Miracle in the Andes Read online

  Marcelo himself had vowed to be a virgin until he married, and a lot of the guys teased him about this. Panchito especially thought it was laughable—no women until you are married? For Panchito, this was like asking a fish not to swim. But Marcelo took the jokes in stride, and I was always impressed by the seriousness and self-respect with which he carried himself. In many ways, he was very different from Arturo, the ardent socialista with the heretical notions of God, but like Arturo, he seemed to know his own mind well. He had thought carefully about all the important issues of his life, and he knew with clarity where he stood. For Marcelo, the world was an orderly place, watched over by a wise and loving God who had promised to protect us. It was our job to follow His commandments, to take the sacraments, to love God and to love others as Jesus had taught us. This was the wisdom that formed the foundation of his life and shaped his character. It was also the source of his great confidence on the field, his sure-footedness as our captain, and the charisma that made him such a strong leader. It is easy to follow a man who has no doubts. We had always trusted in Marcelo completely. How could he allow himself to falter now, when we needed him the most?

  Perhaps, I thought, he was never as strong as he seemed. But then I understood: Marcelo had been broken not because his mind was weak, but because it was too strong. His faith in the rescue was absolute and unyielding: God would not abandon us. The authorities would never leave us here to die.

  When we heard the news that the search had been canceled, it must have felt to Marcelo like the earth beneath his feet had begun to crumble. God had turned His back, the world had been turned upside down, and all the things that had made Marcelo such a great leader—his confidence, his decisiveness, his unshakable faith in his own beliefs and decisions—now prevented him from adjusting to the blow and finding a new balance. His certainty, which had served him so well in the ordinary world, now robbed him of the balance and flexibility he needed to adjust to the strange new rules by which we were battling for our lives. When the ground rules changed, Marcelo shattered like glass. Watching as he quietly sobbed in the shadows, I suddenly understood that in this awful place, too much certainty could kill us; ordinary civilized thinking could cost us our lives. I vowed to myself that I would never pretend to understand these mountains. I would never get trapped by my own expectations. I would never pretend to know what might happen next. The rules here were too savage and strange, and I knew I could never imagine the hardships, setbacks, and horrors that might lie ahead. So I would teach myself to live in constant uncertainty, moment by moment, step by step. I would live as if I were dead already. With nothing to lose, nothing could surprise me, nothing could stop me from fighting; my fears would not block me from following my instincts, and no risk would be too great.

  THE WINDS BLEW all that night, and few of us slept, but at last morning came. One by one we brushed the frost from our faces, slipped our feet into our frozen shoes, and forced ourselves to our feet. Then we gathered outside the plane and began to scan the mountains for signs of our lost friends. The skies were clear, the sun had already warmed the air, and the winds had weakened into a light breeze. Visibility was quite good, but after hours of watching we had spotted no movement on the slopes. Then, in late morning, someone shouted.

  “Something is moving!” he said. “There, above that ridge!”

  “I see it, too!” said someone else.

  I stared at the mountain and finally saw what the others were seeing: three black dots on the snow.

  “Those are rocks,” someone muttered.

  “They weren’t there before.”

  “Your mind is playing tricks,” sighed someone else.

  “Just watch. They are moving.”

  A little lower on the slope was a dark outcrop of rock. Using this rock as a reference point, I kept my gaze on the dots. At first I was sure they were stationary, but after a minute or two it was clear that the dots had moved closer to the outcrop. It was true!

  “It’s them! They’re moving!”

  “Puta carajo! They are alive!”

  Our spirits soared and we slapped and shoved each other in our happiness.

  “Vamos, Gustavo!”

  “Come on, Numa! Come on, Daniel!”

  “Come on, you bastards! You can make it!”

