Miracle in the Andes Page 15

  Arturo looked at me and managed a thin, self-deprecating grin. “At a time like this,” he said, “it seems wise to cover all the angles.”

  All through the first week of November, Arturo grew weaker and more distant. His best friend, Pedro Algorta, stayed close to him through it all, bringing him water, keeping him warm, and praying with him. One night, Arturo started to cry softly. When Pedro asked Arturo why he was sobbing, Arturo replied, with a faraway gaze in his eyes, “Because I am so close to God.” The following day Arturo developed a high fever. For forty-eight hours he was delirious, slipping in and out of consciousness. On his last night, we helped him down off the hammock so he could sleep beside Pedro, and sometime before morning, Arturo Nogueira, one of the bravest men I’ve ever known, quietly died in the arms of his best friend.

  ON THE MORNING of November 15, Numa, Roberto, Tintin, and I stood outside the fuselage, looking down the valley that sloped off to the east ready to begin our escape. Numa was beside me, and though he was trying to hide it, I could see he was in pain. Since the avalanche, he had forced himself to eat, despite his revulsion, knowing he’d need all his strength for the expedition. Still, like Coche, he could not stomach more than a few scraps at a time—sometimes he could not make himself swallow at all—and while his will remained strong, it was clear that his body had weakened. A few nights earlier, someone trying to make his way across the dark fuselage had stepped on Numa’s calf as he lay on the floor. An ugly bruise quickly appeared, and when Roberto saw how badly the leg had swollen, he advised Numa to drop out of the expedition. Numa assured Roberto that the bruise was nothing to be concerned about, and he firmly refused to let us leave without him.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked him, after we had gathered our things and said good-bye to the others. “Are you sure you can make it on that leg?”

  Numa shrugged. “It’s nothing,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

  As we set off down the slope, the weather was overcast and the air was chilly but the winds were light, and despite all my misgivings about the eastern trip, it felt good to be leaving the crash site at last. At first we made good progress moving down the slope, but after an hour or so of hiking, the skies darkened, temperatures dropped, and snow began to squall in violent spirals all around us. In the blink of an eye, a heavy storm rolled over us. Knowing that every second counted, we fought our way back up the slope and stumbled into the fuselage, frightened and half-frozen, just as the storm matured into a full-blown blizzard. As stiff winds rocked the plane, Roberto and I exchanged a sober glance. We understood, without speaking, that if the storm had hit just an hour or two later, trapping us farther from shelter on the open slopes, we would now be dead or dying.

  The blizzard, one of the worst we’d had in all our weeks in the Andes, kept us penned in the fuselage for two long days. While we waited out the storm, Roberto grew more concerned with Numa’s leg. There were two large sores now, each almost as large as a billiard ball. As Roberto lanced and drained the sores, he realized Numa was in no shape to hike through the mountains.

  “Your legs are getting bad,” said Roberto. “You’ll have to stay behind.”

  For the first time on the mountain, Numa’s temper flared. “My leg is fine!” he shouted. “I can bear the pain!”

  “Your leg is septic,” said Roberto. “If you would eat more, your body would be strong enough to fight off the infection.”

  “I am not staying behind!”

  Roberto glared at Numa and, with his characteristic bluntness, said, “You are too weak. You will only slow us down. We can’t afford to take you.”

  Numa turned to me. “Nando, please, I can make it. Don’t make me stay.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Numa,” I said, “I agree with Roberto. Your leg is bad. You should stay here.” As others gave the same advice, Numa fumed and drew into himself. I knew how badly he wanted to be with us, and how hard it would be for him to watch us leave. I knew I would not be able to stand such a disappointment, and I hoped this setback would not crush Numa’s spirit.

  THE BLIZZARD FINALLY spent itself, and on the morning of November 17 we woke to find a clear, calm day. Without much fanfare, Roberto, Tintin, and I gathered our things and set off once more down the slopes, this time in bright sunshine and light breezes. There was little talking. I quickly fell into the rhythm of my strides, and as the miles passed the only sound in the world was the crunching of my rugby shoes in the snow. Roberto, who was dragging the sled, had pulled ahead of us, and after about an hour and a half of hiking I heard him shout. He was standing on a tall snowdrift, and when we joined him there and looked beyond the drift we saw what he was pointing at—the remains of the Fairchild’s tail section were lying a few hundred yards ahead. In minutes we had reached the tail. Suitcases were scattered everywhere, and we tore through them to get at the treasures inside: socks, sweaters, warm trousers. Happily we tore off the tattered, filthy rags on our backs and dressed in clean clothes.

