Deep Down Dark (41 page)

The psychologist, Iturra, is sharply critical of the postrescue treatment afforded to the men. His recommendations are largely ignored, including his argument that the men should return to a new, moderate work routine (aboveground, of course) after a week or two of vacation. Instead, most of the men continue to sit at home expecting to enjoy the fruits of their worldwide celebrity, and feel obliged to attend all the official and unofficial events in their honor. “They became trophies,” Iturra says. “They became symbols.” If you make a man a symbol of things that are bigger than any one person can possibly be, you risk stripping that man of his sense of who he really is. “The worst thing that anyone did was to call them heroes,” says one of the miner’s wives. The same government that worked so hard to pull off a technical feat never before seen in history, to rescue thirty-three ordinary men, should have realized that those ordinary men were about to undertake an emotional journey that was also without precedent. But their surface suffering unfolded, for the most part, in the private world of each man’s home, and no official stepped forward to boldly take charge of their recovery.

Instead, in late October, all thirty-three men are asked to visit La Moneda presidential palace for a public celebration. For a handful, like Florencio Avalos, it will be one of the last times they submit themselves to display. “I went to La Moneda because I had never been there and I always wanted to see that. After that, I never went to anything.” The thirty-three miners receive Chile’s recently minted Bicentennial Medal for heroic actions that encapsulate the proudest qualities of the two-hundred-year-old republic. They listen to the president make a speech in which the rescue becomes a metaphor for what Piñera hopes to accomplish during the rest of his still-young tenure. The president talks about building a country without poverty, a society that treats its workers better, and he says that the 700-meter rescue shaft crafted “by our engineers and technicians,” and which served as “a bridge of life, faith, hope, and liberty,” won’t be the last great project Chile undertakes.

For the thirty-three men of the San José Mine, as for Chile itself, the future appears to be filled with promise. The miners are rising to new heights, literally, when they visit the offices of their new Santiago lawyers in December. Following a series of recommendations, the miners have chosen the biggest law firm in the country, Carey and Company, to transform the oral agreement they reached underground into a legally binding document. Carey and its specialists will also represent them in the negotiations for movie and book rights, contacting talent agencies in New York and Los Angeles, and the Washington, D.C., law firm Arendt Fox. But first the men must see exactly what Carey has to offer, which requires a group visit to the firm’s new offices on the forty-third floor of what is, at this moment, the tallest building in Chile—the recently completed Titanium tower in a swank neighborhood of Santiago known as “Sanhattan.”

Carey has assigned ten lawyers to draft the agreements. They are among the country’s best attorneys, bright and ambitious multilingual men and women educated and trained in law schools and law firms in Chile, Europe, and the United States, but when they finally meet the men of the San José Mine, they are momentarily awestruck. “When you looked at them, you felt this overwhelming feeling of patriotism,” one of the lawyers says. Looking at these Chilean everymen is like looking at the flag, or the Andes, though the feeling of awe dissipates fairly quickly as the lawyers get down to business. They’ve prepared a twenty-page contract, and a PowerPoint presentation, but the interest of the miners in the subtleties of intellectual property law as practiced in Chile and the United States soon wanes—one of the lawyers notes a young miner in the back playing a game on his phone, looking childlike.

When the presentation is done, the lawyers leave the miners alone in a meeting room to decide whether they’ll agree to it. The corporate meeting room on the forty-third floor is one of the most impressive in Latin America—it’s called the Manquehue Room because it faces a peak in the Andes of the same name. The discussion is short and civil, even though several of the miners are furious at Mario Sepúlveda because he granted an interview to a BBC journalist who is writing a book from which the miners won’t make a cent. Mario has also spoken independently with a Latin American movie producer who said he could offer an astronomical sum of money for movie rights. The agreement with the Carey firm will create a new entity called Propiedad Intelectual Minera, S.A. (Miner Intellectual Property, Inc.), but that agreement is worthless unless all thirty-three men agree to join it, including Mario Sepúlveda. The man with the heart of a dog is, at that moment, one of the most popular men in Chile, and he could easily go off and sign his own deal. “Mario was very much aware of his power,” says one of the lawyers. Mario brags to the lawyer that he can make a call “and have tea with the president this afternoon.”

