Deep Down Dark (24 page)

María Segovia is still at her tent, closest to the gate, with her family and the Vega family nearby, all about to begin a night of nervous anticipation. Golborne and Sougarret have informed the miners’ relatives at the daily briefing that one of the drills is getting closer and there is a chance it could break through the next morning. Jessica Vega normally goes to sleep in her tent a bit after midnight, but tonight she’ll stay up late into the night with a group of relatives that includes Alex’s younger sister Priscilla and Priscilla’s boyfriend, Roberto Ramirez, both of whom are just shy of thirty. The young couple are singers and Roberto has a mariachi band (Mexican music is popular in northern Chile) and mariachi sideburns to match. He’s brought his guitar, to liven things up, and maybe to celebrate, because this might be the last night they spend without word from Alex. Roberto can already feel it’s “a special night, a magical night.” His spirits have been lifted, unexpectedly, by what he’s seen in the drive into the mine. A storm passed through the desert a few days earlier, dropping a light, rare rain on the driest desert on Earth. The average annual rainfall in Copiapó is less than half an inch, but this is an El Niño year, and a somewhat early rain (the first storms in the Atacama usually come in September) has briefly moistened the surrounding land and produced what’s known in Chile as the
desierto florido
, the flowering desert. Roberto has seen the rocky and sandy landscape of khaki- and copper-colored mountains covered, suddenly, with fields of fuchsia, white star-shaped flowers, and yellow trumpets swaying in the breeze. It’s enough to make a man want to sing.

As night falls in the camp, the desert breeze blows at the bonfire the Vega family builds next to their camp, and Roberto begins to strum his guitar. The Segovias in the next set of tents are unusually quiet, and Ramirez and the Vega family feel the need to fill the silence by making a “racket.” It’s about two or three in the morning and they’ve been singing for an hour or two when Roberto tells Jessica that he’s written a song in honor of Alex. He pulls the lyrics from a piece of paper in his wallet. Like many Latin American folk songs, it tells a true story, in this case the history of the events the Vegas and the other families are living, and it opens with a slow, sad tempo as it describes the mournful mood in the Copiapó neighborhoods where many of the miners live.

Cuando camino por las calles de mi barrio

no veo el rostro feliz en los familiares.

En Balmaceda y Arturo Prat

sin ti no existe un mundo mejor.

When I walk through the streets of my barrio

I don’t see happiness on the familiar faces around me.

In Balmaceda and Arturo Prat

there is no better world without you.

Next, the song describes the mountain’s collapses, and José Vega’s attempt to enter the mine and reach his son.

Se desintegran las rocas del cerro

Los mineros pronto saldrán

La chimenea está colapsada

Pero tu padre pronto te sacará
.

The rocks of the mountain fall apart

The miners will soon come out

The chimney has collapsed

But your father will soon bring you out.

The chorus introduces Alex’s family nickname—“El Pato,” the Duck, a name given to him when he was a boy—and speeds up to the livelier tempo of a protest song. It’s the kind of chanted tune you might hear a thousand people sing as they march through the streets of a Chilean city.

Y El Pato volverá!

Y va volver!

Los mineros libertad

Y va volver!

En el campo o en el mar

Y va volver!

Y también en la ciudad

Y va volver!

And El Pato will return

And he will return!

Liberty for the miners

And he will return!

In the countryside or in the sea

And he will return!

And also in the city

And he will return!

The singers ask Alex to come back to the home he was building with his wife, to that little property on the sloping street where husband and wife spent the weekends building a concrete wall together.

Pato vuelve a casa,

Tu esposa y tu familia te esperan

vuelve ya.

Y El Pato volverá,

Y va volver!

Pato come back home

Your wife and your family are waiting for you

Come back now.

And El Pato will return,

And he will return!

The Vegas and Roberto Ramirez sing the song several times, late into the night. Finally, they go to sleep, because the word from the government is that the drillers won’t reach the level where the miners are until much later in the morning.

