Deep Down Dark (35 page)

Víctor Segovia, who was never religious before, loves to attend the informal underground church at which José Henríquez is pastor. But he, too, is put off by the direction the services are taking. One day in September he describes going to the daily service and seeing Osman Araya, now fully recuperated from starvation, slip into the holy trance of an inspired Evangelical pastor, raising his arms up in the air because he’s really feeling the Lord. “I am no longer enjoying the noon prayer as much because Osman has started to scream and cry when he prays, and that reminds me of those churches where they cry and jump and scream,” Víctor writes. To Víctor it looks theatrical and strange, though he will continue going to the daily prayers led by José and Osman after others have dropped out.

Omar Reygadas also attends the prayers and notes those who are missing: “Franklin Lobos started praying by himself. Others would step to the side and do their own prayers. And some just forgot about praying and would listen to music.”

*   *   *

For Mario Sepúlveda, who first issued the call to prayer five weeks earlier, the absence of his fellow miners at those holy sessions is another blow. Once all thirty-three men prayed together, but eventually, fewer than half a dozen men will stand with the Pastor to hear the word of God. Mario can see that the brotherhood that kept them together is falling apart, and the distress this causes him leads him to go walking downhill, into the deeper recesses of the mine, down to Level 44. It’s one of the most recently excavated corners of the mine, and in a mountain filled with perils it’s an especially dangerous place, and also hotter and more dank, thanks to the water filling up in a pool there. The underground pond and the large open space adds to the mystical feel of Level 44. Mario has claimed this fetid corner of the mine for himself, calling it his “sacred place” (
lugar sagrado
), and he’s moved around some stones to build a shrine and speaker’s podium there. He goes to Level 44 alone to read Bible verses, and to practice public speaking. On the video the miners sent to the surface, Mario looked into a camera and spoke to the entire world; in this place he reads Bible verses and speaks to multitudes that exist only in his imagination. He’s practicing because he can see that his future, once he leaves this mine, will be as an orator, traveling the world to speak of God and the strength and goodness of the Chilean workingman. In his solitary speeches he tells stories about riding bikes with his son, Francisco, and about tending to the horses he owns. The sound of his voice echoes back to him in that stone chamber. But now, on September 11, his thirty-seventh day underground, he’s going down to this empty gallery cut from the rock, this personal auditorium of his, not to speak as much as to pray and collect his thoughts, and to ask God what can be done about bringing together the increasingly divided and angry men living in caverns higher up in the mountain. Mario knows it’s his thirty-seventh day underground because he’s been keeping a tally on his helmet since the first day. It was after he made the twenty-second mark that the men started to turn on themselves, and now on day thirty-seven, “crying, I went down there, asking God to make me stronger, asking God to do his will with us. Because the insect, the devil, was circling us.”

The devil is present in the mine, taking form in all the greed, the misunderstanding, the envy, and the betrayals among the men. He believes that the devil has come from the surface, attaching himself to those letters, the offers of money and fame, to pit them against one another.

Mario begins to pray: “My Lord, protect us and get this insect out of our minds. The devil has entered the soul of each and every one of us. Have pity on us, and make us as we were before. And my Lord, you can start with me, because the truth is I’m afraid of evil.”

Mario is speaking these words when he hears a tremendous crash. A huge stone slab in that unstable cavern has broken off from one of the walls, some ten feet away, as big and as lethal as the one that maimed Gino Cortés. To see a slab of rock fall is not an unusual event in the mine, but having that stone crash nearby when he’s talking to God about the devil causes Mario to recoil in shock and fear, and at that same instant he feels the presence of someone just behind him, a kind of hot breath that strikes him on the back of the neck. “Who goes there?” he shouts. He turns around, swinging his lamp, and shines it on the pool of water, and as he does so he sees a pair of startled, half-crazed eyes looking back at him—his own eyes, reflected by the water. He sees the face of his own fear, and it shocks him more than anything else he’s seen in the mine in the thirty-seven days he’s spent down below.

