Deep Down Dark (10 page)

He’s about to break the locks, too, when the driver Franklin Lobos steps forward and says, “Wait, I have the key.”

Lobos is taller and bulkier than just about anyone else trapped in the mine. His height is a reminder of the athleticism that intimidated people on the soccer field, and sometimes he uses his size to assert himself, suddenly dropping his unassuming air to give voice to some grievance, or to express annoyance at the fucked-up nature of this workplace. But at this moment Lobos decides that giving in to the hungry men is his only recourse. “I wasn’t going to fight five or six of them. In the state that we were in, fighting didn’t make any sense.” This same idea will soon be repeated, often, in the thoughts of many of the trapped men as more conflicts and disagreements simmer between them: I really want to punch this idiot, this
huevón
, but I don’t want to be stuck underground taking care of a miner with a broken jaw, or a bleeding wound either.

Lobos opens the cabinet and the rebellious miners’ main object of desire is revealed: packages of cookies with the brand name Cartoons. They’re really children’s snacks, chocolate- and lemon-flavored sandwich creams, the kind you can split in half easily, several dozen packages in all. “It didn’t seem like there were that many,” Zamora will remember. Outside, in the surface world, you can buy these packages for 100 Chilean pesos each, or less than a quarter. There are four cookies in each package—several of which are quickly dispensed to those who will take them, though many miners refuse. Zamora will say later that he didn’t think much about what he was doing. “I was just hungry. It was time to eat. I didn’t give it much importance.”

They open some of the milk boxes they find, too. About ten of the two dozen men present in the Refuge partake of this food, getting one or more precious packages of cookies each, sharing two liters of milk.

“It was the northerners that did it,” one of the southerners later says. “They only thought of saving themselves at that moment. Fresh guys. They wanted everything. They never thought that we’d be trapped so long.”

Later, one of the miners will remember listening to the looters of the food box eat in the darkness, sitting in a corner of the Refuge with their headlamps off, as if they were ashamed of their own hunger, and yet unable to keep the crackle of crumpling plastic and the moist crunch of their chewing from filling the small space, to be heard by men who did not take any food at all.

*   *   *

When Luis Urzúa and the party of men involved in the failed escape expedition arrive at the Refuge, they find a scene of disarray. They discover the unlocked cabinet, its severed aluminum bands. Gathering the discarded packages of cookies, they count ten. “With what you guys just ate, we all could have survived three days down here,” Florencio Avalos says. “Well, whoever ate that food, let them get something out of it … May it serve them well.”

The mood changes suddenly, as the members of the escape expedition reveal the truth they learned higher up in the mine: They’re trapped and there will be no easy rescue or escape. They speak with a grave tone of focused urgency that catches many of the men in the Refuge by surprise. “What are you guys doing?” Mario Sepúlveda says, with the raspy, high-pitched paternalistic lament he might use for one of his dogs. “Don’t you realize we might be down here for days? Or weeks?”

No one immediately confesses to the crime of looting the provisions. Nor do any of the members of the failed escape expedition demand to know who was responsible, and in the confusion of the moment, a few men will not learn for many days what exactly transpired with the food supply. The fact of the taking will simply sit for days to come in the conscience of the men who did it. Víctor Zamora, recognized by many as the chief culprit, studies the faces of his friends and companions and understands, for the first time, the severity of what’s happened in that white-tiled room with the box that used to be sealed. He says nothing, and won’t say anything for days about what he’s done.

Now Mario Sepúlveda and Raúl Bustos begin to give details of their climb to the top, with Sepúlveda getting on his knees in the dirt to draw a diagram of the blocked ramp, and the chimney without the ladder. He speaks to them with a common term of endearment among men:
chiquillos
, or “kids.” “In other words,
chiquillos
, even if we’re superoptimistic about things, the best you can say is we’re in a load of shit. The only thing we can do is to be strong, superdisciplined, and united.”