Mario Sepúlveda, feeling the pressure of his colleagues, and faced with the prospect that they might all lambast him in the press if he does otherwise, agrees to sign. Propiedad Intelectual Minera is born and the men, who on August 5 entered a subterranean workplace that was among the least desirable places to work in Chile, can take a moment to feel like corporate bigwigs in the tallest building in Chile. The skyscraper isn’t even a third as tall as the San José Mine is deep, but the view through the meeting room’s windows is limited only by the smog of Santiago’s southern hemisphere summer. The building is flooded with light, and from their perch in the sky the former miners can see a new highway being built beneath the Mapocho River, a massive construction project that is a symbol of Chile’s entry into the “first world.” A new Chile is being born, and its future is boundless, and so is theirs. They are symbols of that nation’s fortitude, the president himself has said this, and Congress has given each of them a medal forged from ore extracted from the mountains of Chile by men who suffer and labor deep below the ground.

20

UNDERGROUND

In their widely publicized visit to Disney World in January, the men of the San José Mine wear yellow faux mining helmets with black mouse ears attached. In February, twenty-five of the miners visit the Holy Land, and the Israeli ministry of tourism gives each man a hat emblazoned with the slogan “Israel Loves You.” The men of the San José are grateful to the Disney Corporation for the opportunity to take their family members to “the Happiest Place on Earth”; and they’re grateful to the government of Israel for the chance to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Jordan River and so many other sacred places and thus pay homage to the faith that helped save their lives. But mixed in with that gratitude is the oddness of the celebrity treatment that follows them as they circle the globe. “To be treated like a rock star—that was stressful,” says Pedro Cortez, who goes on both trips. “We got to Disney World and people wanted to touch us. As if we were God, almost.” A visitor to the Magic Kingdom sees a man in a yellow helmet walking down its pretend Main Street and is told he’s “one of those Chilean miners.” The visitor remembers the story attached to that helmeted man: He’s been resurrected from the deepest stone tomb in human history. How often is one in the presence of a miracle? So they point cameras in the helmeted man’s direction, follow him a bit just to watch him walk. “Yes, it’s a miracle we’re alive. We’re grateful to God and all the people who helped us,” Pedro says. “But it was like being in a movie about Holy Week, where Jesus is walking and everyone is following him.” This odd behavior of strangers continues in the Holy Land itself.

When he returns to Chile, Pedro decides it’s time to stop feeling like a hero or a character in a Bible story. He’s going to get his life back in order. For starters, instead of buying the pricey yellow Camaro he dreamed of when he was trapped in the mine, he buys a used Jeep. More important, he decides to enroll in a university, to get a degree in electronics. But as he begins attending classes, there is the small problem of being the only worldwide celebrity on campus. Journalists stake out his classroom to talk. “I wanted to be relaxed but everything turned against me,” he says. Television news reports and long silences both trigger memories of the mine, and the faces of his girlfriend and relatives trigger feelings of inadequacy. One day Pedro leaves class, weeping, and misses two days of school. “I felt like I was drowning.” He believes he is disappointing all the people around him, that he’ll never live up to their expectations, but he struggles to explain these feelings to the professional who is supposed to be helping him. “Even the psychologist didn’t understand,” he says.

Víctor Segovia does not suffer from nightmares or a sense of worthlessness in the first months after he’s liberated from the San José Mine. But his cell phone is ringing constantly with the voices of friends and relatives, who see him as the person who can summon the magic that will solve their problems: not because he’s a living miracle with access to the divine but rather for the money that’s in his pocket. They call with a series of laments and requests: “Víctor, I don’t feel well.” “I’ve got a problem at home,
huevón
.” “I need a million pesos” (about $2,000). “They’re going to repossess my television, my dining-room furniture, help me!” Víctor says his friends and relatives are treating him “like a bank.” “I’d have a guy call me and ask for forty or fifty large,” he says, or about $80 or $100, “and he wouldn’t even invite me to a beer first.” “The whole thing was just to get money out of you.” He is surrounded by many concentric circles of need: eventually friends of relatives, and friends of friends start to ask him for help. When Víctor finally stops loaning money, he realizes he’s doled out about 6 million Chilean pesos (about $12,000, roughly a year’s salary), most of which will never be paid back.

