at which the miners are trapped. More than a dozen such holes have been drilled, each a failure. On August 19, with the men having been trapped for exactly two weeks, one of the drills passes 500 meters. It’s headed for one of two open galleries in its path, and Golborne and André Sougarret and the others are optimistic they will hit something. The families have been informed that the drill is close, and a series of hopeful all-night vigils begins at Camp Esperanza—but the drill just keeps on going, never finding an open passageway, and eventually it will reach 700 meters without striking anything. “The driller was so emotionally invested he couldn’t stop, even though we knew he’d gone too far already,” one official says.
Golborne tells the press that he isn’t sure what’s gone wrong, though he suggests the mine owners’ diagrams could be inaccurate. Sougarret, the lead rescuer, says the same thing to the newspaper
La Tercera
: “With bad information, it’s hard to make decisions.” Another, unnamed government source tells
La Tercera
that it’s possible the entire mine has collapsed, one of many pessimistic statements that filter down to the families. “That night, there was a revolution among the families,” Golborne says. You don’t know what you’re doing, they say. Codelco has no idea what it’s doing. We know! Listen to us! A union of small miners,
perquineros
, announces that they will enter the mine, “on our bellies,”
de guatitas
, if only the government will open the sealed-off mine entrance.
Finally, at the behest of some desperate relatives, the minister of mining agrees to talk to a few “wise” people who the relatives believe might be able to help. One is a psychic, and Golborne meets with her on a freezing cold night. “I see seventeen bodies,” she says. “I see one whose legs are smashed. He’s screaming.” Golborne decides it’s best not to pass on her “findings” to the families, who have also insisted he talk to a “treasure seeker,” a man who uses a kind of secret divining-rod “technology” to study the surface of the mountain where the men are buried.
“What kind of technology is this?” Golborne asks.
“Well, it’s very complicated,” the treasure seeker says.
“I’m an engineer. Explain it to me. Is it based on sound waves, heat, voltage differences?”
The treasure seeker says it really is too complicated and declines to explain further, but Golborne grants him access to the mountain anyway, to please the families more than anything. The treasure seeker spreads long rugs across the surface of the mountain, he takes some measurements with a device Golborne has never seen before. When he’s done, he announces to Golborne in a haughty tone that his drilling teams are looking for the miners in the wrong place. The treasure seeker says Golborne, Sougarret, and the rest of their team are a bunch of idiots who are going to let those thirty-three men die if they don’t listen to him and pay attention to what his instruments are saying: You won’t find them unless you drill in a totally different area.
Golborne ignores the treasure seeker’s advice and walks down the mountain to sit with a woman who earns a living selling pastries by the beach, a woman who has earned the trust of the families and whose trust he must earn, too. He has to make her believe that he’s trying everything that can be done, that he and the government are using every resource and all the knowledge at their disposal to find the trapped men. He speaks to María Segovia, the sister of Darío and the “mayor” of the family camp. María has heard the news of the drill passing 530, 550, 600 meters, each number another blow. “We’re running out of time,” she tells him. She repeats the phrase.
Se nos está acabando el tiempo
. There are more drills working, he tells her, though his face betrays both exhaustion and concern. We have not given up.
María Segovia will remember that moment with the minister as her lowest. “You have to fight and fight, but at the same time, you feel this sadness, this worry, this sense of powerlessness,” she later says. She’s bundled against the cold, listening to the minister in his official red jacket.
GOBIERNO DE CHILE
, it says in white letters. The minister often comes down to her camp, and sits with her and her family and drinks maté tea with her, and in this way he’s won more of her trust. The minister acts oddly humbled in her presence, and he says another drill is just two days or so away from its target. María is fighting her natural skepticism for the privileged and everything they say, and she’s trying to believe him.
* * *
The average human brain requires about 120 grams of glucose each day to survive. The thirty-three trapped men are ingesting, on average, less than one twentieth that amount. During a man’s first twenty-four hours without steady food, his body produces glucose from the glycogen stored in his liver. After two or three days the body begins to burn the fat stored in his chest and abdomen, and around his kidneys and many other places. His central nervous system cannot survive on such fats, however. Instead, his brain is fed the acids, or ketone bodies, produced by his liver as it processes his body fat. When his body’s fat reserves are exhausted, the protein in his body—muscle, primarily—becomes his brain’s chief source of energy. The body’s protein is gradually broken down into amino acids that the liver can convert to glucose. In effect, a man’s brain begins to eat his muscles to survive: This is the moment when starvation begins. After two weeks the smaller and thinner of the thirty-three men trapped in the San José have lost enough muscle mass that their colleagues begin to notice.
Alex Vega’s clavicle is starting to push out against his skin. “Hey, Bicycle Chassis, look at you!” Omar Reygadas says to Alex, the man who came to the mine so that he could add some rooms to his house. Then Omar thinks that, no, a bicycle chassis is too heavy and big a metaphor to describe the way the shirtless, thinning Alex looks. He looks like
charqui
, a Chilean idiom roughly equivalent to “jerky.” “
Charqui
is what animal meat looks like when you dry it up.”
Charqui de mariposa
, he calls Alex. Butterfly jerky. “You can imagine what butterfly
charqui
would be like. That’s basically just dust.”
Alex takes this with the humor and endearment with which it’s intended. Omar isn’t looking so great either, after all. None of them are. Their metabolisms are slowing down, even the most energetic among them are sleeping longer than normal, and there is a haze starting to drift over their thoughts. Several are beginning to experience one strange, unexpected side effect of prolonged hunger that’s been noted again and again by people who fast for a week or more: When they sleep, their dreams and nightmares are unusually long, vivid, and lucid. Their dreams seem more like real life, an effect many devoted fasters attribute to the purification of the body and brain during fasting. Deprived of sustenance, their brains take the men to places of memory and desire, mind dramas crafted from the material of their personal histories, with a cast drawn from their families and loved ones.