“
¡Diablo!
” he shouts into the blackness. He can feel the devil trying to grab hold of him. Suddenly, evil isn’t just an idea, it’s a presence lurking down there in Level 44, hovering over the water. “You’ll never take me, I’ll never be your son!” The crashing stone, the image of his own face in the water, and the hot breath on his neck all send Mario into a crazed state of mind in which he truly believes he’s at war with an evil being. He scrambles in the mud in search of rocks and begins to throw them at the darkness, at that thing down there in the cave that’s trying to get inside his skin. “I’m never going to be your son!
¡La concha de tu madre!
” He throws rocks against the walls of the cave, and then he runs away, uphill, three-quarters of a mile toward Level 90 and the living souls trapped there, waiting to be rescued.

When Mario reaches the others they see him with his clothes and face covered in mud, as if he’d been wrestling with someone down below.

“What happened to you?” they ask.

“I was fighting the devil,” Mario says.

Some of the men laugh, but others don’t, because just about everyone who’s worked at the mine long enough will have seen or felt the devil living down there at one time or another. A Chilean mining legend has it that Satan lives in all gold mines, and gold is precisely what they were digging out of the stone, down there, in those caverns at the very bottom of the mountain. The men dug out tons of rock to get at a few precious ounces of gold, and in so doing they weakened the mountain and transformed it into a mine whose walls can burst without warning. The men of the San José have seen rock explode, and it’s put the fear of God and the fear of the devil into them. Sometime after Mario Sepúlveda’s fight with the devil, there’s another collapse down at Level 44. A chunk of rock weighing more than a ton breaks away from the ceiling of the cavern with another huge crash, and the place where Mario built his auditorium and his chapel is declared off-limits.

16

INDEPENDENCE DAY

When he entered the mine on August 5, Ariel Ticona knew that his wife was due to have their third child, a girl, on September 18, Chilean Independence Day. For the first seventeen days he was trapped underground, he told himself he needed to stay alive so that he could rise to the surface and see the girl whose name he and his wife had already agreed would be Carolina Elizabeth. Perhaps it was the desire to see his daughter that led him to privately ration the extra cookies he was given by Víctor Zamora after the first night’s raid on the food stores—four cookies that he ate, secretly, over the course of that first week. After the miners had been discovered on the seventeenth day, Ariel held on to the idea that he would rescued in time to see Carolina born, and that he would be able to fulfill a promise he’d made to his wife: For this baby, unlike the previous two, he would be inside the maternity room with her. Ariel is twenty-nine years old, and he admits to being more mature today than he was after first becoming a father. After a man has a couple of kids he has a greater appreciation of the domestic labor that a family is built upon, and with his wife’s third pregnancy he had tried to be more helpful. He was there to help her do the laundry, for example, and he had hoped to be there for her final moments of labor, to hold her hand and make her stronger.

Ariel has resigned himself to missing his daughter’s birth, but in the meantime, he’s had an epiphany. After talking to his family via the video link, and seeing the images from the surface of the camp where thirty-three families and hundreds of rescuers have all gathered, he decides his daughter should be called Esperanza. On September 14, Esperanza comes into the world, at a hospital in Copiapó. His sister-in-law takes a camera into the delivery room and the Chilean channel Megavision prepares a video of the birth with music in the background. But Ariel doesn’t see it. Esperanza has been delivered via cesarean section, and the psychologists have decided, according to media reports, that Ariel should be spared the trauma of seeing a surgical procedure while he’s still trapped underground. Instead, Ariel sees a heavily edited video transmitted via the fiber-optic link to the big screen below. The other miners think Ariel should see his daughter’s birth in private, and they leave him alone with the screen. He sees blue-clad doctors standing over his wife, and then the video cuts to one of the doctors holding his new daughter, and he sees her with wet, matted hair and closed eyes next to his smiling, exhausted wife. Controlled by men on the surface, the same two minutes of video plays over and over again in a loop. The quality, however, isn’t sharp enough for Ariel to make out if Esperanza looks like him or his wife. No one before in human history has witnessed the birth of his daughter while trapped in a stone cavern, and when I later point this out and ask Ariel what it was like to first cast his eyes on his daughter, he says: “I don’t know what I felt. If it was emotion, or happiness, or what.” After speaking to Ariel’s brother, the world’s newspapers will report that Ariel wept copious tears upon hearing the news. They report his daughter’s vital statistics, too: 3.05 kilos (6 pounds, 11 ounces), 48 centimeters (19 inches), born at 12:20 p.m. These figures are tossed into their stories alongside the latest statistics on the drills trying to reach the trapped men. The Plan B drill has advanced 368 meters. The Plan A drill 300 meters. The Plan C drill will begin work in seven days.