  It took the three of them two hours to work their way down the slope and across the glacier, and all that time we shouted encouragement to them and celebrated as if our friends had returned from the dead. But the celebration ended abruptly when they got close enough for us to see their condition. They were stooped and battered, too weak to lift their feet from the snow as they shuffled toward us, leaning on each other for support. Gustavo was squinting and groping as if he’d gone blind, and all three seemed so weary and unstable that I thought the lightest breeze might blow them down. But the worst thing was the look on their faces. They seemed to have aged twenty years overnight, as if the mountain had blasted the youth and vigor from their bodies, and in their eyes I saw something that had not been there before—the unsettling combination of dread and resignation you sometimes see on the faces of very old men. We rushed to meet them, then helped them into the fuselage and gave them cushions to lie on. Roberto examined them immediately. He saw that their feet were nearly frozen. Then he noticed the tears streaming from Gustavo’s bleary eyes.

  “It was the glare on the snow,” said Gustavo. “The sun was so strong …”

  “Didn’t you use your sunglasses?” Roberto asked.

  “They broke,” said Gustavo. “It feels like sand in my eyes. I think I am blind.”

  Roberto put some drops in Gustavo’s eyes—something he’d found in a suitcase that he thought might soothe the irritation—and wrapped a T-shirt around Gustavo’s head to shade his damaged eyes from the light. Then he told the rest of us to take turns rubbing the climbers’ frozen feet. Someone brought them large portions of meat, and the climbers ate ravenously. After they had rested, they began to talk about the climb.

  “The mountain is so steep,” said Gustavo. “In places it is like climbing a wall. You have to clutch the snow in front of you to pull yourself up.”

  “And the air is thin,” said Maspons. “You gasp, your heart pounds. You take five steps and it feels like you have run a mile.”

  “Why didn’t you come back before night?” I asked them.

  “We climbed all day and were only halfway up the slope,” said Gustavo. “We didn’t want to come back and tell you we had failed. We wanted to see beyond the mountains, we wanted to come back with good news. So we decided to find shelter for the night, then climb again in the morning.”

  The climbers told us how they had found a level place near a rocky outcrop. They made a short wall out of large stones they found lying about, and huddled behind this wall, hoping it would shield them from the wind at night. After so many nights freezing in the fuselage, the climbers didn’t think it was possible to suffer much more from the cold. They quickly discovered they were wrong.

  “The cold up on those slopes is indescribable,” said Gustavo. “It rips the life from you. It’s as painful as fire. I never thought we would live until morning.”

  They told us how they had suffered horribly in their light clothing, punching each other in the arms and legs to keep the blood moving in their veins, and lying close together to share the warmth of their bodies. As the hours crawled by, they were certain their decision to stay on the mountain had cost them their lives, but somehow they lasted until dawn, and finally they felt the first rays of sun warming the slopes. Amazed to be alive, they let the sunshine thaw their frozen bodies, then they turned to the slope and resumed the climb.

  “Did you find the tail?” Fito asked.

  “We only found pieces of wreckage and some luggage,” Gustavo answered. “And some bodies.” Then he explained how they had found the remains of people who had fallen from the plane, many of them still strapped to their seats. “We took these things from the bodies,” he said,
pulling out some watches, wallets, religious medallions, and other personal effects he had taken from the corpses.

  “The bodies were very high up the slope,” said Gustavo, “but we were still far from the summit. We didn’t have the strength to keep climbing, and we didn’t want to get trapped for another night.”

  Later that night, when things were quiet in the fuselage, I went to Gustavo.

  “What did you see up there?” I asked. “Did you see beyond the peaks? Did you see any green?”

  He shook his head wearily. “The peaks are too high. You can’t see far.”

  “But you must have seen something.”

  He shrugged. “I saw between two peaks, into the distance …”

  “What did you see?”

  “I don’t know, Nando, something yellowish, brownish, I couldn’t really tell, it was a very narrow angle. But one thing you should know: When we were high on the mountain I looked down at the crash site. The Fairchild is a tiny speck in the snow. You can’t tell it from a rock or a shadow. There is no hope that a pilot could see it from a plane. There was never any chance we would be rescued.”