In the silence that follows Sepúlveda’s assessment, Luis Urzúa steps forward to make an announcement. Given the circumstances, he says, “We are all equal now. I take off my white helmet. There are no bosses and employees.” He is surrendering, in effect, his responsibilities as a shift supervisor, as
jefe de turno
. A few minutes earlier on the walk down from the chimney, Urzúa had told the members of the escape expedition that he was going to do this, and now he’s gone ahead and done it, even though they told him not to. “We have to decide, together, what we’ll do,” Urzúa says. What he wants to communicate is their need to stand together and stand united, “one for all and all for one,” though what some take from this small speech and his low-key demeanor is meekness in the face of a challenge, and the sense that the man who’s supposed to be in charge isn’t.

“Sometimes Luis Urzúa says things without thinking,” Raúl Bustos later says. Bustos feels a kind of suppressed anarchy lingering there in the cavernous space underground. Five months earlier, he saw his hometown of Talcahuano descend into anarchy following a tsunami and earthquake, and he was nearly mugged outside a pharmacy that was being looted. Like a natural disaster, the collapse might cause the daily order and hierarchies of the mine to come apart. Bustos can see the possibility that the strongest and most desperate men in the cavern will take advantage of the weaker men. The logic of the street could take over the mine. There are, after all, a few among them who have spent a bit of time in jail, for fights in bars, that sort of thing, and each of those men is a potential “alpha dog,” he thinks. “At any moment, they could have turned on
el jefe de turno
if we didn’t back him up.”

Urzúa speaks his piece, but it leaves a kind of void, so others from the escape expedition try to fill it: Mario Sepúlveda and the foreman Florencio Avalos, and Juan Carlos Aguilar, the supervisor of the contract mechanics crew.
El jefe de turno
is correct, they all say. We have to stick together. Aguilar speaks with a voice that is at once authoritative and informed. The situation is not good, he says, but there are things they can do to prepare. Number one, they have to take care of all the water that’s down there with them, because the water they used to keep the machines and the mine running can keep them alive, too. It’s obvious they’ll have to ration the food, too, eating as little as possible every day to make it stretch out as long as possible, and the only question is how to do it.

Sepúlveda helps lead a tally of what is (and was) inside the emergency cabinet: 1 can of salmon, 1 can of peaches, 1 can of peas, 18 cans of tuna, 24 liters of condensed milk (8 of which are spoiled), 93 packages of cookies (including those that have just been eaten), and some expired medicines. There are also, incongruously, 240 plastic spoons and forks, and a mere 10 bottles of water, which serve as further proof of the mine owners’ thoughtlessness. The men will not die of dehydration, however, because there’s several thousand liters of industrial water in the big tanks nearby that’s used to keep the engines cool, and even though it’s probably tainted with small amounts of oil, it will likely be drinkable. But they have to divide those cookies and cans of tuna among them all: If each man eats one or two cookies and a spoonful of tuna each day, the provisions might stretch out a week. They put all the food back into the cabinet, and lock it again. Urzúa takes the key and gives it to Sepúlveda for safekeeping.

But how many of them are there, exactly? Urzúa counts them again, and checks the list against his mental notes on how many men should be there among them. “Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three…”

“There are thirty-three of us,” he announces.

“Thirty-three?” Sepúlveda shouts. “The age of Christ! Shit!”
¡La edad de Cristo! ¡Mierda!

Several other men repeat the phrase, including Aguilar and Lobos. “
¡La edad de Cristo!
” they yell out. Even for men who aren’t especially religious, the number carries an eerie meaning, especially for those who have reached and passed the age themselves. Thirty-three, the age of a crucified prophet. The number and the name sit there among the group for an instant, a coincidence that’s both trivial and frightening. Really, there should only be sixteen or seventeen of them, but thanks to all the men working overtime, or makeup days, there are many more. Twice as many, in fact. So many that no one man has met all the others. Thirty-three in all. How can that be?

Finally, Sepúlveda speaks, loudly, because in the eyes of the men around him he sees confusion and fear.
Somos treinta y tres
. “There are thirty-three of us. This has to mean something,” he says. “There’s something bigger for us waiting outside.” He says this with the anger of the street fighter he once was, and with the conviction of the father he’s become, a man who’s seen a wall of stone and a half-empty cabinet of food, and who refuses to believe it marks the end of his life’s journey.

