Deep Down Dark (44 page)

Two and a half years after the accident, Juan Carlos Aguilar is alongside Luis Urzúa in Copiapó at the press conference announcing the creation of the miners’ new nonprofit foundation, the Thirty-Three of Atacama. The foundation’s mission is to aid the poor of the region, and the
perquineros
, the artisan miners whose culture shaped the childhood and family life of several of the thirty-three men. Most of the survivors of the San José Mine are there, including Mario Sepúlveda, Raúl Bustos, and Edison Peña, along with the former minister of mining Laurence Golborne, who can no longer be accused of having immediate political motives. They meet at the Antay Casino and Hotel, across the street from the chapel that holds the Catholic relic most sacred to local miners, and they listen as Luis Urzúa reads some prepared remarks. “Why did we survive a tragedy?” he asks. “What is the mission each one of us must follow?” Since the rescue, Luis has taken classes in public speaking, and aboveground he’s tried to be something he wasn’t underground—the undisputed leader of the thirty-three miners. He tells me he’s learned to talk to “big people,” and more than once he’s written pointed letters and e-mails to powerful lawyers and film producers in Santiago and Los Angeles. Eventually, however, his fellow miners question his actions (much as they did underground) and they vote to remove him from their leadership committee.

The last time I speak with Luis, he is angry with many of his former colleagues. But to outsiders he still retains his role as a figure of Chilean and mining history. Luis can feel the way the collapse of the mine and the drama of the rescue linked him to strangers around the world. In Chile, people tell him they’ll never forget where they were when they heard the news that the men had been found alive. It was on a Sunday, a family day, at the hour of the day’s biggest meal. “We were just sitting down to eat,” they tell him, and they remember the church bells ringing, and the people running out into the streets. Chileans who were traveling abroad when 1.2 billion people watched the men being rescued on television tell him that to be Chilean in those days in October was to feel the entire world had adopted you. People congratulated us for being
chilenos
, they tell him.

From all these strangers, Luis does not get the sense that they think he’s a hero, necessarily, or that they’re in awe of him. Rather, he understands that it’s as if he and these strangers had lived something together: a shared experience with him in the mine and them on the outside. What he feels from these strangers is the gratitude of people who’ve been given a true and hopeful story, a timeless legend born of their own time, in a humble country in the shadow of the Andes.

*   *   *

The first time I met Alex Vega, it was in his home in Copiapó, about eleven months after his rescue. He was not well. I asked him about his family history, and how it was he came to work in the San José, and I noticed his hand was trembling. I talked to him a bit more, and the tremor seemed to spread through his body, as if he were shivering from cold on that warm, sunny day of Southern Hemisphere spring. “You look a little nervous,” I said, and soon Alex talked about the “scars” he still had and how he’d struggled with mood swings, and nightmares that were starting to diminish in frequency but which still haunted him. Above all, what troubled Alex was the sensation that he needed to be alone, that his wife and children were better off when he wasn’t in the same room with them, which is a painful and confusing thought for a family-loving man to have in his head, especially after spending sixty-nine days longing to be reunited with them.

Eventually, Alex’s response to his emotional crisis is to hold on tighter to his wife, Jessica, and to depend on her more. He realizes he can’t leave home for a long trip without her, and when he goes to Santiago for a meeting with the other miners, it’s the thirty-three men and Jessica Vega, not because Jessica is a busybody but simply because Alex isn’t able to get on a plane or be in a hotel room without her. The other miners don’t hold this against him, because they all know exactly what he’s going through.

Each time I meet Alex again—seven months later, a year later—he’s doing better. At his home in the Arturo Prat neighborhood, I meet his father and his sister and brother, and I interview Jessica, too. After a while, it’s clear to me that there’s a lot about what happened to Alex underground that Jessica doesn’t know. “Can I tell her?” I ask. Eventually, she’ll read it in this book, and maybe it’s better she hear it from me now. Alex says it’s okay, so I tell Jessica how Alex was sent flying by one of the blasts caused by the mine’s collapse; I tell her how, in his desperation to reach home, he risked his life trying to crawl under the stone blocking the Ramp; and I tell her how he offered not to eat on the sixteenth day, when the other miners said he looked painfully thin, weak, and hungry. The realization that her husband has been carrying these memories as he walks about their home causes Jessica to weep, briefly, and then later, perhaps, it brings her a measure of understanding, as if the plot and meaning of the movie in which she’d been living had suddenly been made clearer to her.

*   *   *

The accident at the San José Mine briefly made Copiapó the most famous mining city in the world. In the years since, life there has quickly returned to its everyday rhythms, to the routines of mineral extraction and the vagaries of weather and geology Darwin noted in his journal. An 8.2 magnitude earthquake shook the Atacama Desert. And nine months after the thirty-three men of the San José Mine were rescued, torrential rains fell on the city. The Copiapó River filled with water for the first time in fourteen years, and the riverbank flooded, forcing the evacuation of the Tornini neighborhood of squatters, much as another storm had driven María and Darío Segovia from their home as children. The Tornini squatters were later evicted by the city government to make way for an access road to a new nearby riverside mall that is yet another symbol of the city’s booming growth. After the neighborhood had been emptied but not yet demolished, stray dogs wandered through the ruins.

About a hundred yards away, on the other side of the bridge that takes the Pan-American Highway across the Copiapó River, the city erected the most conspicuous local monument to the rescue of “the thirty-three of Atacama,” a tall, chrome-skinned woman holding a dove. Donated by the Chinese government, the sculpture faces the dry bed of the Copiapó River and greets all those who enter Copiapó in cars and buses from the south, including those who come to work in the region’s mines. Outside the city, at the San José Mine, a cross and monument have been erected at the spot where the families of the thirty-three men gathered and built Camp Esperanza. Only rarely do tourists undertake the forty-minute drive from Copiapó to visit. The entrance to the mine is covered, top to bottom, with a chain-link fence. If the guard at the site isn’t looking, you can walk up to the fence and peer into the gloomy tunnel that leads into an empty and broken maze of caverns below.