  THE NEWS THAT the search had been canceled convinced even the most hopeful among us that we were on our own, and that our only chance of survival now was to save ourselves. But the failure of Gustavo’s mission disheartened us, and as days passed, our spirits were battered further by the realization that Marcelo, in his self-doubt and despair, had quietly abdicated his role as our leader. There seemed to be no one to take his place. Gustavo, who had led by his courage and resourcefulness from the very first moments of our ordeal, had been devastated by the mountain, and could not regain his strength. Roberto was still a strong presence, and we had come to rely on his cleverness and keen imagination, but he was an extremely headstrong young man, far too irritable and belligerent to inspire the kind of trust we’d had in Marcelo. Rapidly, in the absence of a single strong leader, a looser, less formal style of leadership emerged. Alliances formed, based on previous friendships, similar temperaments, and common interests. The strongest of these alliances was the one made up of Fito and his cousins Eduardo Strauch and Daniel Fernandez. Of the three, Fito was the youngest and the most prominent. He was a quiet boy, and at first I thought he was almost painfully shy, but he soon proved himself to be bright and level-headed, and while he had an unflinching grasp of how steeply the odds were stacked against us, I knew he intended to fight with all his strength to help us all survive. The three cousins were extremely close, and with Daniel and Eduardo consistently following Fito’s lead, they presented a unifying force that gave them a great deal of influence over all the decisions we made. This was a good thing for all of us. “The cousins,” as we called them, gave us a strong, stable center that prevented the group from disintegrating into factions, and saved us from all the conflict and confusion that might have caused. They also were able to convince most of the survivors that our lives were in our own hands now, and that each of us had to do everything he could to survive. Yielding to that advice, and to Javier’s pleading, Liliana finally began to eat. One by one, the rest of the holdouts—Numa, Coche, and the others—did the same, telling themselves that drawing life from the bodies of their dead friends was like drawing spiritual strength from the body of Christ when they took Communion. Relieved that they were nourishing themselves, I didn’t dispute their rationale, but for me, eating the flesh of the dead was nothing more than a hard, pragmatic choice I had made to survive. I was moved by the knowledge that even in death, my friends were giving me what I needed to live, but I felt no uplifting sense of spiritual connection with the dead. My friends were gone. These bodies were objects now. We would be fools if we didn’t use them.

  As the days passed, we became more efficient at processing the meat. Fito and the cousins took responsibility for cutting the flesh and rationing it to us, and soon they had devised an efficient system. After cutting the meat into small pieces, they would arrange it on pieces of aluminum and let it dry in the sun, which made it much easier to stomach. On the rare occasion when we had a fire they even cooked it, which improved its taste dramatically. For me, eating the meat became easier over time. Some could not overcome their revulsion, but all of us were eating enough now to hold starvation at bay. Out of respect for me, the others had promised not to touch the bodies of my mother and sister, but even so, there were enough bodies to last us for weeks if we rationed the meat carefully. To make the food last even longer, we eventually began to eat the kidneys, the livers, and even the hearts. These internal organs were highly nutritious, and as grisly as it may sound, by this point in the ordeal, most of us had grown numb to the horror of friends being butchered like cattle.

  Still, eating human flesh never satisfied my hunger, and it never gave me back my strength. I was still wasting away, like the others, and the small amount of food we allowed ourselves each day only slowed the process of starvation. Time was running out, and I knew that soon I would be too weak to climb. This became my greatest fear, that we would grow so weak that escape would become impossible, that we would use up all the bodies, and then we’d have no choice but to languish at the crash site as we wasted, staring into each other’s eyes, waiting to see which of our friends would become our food. That horrible scenario preoccupied me, and sometimes it took all my discipline to keep myself from ignoring the wishes of the others and setting off on my own. But the near disaster of Gustavo’s expedition had given me a new understanding of how difficult the climb would be. Like all the others, I was stunned by what the mountains had done to Gustavo, who was famous for his toughness and stamina on the field. Why should I believe I could conquer the mountain when he could not? In moments of weakness I would surrender to despair. Look at these mountains, I would tell myself. It’s impossible, we are trapped here. We are finished. All of our suffering has been in vain.