*   *   *

One group goes back up to the rock at Level 190, and to the nearby chimneys and caverns, to listen for the approach of rescuers and then to make noises alerting people on the surface to the presence of living men down below. They’ll be so busy moving rocks, lighting fires, and doing other things that they won’t be able to sleep for a couple of days. But most of the thirty-three trapped men stay in or near the Refuge. A few, in fact, are afraid to leave that room, and won’t for several days, because they can’t forget running for their lives in the collapsing, exploding mountain outside. Sleeping behind the steel door of the Refuge, or just next to it, they can at least pretend they are in a safe place.

“Remember those Mexican miners who were buried underground,” one of the miners says. “They just put a stone over the entrance to the mine and said, ‘They’re dead. This is their tomb.’ They didn’t even bother getting out their bodies.”

“No, you’re wrong,” another miner shouts back. “Right now, our families are all up there. They’re going to make sure they come after us.”

Someone says that the rescuers could carve a new ramp to come and get them. Maybe even a ramp from the brother mine nearby, the San Antonio.

“But it took ten years to make the ramp that’s here now,” says Yonni Barrios, who’s worked at the mine that long. “It would take ten years for them to reach us that way.”

Or maybe we could climb out through the Pit, another miner suggests.

No, that would be suicide, useless, like trying to climb a cliff of shifting and tumbling boulders, several men reply. You’d be sure to fall or be crushed.

One of the older miners says the only solution is to drill for them. A drill can reach them in a few days, send down food, keep them alive while the people on the surface devise a rescue plan.

So they’ll reach us in a day or so, someone says, hopefully.

No, another miner answers. “Did you see a drill out there when we came into work today? No. They’re going to have to bring one in from another mine. And then they’re going to have to build a platform for it. It’s going to take a few days, at least, just to get started.”

It’s past 10:00 p.m. as the men scatter about the Refuge looking for a spot to sit or lie down. There is nothing else to do there, for the moment. Several make beds from the cardboard boxes that once stored various explosives, or with the soft plastic ripped out from the ducts that pumped fresh air from the surface. On a normal day they’d be back in their bunks at the hostel in Copiapó, their bellies warmed by wine or beer or something stronger, or in their homes dozing off to sleep with wives, girlfriends, children around them. This is the hour when their bodies usually give up, surrendering to gravity and sleep after twelve hours on their feet, underground, but tonight the only rest is on the white floor of the Refuge, the sandy surface of the Ramp, catching the eyes of other men, exhausted, disoriented, with the childlike stares of the lost. Ten years for a new ramp to reach them. Days just to hear a drill. Or maybe just the silence of being forgotten, of having that stone across the Ramp be the closed door of their tomb. When there is nothing left to say, they open their eyes wide in the darkness and think how cruel and how wrong and how unfair it is to find themselves here, among these other sweaty, smelly, and frightened men.

There was comfort in the rushing rhythm of their daily working lives, in the 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. shift going underground and coming out again, and then back into this mountain where the tiniest share of the bounty of copper and gold was theirs to keep. Now there is nothing to do but sit still, listen to the intermittent thunder of falling rock, and wonder if this is all they will know. Maybe all the pleasures of sweat and simple living under the sun, the moon and the Southern Cross in the night sky belong to the past. So many memories left behind, out there in the world of the unburied: filling boxes with picked grapes, seeking out the pretty newcomer at the family gathering, joining friends for hard drinking, walking through doorways and into Copiapó bars where stationary mirror balls awaited. Collecting paychecks and coming home at 9:00 p.m. to the voices of children gathered under the streetlamps in the sloping neighborhoods of Copiapó, under lights tinged amber and emerald. The outside has slipped into the
was
, because now they live in a present, and perhaps a forever, of darkness. The past was family patios where men gathered to discuss whether La U or Colo-Colo would win the next
fútbol
championship, and other important and relaxing subjects of male-centered conversation. The past was the open windows leading to their backyards, to grills and the cracked skin of cooked sausage. It was the silhouettes of their pregnant wives and girlfriends, moving about living rooms and kitchens, the mystery of the feminine there in the bellies growing with their progeny.