*   *   *

The last time I meet with Alex Vega and his family, it’s not to interview them but to share a meal together. I head out on foot to their home and enter a working-class neighborhood of Copiapó at twilight, a collection of homes hugging the low ground. There is no one else but me on the sidewalk, until I see a group of young men gathered under a weak streetlamp that’s just come on in the growing darkness. They look furtively down an asphalt avenue conspicuously absent of traffic, and I walk past them, and then past warehouse buildings, and homes of tin and wood clustered behind tall concrete walls. Once again I am alone on the street, though I sense that behind these barriers there are especially industrious families who have filled their properties to the brim with rooms, furniture, and appliances—but whose humility allows them to enjoy this prosperity only if they can be certain no one will see them. I take a wrong turn and come upon a pair of boys rolling a tire down one of the sloped streets; they help me find my way.

When I reach Alex’s address I find his homestead is how I remember it: unfinished. Alex hasn’t completed the building project that sent him into the San José Mine to earn a bit of extra money. He’s still got one old room that’s crowded with stoves and a table, and one newer room with a big couch and some sofa chairs; in between, there’s an empty, open space waiting to be filled with new construction. The wall he’s been building with his wife is taller, however, and nearly done. When he shakes my hand I note how, for the first time, it’s with the firm grip of a man who works with tools for a living. After more than two years of emotional suffering, Alex has taken several steps to heal himself, including returning to work, at a job repairing vehicles. When we sit and talk, he tells me what he did to end his nightmares about being buried alive. “I couldn’t sleep, so I told myself, ‘I need to confront this fear. I need to go back into a mine.’” He asked a brother-in-law who worked underground if he could join him, and for a week Alex entered the mine every day, going three hundred meters below the surface. He drove down into the deep dark, wandering about the stone passageways, and then back up and out those dank caverns and into the sunshine. The nightmares never returned after that, and he stopped waking up and crying in the middle of the night. The next step in his recovery, he tells me, will be to host a gathering of all his family and friends, to talk about what he saw and survived during his sixty-nine days underground, a topic that he and the people around him have deliberately avoided for years. “I want to turn the page and leave it all behind.”

When Alex’s sister Priscilla and her boyfriend, the mariachi Roberto Ramirez, arrive, and Alex’s brother Jonathan arrives a bit later, the mood is light and full of laughter. The presence of the author writing the book about Alex and his coworkers leads Jessica, Roberto, and Priscilla to remember what Camp Esperanza was like, with its bonfires and its families and its odd characters: the clown who came to make the children laugh, the celebrities who came to have their pictures taken, the workers who came to drill and search, and the reporters who came from every corner of the globe. Then, because it’s a pleasant night, and because some of the Vegas want to smoke, we go outside.

As his two small children run and circle him several times in the chasing game they’re playing, scampering in and out of the cement courtyard, Alex has the calm, content look of a man who has returned home from a long journey, and who can see how his presence is soothing and a source of strength to the people around him. Under the black sky and the stars, I listen as his family tells more stories about the sixty-nine days they spent at the San José, and especially about the predawn hours of August 22 in Camp Esperanza. Remember that night, Roberto asks, what a magical night that was? Alex says no, he doesn’t remember, and everyone laughs: Well, it
felt
like you were there with us, Alex, even though you were still buried seven hundred meters underground. It was a cold August night, but the Vega family was full of hope, because the Plan B drill was said to be close to the Refuge, and they had faith it would break through to Alex. The desert around the mine was covered with flowers, after a rare shower a few days earlier. The Vegas remember the songs they sang that night, including the one that Roberto wrote about “El Pato” Alex and his seventy-year-old father entering the mountain to search for him.

On that night, in a flower-covered desert, and in a fungi-filled cavern underneath, Alex and his family lived an epic story that belongs to the world and to the history of Chile; but it’s also a family tale as intimate as this small and still-unfinished space Alex and Jessica Vega call their own. For Alex, the odyssey ends with the renewal of the daily rhythms in his home: on mornings when he leaves for work as the fog called the
camanchaca
rolls in; on afternoons when the desert sun burns through it; and on nights like this one when the cooling air calls him outside with his family. I look up at the unfamiliar canopy of the Southern Hemisphere night above me, and I see a sky similar to the one Alex’s family saw from Camp Esperanza, including a constellation called Phoenix, and the five bright stars of Crux, a cluster of stars also known as the Southern Cross. Under the southern stars, before dawn on August 22, they had faith they would soon witness a miracle, and they sang a song that declared Alex would be freed from his mountain prison. Tonight they sing it again, for a visitor from a faraway country, and for Alex.

“And El Pato will return!”

“He will return!”

When the song finishes, Alex Vega looks at the people who love him, and who are smiling with the memory of the night they first sang those words.

“And here I am,” he says.

NOTES

2. The End of Everything

13. Absolute Leader

17. Rebirth

21. Under the Stars

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is based, in large measure, on the hundreds of hours of interviews I conducted in Chile with the thirty-three survivors of the San José Mine collapse and their families, and on the diary kept by Víctor Segovia. Many of the interviews were conducted in the homes of the miners, individually and privately, or with their wives, girlfriends, children, and other relatives present. Some interviews were conducted in groups, and in hotels in Copiapó, and in the offices of the Carey law firm in Santiago.