*   *   *

As the Vega family sings during the early morning hours of August 22, Mario Sepúlveda, overcome from several days of insomnia and agitation, slips into the deepest sleep he can remember. All the tension lifts from his mind and body. In the surreal vividness of a hunger-induced dream, he finds himself transported to that place where all of his longing, his hurt, and his love of life were born. He’s in Parral, sleeping on the floor, and when he lifts his head he sees his grandmother Bristela and his grandfather Domingo, “all dressed up and beautiful.” They’ve been dead for many years, and in his sleep Mario feels the joy of a man witnessing a resurrection. They were his
viejos
, the people who cared for him most as a small, motherless boy. His grandmother has brought a basket filled with food.
Porotitos con locro
: beans in a winter stew with corn and meat still on the bone. “Get up from there,
hombre
,” his grandfather tells him, in the strong, country voice of an old man. “You are not going to die here.”
Vos no vas a morir aquí
.

*   *   *

Nelson Flores, the drill operator, is home for just two hours or so before the call comes in ordering him back to work. The driller from the night shift has had a family tragedy—his grandmother died. So Nelson returns to the San José Mine and borehole number 10B. He works through the night, the sound of the drill drowning out the singing from the Vegas farther down the mountain. Just after 5:00 a.m., with the winter sun beginning to turn the horizon indigo, he has the drill bit advancing at just 6 to 8 meters per hour. He stops to allow the crews to add another 6-meter-long tube to the shaft. It’s linked to 113 other tubes below it, the borehole 10B having now reached 684 meters, about 10 meters from the spot where they hope to break though. When the men are done, Flores closes his eyes as he raises the lever that adds air pressure to the hammering drill bit. The 114 interlinked tubes begin to turn, moving the drill bit at the bottom of the shaft and its tungsten carbide beads. Tungsten carbide is harder than the granitelike diorite, and in the friction battle between the two, tungsten carbide wins, grinding the diorite into dust that is shot by air pressure more than 2,200 feet to the surface, producing a cloud of lead-colored dust the drillers call a “cyclone.” With that pillar of dust shooting from its chimney, the Schramm T685 resembles some kind of stone-powered train, and Flores’s boss, the drill supervisor Eduardo Hurtado, sits nearby in a pickup truck and watches as the silhouette of the cyclone rises steadily against the sky, a sign that the drill under their feet is advancing as it should.

*   *   *

Sometime after 5:00 a.m., Mario Sepúlveda wakes up at the command of his dead grandfather, and the good, almost euphoric feeling of a dream come to life stays with him in the minutes that follow, as he takes in the grinding and pounding sound of a drill that’s become impossibly loud.

Richard Villarroel, the expectant father, has been trying to sleep. He’s about forty-five vertical feet above Mario, in the passenger seat of a pickup truck, at Level 105. The sound of the drill approaching is very loud, yes, but there’s no real way to tell if it’s actually as close to breaking through as Richard hopes it is. He’s been reciting the Our Father and Hail Mary over and over again, about one hundred times in all, with assorted pleas to Jesus. When the pounding stops, briefly, at 5:00 a.m. he says, “
Papito
[little father], help that operator change the bars [that house the drill], and guide him to us, please…” He still can’t sleep, so he goes down to the Refuge, where there’s an insomniacs’ game of dominoes in progress, with the set Luis Urzúa made. Richard joins a match with José Ojeda, a bald, short man and mine veteran. After a while, the drilling starts to get even louder.

“It’s going to burst through,” José says in a matter-of-fact voice.

*   *   *

At about 6:00 a.m., several of the men around the drill operator, Nelson Flores, have fallen asleep. No one expects a breakthrough for several hours. Flores notices something odd: The last steel tube turning the 114 tubes below is starting to stutter in its rotation. The drill bit is grinding away at something with a different texture. Suddenly the cloud of dust coming from the Schramm’s chimney stops, and the pressure gauge drops to zero. Instinctively and immediately, Flores lowers a lever that shifts the drill engine into neutral and stops the air pressure being forced down into the shaft. As he does, the rig turns quiet, and the sudden silence is filled, almost immediately, by the sound of his boss and coworkers yelling and running toward him.

*   *   *

Far below, 688 meters under Flores’s feet, there’s a small explosion just up the tunnel from the men in the Refuge—
poom!
—followed by the sound of rocks tumbling to the ground. The grinding of metal against rock that has filled the ears of the men stops, and in its place there is a whistle of escaping air. Richard Villarroel and José Ojeda jump up and run toward the noise, Richard grabbing his 48-millimeter wrench as he goes. They are the first to reach the spot. A length of pipe is protruding from the rock, at the spot where the wall and ceiling meet, and Richard watches as a drill bit inside the pipe lowers and rises, and lowers again: Up on the surface Nelson Flores realizes he’s entered an empty space, and is “cleaning” the shaft. Then the drill bit falls to the mine floor and stays there, and Richard takes his wrench and begins pounding on the exposed pipe protruding from the tunnel ceiling.

