Authors: Héctor Tobar
Calls go out to various Chilean officials. Sougarret, the engineer in charge of the rescue, is skeptical. He issues an order to the drill team that will be immediately disobeyed: “I told them not to tell anyone, because I remembered what happened the last time we broke through. I didn’t want to cause another crisis with the families.” Minister Golborne is cautious, too, and since it’s still before 6:00 a.m. and President Piñera in Santiago is likely asleep, Golborne sends his commander in chief a text message: “
Rompimos
.” We broke through. There is to be no news, officially, to the families or anyone else, but after so many days of frustration the drillers can’t contain themselves, and word starts to spread among the dozens of rescuers and support staff gathered inside the mine property. Pablo Ramirez, the friend of Florencio Avalos and the man who first entered the mine in search of the trapped men with Carlos Pinilla, hears the news and rushes to the site of drill 10B. Many of the rescuers know Ramirez by now, because he’s been consulted time and again for his knowledge of the mine, and they know he has many friends buried down there, and when he arrives at the drill they allow him to listen. The sound coming from below is louder: It’s clearly and undeniably human, even after traveling 2,200 feet through steel. The trapped miners are so far away that if they were simply yelling into that shaft it would take more than two seconds for the sound of their voices to travel through the air to reach the top. But sound moves through metal twenty times faster, so Ramirez can hear within a fraction of a second each time his friends below strike the drill bit.
There is now cell phone service at the mine site, thanks to the efforts of the Chilean government, and Ramirez calls the first person he wants to know, Florencio Avalos’s teenage son, Ale. It’s Sunday morning, and for once Ale isn’t rushing back and forth from the mine to the school.
“Ale, your father is safe,” Ramirez says. “Don’t worry. They’re all alive. Listen.” Ramirez places the phone against the steel shaft.
At home in Copiapó, Ale hears the sound coming from the place where his father is buried alive.
“It was like a bell,” Ale remembers. “Like a bell you hear at school.”
Ale calls Camp Esperanza, where his mother is inside her tent, having drifted off to sleep an hour or so earlier.
“Mamá, Uncle Pablo says they’re all alive.”
Mónica gives thanks to God, and “only to God,” and there is something defiant in the way she says this, because she realizes at that moment how alone she’s been since the night of August 5. “It felt like my heart had opened up again.” Florencio is alive and her life is going to start over. After seventeen days of eating only sparingly, of briefly forgetting her own children, of sleeplessness, hunger, and sleepwalking, Mónica will once again start to cook and eat on a regular schedule. When she steps out of her tent and into Camp Esperanza, she sees her in-laws at their own tent nearby. She wants to tell them the good news, but before she can open her mouth it’s clear they already know. While she was sleeping, a few rescuers have come running down from the drill site yelling: “We found them!” Those words have reached the ears of her in-laws, who haven’t thought to wake her up and tell her. Since their son Florencio was trapped they’ve kept their distance from their daughter-in-law, they’ve watched as Mónica fell apart, and did not, or could not, help her. They’ve seemed angry with her, and perhaps it has something to do with the fear that their undeniably bright son has been killed working in a mine to support the family that he and his pregnant girlfriend started when they were only fifteen. Mónica is confused and hurt. Her moment of joy is mixed up with this new family wound she never expected.
Mónica and her in-laws look at each other for an awkward moment.
“
No importa
,” she says. It doesn’t matter.
In Copiapó and across Camp Esperanza and the ground underneath, the drama and the longing surrounding the fate of the thirty-three men has been entangled with the messy complications of everyday family life since August 5. This hopeful morning of August 22 is no different. Susana Valenzuela shares the news with Marta, her boyfriend Yonni’s wife, and in other families siblings and cousins who spent years avoiding each other are joined together, again, by the sudden wonderful possibility that the man whose love they all seek, whose life they’ve prayed for, might be alive after all. It isn’t easy being a miner’s wife, or his girlfriend, or his son, or his daughter, or his ex-wife. Before the accident Darío Segovia’s adult children from his previous marriage had never talked to Jessica, his current love and the mother of his baby girl. With Darío buried underground, Jessica has met two of these adult children for the first time, and for seventeen days the two hitherto separated halves of Darío’s family have been thrown together by worry and the possibility of imminent, permanent loss. But the old resentments haven’t disappeared. “I was never married to their father,” Jessica says of Darío’s adult children. “And sometimes I think they didn’t want me at the camp.” Her love with Darío was as real as the home they shared, as real as that last, long embrace he gave her before going to work, and perhaps Darío’s older children have seen this love in the way Jessica waits with their half sister at the camp. Or perhaps they think she’s “just one more woman” on Darío’s “list” of conquests, as Jessica puts it. For one moment of happiness, none of that will matter—and then it will matter again. The thirty-three men are alive—it has not yet been confirmed, but that’s what many at Camp Esperanza believe already—and they will return from the shift they started seventeen days ago. And everything in their aboveground lives is going to remain as complicated as it was before.