*   *   *

I start to meet the miners at about the same time it’s beginning to dawn on them that their postrescue bonanza isn’t going to be as big, or last as long, as they expected. Like Víctor Segovia, they begin to burn through their Farkas money fairly quickly—a million Chilean pesos doesn’t go as far as it used to. And with much of Chile believing they’ll get rich selling their story, no one follows through on Farkas’s call to raise one million dollars for each of them. Richard Villarroel is the very first miner I talk to in private, at a table in an empty restaurant in Copiapó. He tells me about hitting the drill bit with a wrench when it came through, about growing up without a father, and about the recent birth of his first son. He brings the conversation to the present and his mental state, because now that he’s no longer visiting foreign lands and he’s home, the burden of what he’s been through is all the more apparent. “I’m in the hardest part right now,” Richard tells me. “I don’t have any feelings. I’m a more serious person. A harder person. I don’t cry for anything. My wife has noticed it, too. Whatever happens around me, it’s like I don’t care. I have this disorder in my head. I could be talking to you one moment, and then suddenly I lose the thread [
se me va la onda
]. I have to wait for you to bring up what we were talking about so that I can remember what it was.” I ask him if he’s been seeing a psychologist or a psychiatrist. I was, he says. But the professional treating him said: “You’re fine. You can go.” To which Richard responded: “I am? But I don’t feel the same. Talk to my wife. She’ll explain to you how I was before and how I am now.”

As I meet the miners and travel to their homes, several of their wives and girlfriends express that same thought: The man who came out of the mine isn’t the same one who went in. “The Arturo we used to have here in the house stayed behind in the mine,” Jessica Chilla tells me, using her partner Darío Segovia’s middle name, the one they always use at home. The new Darío Arturo Segovia is stoic and emotionless. “You can punch him, and he won’t say anything. He doesn’t feel anything.” Even his six-year-old daughter says, “He isn’t the same Arturo.” Jessica longs to return to their old, soothing daily routines, the simple pleasures of taking turns picking up their daughter from school.

“We had a whole system of life,” Jessica tells me in their living room.

“Yes, a system of life that was beautiful,” Darío says.

“He even cooked for me,” Jessica says.

“I cooked,” Darío says.

“Now he doesn’t cook,” Jessica says, and she laughs, because it really was remarkable for a tough miner like Darío to make meals for her, and to do it as lovingly as he did. She also laughs because as much as Darío Arturo has changed, she can sense, by this point, that he’s starting to get better. “Two or three months ago, he was much worse.”

Over at the home she shares with Yonni Barrios, Susana Valenzuela has witnessed the suffering of her “Tarzan.” When the sun goes down each day and the windows turn dark, he becomes depressed. Yonni wakes up in the middle of the night sometimes and puts on his old helmet, and sits in the living room in the dark with the mining lamp on, as if he were back inside the caverns of the San José, listening to the distant thunder. Sometimes he begins to scream and pounds at the cushions of their sofa. “I didn’t know what to do,” Susana says. This goes on for several nights, until finally Susana turns on the living-room lights, grabs him, embraces him, and says, “Wake up, wake up,
huevón
, it’s over already.” Later, he sleeps all day, all night, and he sleeps and sleeps so much it can’t be normal. Then he can’t sleep at all again, and Susana makes him tea and milk, and brings it to Yonni on a tray and pretends it’s his birthday, singing to him like a little kid.
“Estas son la mañanitas…”
She does this for a few days, each day another “birthday” of tea and warm milk and singing, and she has him go back to his psychiatrist, and after a while he starts to calm down a little.

At about this time, I show up at Yonni and Susana’s house for the first time, and I talk to Yonni for more than two hours in a living room dominated by several photographs of Yonni and Susana embracing in the days after the rescue, Yonni looking lean and pale and exceedingly happy to be in his girlfriend’s arms. When he remembers the collapse and the days of starvation, he sheds many tears, but it’s clearly cathartic for him to finally share the story with someone who will tell it to others. “I liked when you came and he talked to you, because it’s like he let go of it,” Susana tells me later. “He was going to be loyal to his promise, and he wasn’t going to talk to anyone else.”