*   *   *

The drill that breaks through first will be used to lower an escape capsule to the thirty-three men. The Chilean navy begins to build that capsule—coincidentally in the same shipyard where the mechanic Raúl Bustos repaired engines until the tsunami hit. A two-minute walk in the vast ASMAR shipyard separates the small workshop where Bustos worked from the machine shops where the escape capsule will be assembled. The interior walls of most of the buildings in the shipyard in Talcahuano still have seven-foot-high watermarks from the ocean water that swept through six months earlier, and parts of the vast complex are still waterlogged. But the navy has cleaned out all the dead fish, removed the grounded vessels, and gotten the shipyard working again. Now the team of naval engineers and machinists gets to work building what their colleagues at NASA have named—following a typically North American obsession with acronyms—the EV, or Escape Vehicle. The Chileans have received a twelve-page memo from NASA detailing the space agency’s recommended specifications for such a craft: “EV … shall have portable oxygen tanks of sufficient size … to provide medical grade oxygen at the rate of 6 liters per minute for up to 2–4 hours … EV shall be configured such that occupant is able to move at least one hand to his face.” But the design the Chileans come up with is entirely their own (they will soon consider patenting it), and on September 12 the government announces its basic parameters to the media. Built from steel plates, the Escape Vehicle will have an exterior diameter of 54 centimeters (21.25 inches), will be no taller than 2.5 meters (8 feet), and will weigh approximately 250 kilos (550 pounds) when empty. It will have the oxygen supply recommended by NASA, and also a roof built to resist objects falling from great heights, and it will travel up and down with wheels that keep the Escape Vehicle’s steel shell from striking the walls of the shaft as it rises to the surface. (Those retractable rubber wheels will eventually be provided by an Italian firm.) Should the man traveling inside lose consciousness, a harness will keep him standing up.

A few days later, the Chilean government releases drawings of the proposed capsule, painted the colors of the national flag, and emblazoned with a name: Fénix, or Phoenix in English. Phoenix is a minor constellation in the southern sky, a group of stars in the shape of a triangle and a diamond, two simple shapes that, when joined together, form the bird that rises from the ashes in Greek mythology. The name has an obvious rhetorical purpose for the Chilean government: Chile itself is a country that’s rising from the ashes. With this capsule Chilean workingmen and Chilean technology and Chilean faith are going to pull off a daring rescue that will fill a people with hope just months after a disastrous earthquake and tsunami claimed the lives of so many innocents and sent the national mood into a funk. Lifting thirty-three men up from the bowels of the Earth in a Phoenix the colors of the flag also suggests how the government wants the rescue to be remembered: as a heroic, nation-defining myth, with real Chilean workingmen cast in the leading roles.

In Greek mythology, however, even the gods are imperfect, imbued with vanity, courage, pride, familial love, vindictiveness, and other all-too-human qualities that can also be found among the men living inside the broken San José Mine.

*   *   *

In the days before September 18, Chilean Independence Day, the question arises: How will the thirty-three Chilean patriots trapped in the San José Mine celebrate? Several of the leaders of the rescue team on the surface want to send the men wine. It’s the biggest holiday of the year, after all, celebrated with family feasting and drink, and seeing these living symbols of national pride having a little glass in their mountain prison will make all of Chile feel good. “I wanted to send them wine, too,” the psychologist, Iturra, says. “But the doctors were completely against it.” Some of the men were heavy drinkers, and they’ve been abstinent now for more than forty days. The crisis of abstinence is over for them: All thirty-three are now teetotalers. After thinking about it, the psychologist agrees that wine is a bad idea. At about this time he’s received a troubling reminder of the battle some of the men have had with addiction. “One of the mothers came to me and told me, ‘My son is receiving drugs.’” The family members have been allowed to send the miners care packages with clothes and the like, and in these packages someone has slipped in something illicit. “It was either marijuana or cocaine, I don’t know which, but it didn’t really matter. I really couldn’t afford to have any men with altered states of consciousness down there.” Iturra changes the procedure by which items are packaged and any further shipments of drugs are stopped. As to the Independence Day wine, Iturra points out that the corridors of the mine are a work site, and alcohol is prohibited, by law and by common sense. Down below, the men have reached the same conclusion: We won’t be needing any wine, they say, thank you very much.