Mónica Avalos begins walking around the camp amid the embracing siblings, spouses, cousins, and children of miners. Many a prayer is heard, and it will be a day of piety and thanks in the camp some have called a “Jerusalem.” Once, Mónica strode across the dry, dusty surface of the mountain in her sleep. Though they are filled with tears, her eyes are open this morning and she is fully awake and alert and present for the first time in seventeen days, watching the camp and its wives and girlfriends and brothers and sons speak, their breath visible in the air of a morning just turning to light.
* * *
The drill bit with its tungsten carbide beads spends four hours on the floor of the passageway above the Refuge before it begins to rise up into the 4.5-inch shaft through which it came. The thirty-three men watch from a safe distance as it disappears into the hole, carrying their messages: a few personal letters, details about where, precisely, the drill has broken through, and one very pithy note written by José Ojeda, who’s condensed the most critical information (how many of them are alive, their physical condition, and their location) into just seven words written in big red letters. He’s wrapped his note behind the hammer, because one of the miners said that would be the safest place. The thirty-three men gather around to celebrate, Mario Sepúlveda calling the last stragglers to a gathering by the Refuge, “Florencio, Illanes, get over here!” They start to chant “
¡Chi-chi-chi, le-le-le, mineros de Chile!
” José “the Pastor” Henríquez has turned on his cell phone camera to record the moment. More than half of them are stripped down to their underwear against the heat, and they look like a group of homeless men who’ve decided to stage a scene from that novel and film about castaway boys,
Lord of the Flies
. They are laughing and cheering, and passing around a plastic bottle filled with dirty water as if it were champagne. The haunted, concentration-camp look that covered their faces just a few hours earlier is gone. Mario Sepúlveda throws up his hands and makes the aggressive, pleading gesture Chilean men make at soccer matches. Alex Vega wraps his arm around him and soon the entire group launches into a rendition of the national anthem. As they begin to sing they are shouting the lyrics, especially the first lines about Chile being a “happy copy of Eden,” though by the time they get to the third repetition of the final line about “the refuge against oppression,” their unfed voices have started to sound meek, and the song peters out.
* * *
When Minister Golborne arrives at the mine, he heads for Camp Esperanza first, before going to the drill site. He officially informs the families of the news they already know: that they’ve broken through and are hearing sounds from below. He finds María Segovia and the others and promises that as soon as the rescuers confirm that the miners are indeed alive they will be the first to know. By all accounts, Golborne has worked hard in the previous days to win over the trust of the family members; a few days before, they’d given him a miner’s helmet signed by the families, and it will soon become the most precious memento of his eventful days there.
Vamos, Ministro, déle con fuerza. Confiamos en Usted
, the helmet says. Go, Minister, give it all you’ve got. We trust you. The minister then heads up to drill 10B, where Hurtado and his team have a stethoscope for him to listen to. What the minister hears certainly sounds like men tapping at the shaft, but when he calls the president he is cautious. “I can’t be completely certain. It could be the power of suggestion.”
The president is in Santiago, and he also talks via phone to Cristián Barra, his fixer at the Ministry of the Interior. “Should I come?” the head of state asks. Barra tells the president to stay in Santiago, because it’s possible only some of the men are alive, and that the government will have to make a grim announcement about how many are dead. But it was only a rhetorical question, because the president is already in his car, on the way to the airport for the hour-long flight to Copiapó.