Richard has been waiting for days to put this wrench to use. It’s two feet long, the biggest chrome-vanadium tool in his possession, and now he strikes it against the exposed pipe with joy and desperation, a repetitive clank that’s meant to announce a human presence to the drill operator above:
We’re here! We’re here!
He strikes the pipe, and the idea that he will see his first son born takes hold of him, that his prayers have been answered by this drill bit and the men who sent it here. Richard pounds away until his boss, Juan Carlos Aguilar, steps in behind him and tells him to stop, because they have to think like miners, and reinforce the roof of the tunnel where the drill has broken through, to keep from being crushed by a loosened slab of rock.

Soon all thirty-three men have gathered around the pipe and the drill bit, objects that have intruded into their dark world with the promise of raising them up to the world of light again. With its parallel circles of pearl-size tungsten carbide teeth, the drill bit resembles some Assyrian sculpture, a kind of alien apparition, and the men stare at it in awe and joy, embracing and weeping. To Carlos Mamani, who falls to his knees before the drill bit, “it felt like a hand had punched through the rock and reached out to us.”

José Henríquez, the jumbo operator who’s been transformed underground into a shirtless and starving prophet, looks at the drill bit and pronounces the obvious to anyone who will listen:

“
Dios existe
,” he says. God exists.

PART II

SEEING THE DEVIL

10

THE SPEED OF SOUND

For the first few minutes after the breakthrough of drill 10B, the men keep pounding at its shaft. They take turns, hitting it not just with Richard Villarroel’s chrome wrench, but also with loose stones and a hammer, not paying much heed to those warning that the rock loosened by the drill could fall on their heads. “We were like little kids hitting a piñata,” Omar Reygadas remembers.
Como cabros chicos pegándole a una piñata
. The shirtless boys in the yellow, blue, and red helmets keep hitting, until one of the miners drives up with a forklift, which lifts up Yonni Barrios and Carlos Barrios in a basket to perform the critical task of reinforcing the spot with steel bars. They’re frantic, yelling instructions back and forth: Above all, they have to erase any doubt the people on the surface might have about men being alive down here. Make a sound, leave a mark, attach a note. Someone says to stop hitting the bar, to see if the people who are at the top are answering, and Yonni puts his ear to the bar and says, yes, he hears them tapping back. A miner tosses Yonni a can of red spray paint, and he tries to leave a mark on the shaft, but the steel is covered in a stream of muddy water flowing from up above that erases the paint again and again. “We needed to dry the bar, but we didn’t have anything dry to clean it with.” Eventually some of the paint seems to stick. The men tie the notes and letters they’ve prepared, more than a dozen in all, wrapping them in pieces of plastic and strips of electrical tape and rubber tubing against the moisture that’s pouring down through that hole, worrying that a piece of paper might not survive the long journey back up through the slosh. They keep pounding on the bar.

*   *   *

Nelson Flores, the drill operator, feels the pulse in the steel from down below before he hears it. At first he wonders if it’s just the weight of the 115 steel bars, 22 tons’ worth, striking and settling against one another in the shaft. Putting his ear to the uppermost bar in the shaft, he hears a tapping that’s fast and frantic, but which then slows, “as if the
viejos
down there were getting tired.” As word goes out for all the other drills on the mountain to stop, several other men listen to the sounds coming from the steel tube. “It’s them!” The drill team moves quickly and carefully to add one more steel bar to the shaft, so they can measure how deep the cavity is by lowering the bit until it strikes something and stops. When they’re done, Flores watches as the shaft moves four meters before it stops, which is exactly the height of the passageway they were aiming for. Listening to the shaft again, they hear that the sound from below is shifting in rhythm: It begins tapping out as if sending a Morse code signal, or making music, mixing short and long pauses. “At that point, we had no doubt,” says Eduardo Hurtado, the drill supervisor. “There was someone alive down there.”