  But each time I gave in like this to defeat and self-pity, the face of my father would drift up from memory, reminding me of his suffering, and of the promise I had made to return to him. At times, when I thought I couldn’t stand the cold or the thirst or the gnawing terror for one more second, I’d feel a powerful urge to surrender. “You can end this whenever you want,” I would tell myself. “Lie down in the snow. Let the cold take you. Just rest. Be still. Stop fighting.”

  These were comforting, seductive thoughts, but if I savored them too long the voice in my mind would interrupt me. When you climb, make sure every fingerhold is a good one. Don’t trust a rock to hold you, test every step. Probe the snow for hidden crevasses. Find good shelter for the nights …

  I would think about climbing, and that would remind me of my promise to my father. I would think of him and let my heart fill with love for him, and this love would be stronger than my suffering, or my fear. After two weeks on the mountain, my love for my father had taken on the irresistible power of a biological drive. I knew that someday I would have to climb, even though I’d be climbing to my doom. But what did it matter? I was a dead man already. Why not die in the mountains, fighting for each step, so that when I died, I would die one step closer to home? I was ready to face such a death, but as inevitable as that death seemed, I still felt a flicker of hope that I might somehow stumble through the wilderness and make it home. The thought of leaving the fuselage terrified me, even though I couldn’t wait to leave. I knew that somehow I would find the courage to face the mountains; I also knew I would never be brave enough to face them alone. I needed a companion for the journey, someone who would make me stronger and better, and so I began to study the others, weighing their strengths, their temperaments, their performance under pressure, trying to imagine which of these ragged, starving, frightened boys I would most want by my side.

  Twenty-four hours earlier the question would have had a simple answer: I would want Marcelo, our captain, and Gustavo, whose strength of character I had always admired. But now Marcelo was in despair, and Gustavo had been battered and blinded by the mountain, and I feared th
at neither one of them would recover in time to go with me. So I turned my eye to the other healthy survivors, and as I watched them, a few quickly caught my attention. Fito Strauch had proven his bravery in the first attempt to climb the mountain, and had earned all our respect for his calmness and clear thinking throughout the ordeal. Fito’s cousins, Eduardo and Daniel Fernandez, were a great source of strength for him, and I wondered at times how he would perform on his own in the mountains, but Fito was definitely high on my list. So was Numa Turcatti. Numa had impressed me from the start, and as the days passed my respect for him had deepened. Although he had been a stranger to most of us before the crash, he had quickly won the friendship and admiration of all the survivors. Numa made his presence felt through quiet heroics: no one fought harder for our survival, no one inspired more hope, and no one showed more compassion for the ones who suffered most. Even though he was a new friend for most of us, I believe Numa was the best loved man on the mountain.

  Daniel Maspons, who had climbed bravely with Gustavo, was another candidate. So was Coco Nicholich, whose selflessness and composure had impressed me. Antonio Vizintin, Roy Harley, and Carlitos Paez were all healthy and strong. And then there was Roberto, the brightest, most difficult, most complicated character on the mountain.

  Roberto had always been hard to handle. The son of a renowned cardiologist in Montevideo, he was brilliant, self-confident, egotistical, and interested in following no one’s rules but his own. Because of his contrary nature, he was constantly in trouble at school, and it seemed his mother was always being called into the headmaster’s office to endure another conference about Roberto’s transgressions. He simply refused to be told what to do. For example, Roberto had a horse that he would ride to school each morning, even though the Christian Brothers repeatedly forbade him to bring the animal onto school grounds. Roberto simply ignored them. He would tie the horse to the bicycle rack, it would work its tether free, and an hour or so later the Brothers would find it wandering in the garden, munching their prized shrubs and flowers. He also spurred the big animal through the crowded streets of Carrasco, galloping along sidewalks and through busy intersections so fast that the horse’s shoes struck sparks on the pavement. Drivers swerved and pedestrians lurched out of his way. Our neighbors constantly complained, and once or twice the police spoke to Roberto’s father, but Roberto continued to ride.