As the president heads north, the drill team is slowly raising up the bit and removing the 115 four-hundred-pound steel tubes from the shaft, one at a time, a process that will take up the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon. President Piñera is still en route as the Terraservice team prepares to remove the last of the steel tubes inside the shaft and the hammer and drill bit attached to it. Only a few workers and officials are allowed at the site, though dozens more are hovering nearby, outside the security cordon Barra has placed around the shaft. Barra has ordered that no one is to leave the area, lest some bad news filter out before the government can make an official announcement to the hundreds of people gathered in the camp below. By now it’s a bright, sunny, chilly afternoon of South American winter, and Golborne and the other Chilean officials are wearing both sunglasses and red government jackets. Finally, the last tube emerges from the shaft, covered in mud. The drillers pour water and wash away the muck, revealing a clear red mark on the metal: The miners painted several feet of the steel tubing, but only a single, palm-size smudge has survived the journey through stone and mud to the top. “Was that there before?” the minister asks. “No!” comes the excited reply from the drillers. They’ve found confirmation that at least one man is alive down below, and many of the men gathered around drill 10B exchange quiet embraces. Golborne can see there’s something wrapped around the bit, and he begins to remove it. It’s some sort of rubber tubing, and he lets it fall to the ground, because underneath the tubing a piece of paper is visible. Of the dozen or more notes the men attached to the drill assembly, three have survived, and Golborne has just found the first, removing the paper carefully, because it’s wet and it immediately starts falling apart in his hands. “No, don’t unfold it, Señor Ministro,” someone says. “Wait until it dries.” “If we don’t read it now, we’ll never be able to read it,” someone else says. Finally, Golborne gets the first note open.
“What does it say?”
The minister of mining begins to read out loud: “The drill broke through at Level 94, at three meters from the front. On one side of the roof, close to the right wall. Some water is falling. We are in the Refuge. Drills have passed behind us…” Part of the note is cut off. It ends with: “May God illuminate you. A
saludo
to Clara and my family. Mario Gómez.”
Barra begins to read a second note: “Dear Lilia. I am well. I hope to see you soon…”
“It’s a personal letter,” someone says. “We should save it.”
As two of the more powerful men in Chile are trying to decipher these messages, one of the sunburned roustabout members of the mining crew has quietly used his feet to move the piece of rubber tubing Golborne first tossed on the ground. The driller figures he’ll hold on to it as a souvenir, but when he begins to take a closer look at what he’s going to take home, he notices there’s something hidden inside. “It’s another note,” someone next to him yells, and soon the minister himself is opening this third message, written on a folded piece of graph paper.
ESTAMOS BIEN EN EL REFUGIO. LOS 33
.
WE ARE WELL IN THE REFUGE. THE 33.
Even before Golborne can announce to the men what it says, those looking over his shoulder scream out in joy.
¡Vivos!
Each and every one of those knuckleheads down there is alive.
¡Todos los huevones!
Suddenly all the workers are cheering and embracing, and one of the drillers falls to his knees. Some of the men embrace again, but a few begin sobbing as they do so, bawling the way men do when their mothers die, or when their sons are born. These rugged men have been sending steel bits into the gray rock beneath their feet, and they are at this moment surrounded by piles of that rock, and the dust made from boring down into it. They’re men who drill holes looking for gold and copper and other metal, and they’ve drilled the greatest hole in their lives to reach thirty-three knuckleheads and find them, under this seemingly immovable, unconquerable mountain.
“Gracias, huevón, gracias.”
¡Lo logramos!
“We did it!”
The burst of triumphant emotion makes everyone forget the Ministry of the Interior’s security “protocols,” and no one moves to stop several drillers as they run downhill, away from the Schramm T685, toward the fence that separates the mine proper from Camp Esperanza, toward the tents and the shrine and the kitchen there, and the television satellite dishes, and the cords of firewood, and the lines of smoke climbing up from the recently extinguished campfires, including the one where Alex Vega’s family and friends stayed up late into the night singing a ballad to him. The rule-breaking drillers shout, loud enough to be heard back up at drill site 10B, because now all the drills have stopped and all the machines that have filled the mountain with machine noises are silent, and the mountain is covered instead by human sounds, a cheering that’s spreading, with the cries of the drillers loudest.