  Inside the tail we found more luggage, filled with more clothing. We also found some rum, a box of chocolates, some cigarettes, and a small camera loaded with film. The plane’s small galley area was in the tail, and there we found three small meat pastries that we immediately devoured, and a moldy sandwich wrapped in plastic, which we saved for later.

  We were so excited by all this unexpected booty that we almost forgot about the radio batteries, which Carlos Roque had told us were somewhere in the tail. After a short search, we found the batteries in a recessed space behind a hatch in the tail’s exterior hull. They looked larger than I expected. We also found some empty Coca-Cola crates in the luggage hold behind the galley, which we took outside and used as fuel for a fire. Roberto roasted some of the meat we’d brought with us, and we ate with great appetite. We peeled the mold off the sandwiches we’d found, and ate them, too. As night fell, we spread clothes from the suitcases on the floor of the luggage hold and laid down to rest. Working with wires he’d stripped from the walls of the tail section, Roberto connected the airplane’s batteries to a light fixture bolted to the ceiling, and for the first time we had light after sunset. We read some magazines and comic books we had salvaged from the luggage, and I took some pictures of Roberto and Tintin with the camera we had found. I thought that if we didn’t make it out alive, someone might find the camera and develop the film, and they would know that we had lived, at least for a while. For some reason, this was important to me.

  It was luxuriously warm and spacious in the luggage hold—what a pleasure to stretch my legs, and to roll into any position I chose—and soon we grew drowsy. Roberto extinguished the light, we closed our eyes, and all of us enjoyed the best night of sleep we’d had since the plane fell into the mountains. In the morning we were tempted to stay for a while in these cozy quarters, but we reminded ourselves of the others and their hopes for our expedition, and soon after waking, we were once again trekking east.

  It snowed that morning, but by late morning the skies cleared, the sun was hot on our shoulders, and we perspired heavily in our warm clothing as we hiked. After so many weeks of frigid temperatures, the sudden heat exhausted us quickly, and at noon we were forced to rest in the shade of a rocky outcrop. We ate some of our meat and melted some snow for water, but even after we’d refreshed ourselves, none of us had the energy to continue, so we decided to camp at the rock for the night.

  The sun grew stronger as the afternoon passed, but at sunset, temperatures began to plummet. We dug into the snow for shelter and wrapped up in our blankets, but as the hard chill of night fell upon us, these things seemed to offer us no protection at all. This was my first night outside the fuselage, and it only took a few moments to understand how terribly Gustavo, Numa, and Maspons must have suffered when they spent their long night on the open slopes. Our night was no better. The cold bore down on us so aggressively that I feared my blood had frozen solid in my veins. Huddling together for warmth, we shuddered in each other’s arms. We discovered th
at by making a sandwich of our bodies—one of us lying between the others—we could keep the guy in the middle of the sandwich warm. We lay this way for hours, taking turns at the middle position, and though we didn’t sleep at all, we survived until daylight. When morning finally came, we climbed out of our poor shelter and warmed ourselves in the first rays of the sun, staggered by what we’d lived through, and stunned to be alive.

  “We won’t last another night like that,” said Roberto. He was gazing to the east, at the mountains that seemed to have grown larger and more distant as we trekked.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “I don’t think this valley ever turns west,” he said. “We are only walking deeper into the cordillera.”

  “You may be right,” I said. “But the others are counting on us. Maybe we should go a little farther.”

  Roberto scowled. “It’s hopeless!” he snapped, and I heard that angry falsetto creeping into his voice. “Are we any good to them if we’re dead?”

  “Then what should we do?”

  “Let’s get the batteries from the tail and take them to the Fairchild,” he said. “We can drag them on the sled. If we can make the radio work, we can save ourselves without risking our lives.”

  I had no more faith in the radio than I had had in the prospects of trekking east, but I told myself we had to explore every hope, no matter how slim. So we gathered our things and returned to the tail section. It took only moments to remove the batteries from the plane and set them side by side on our Samsonite sled. But when Roberto tried to drag the sled forward, it dug deep into the snow and wouldn’t budge.

  “Damn, these are too heavy,” he said. “There is no way we can drag them up to the plane.”

  “We can’t carry them,” I said.

  Roberto shook his head. “No,” he said, “but we can get the radio from the Fairchild and bring it here. We’ll bring Roy with us. Maybe he can figure out how to connect it to the batteries.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this. I was certain the radio was damaged beyond repair, and I feared that Roberto’s attempts to fix it would only distract him from what we now knew more clearly than ever was our only chance to survive: climb the mountains to the west.

  “Do you really think we can make it work?” I asked.

  “How do I know?” snapped Roberto. “But it’s worth a try.”

  “I’m worried we will waste too much time.”

  “Do you have to argue about everything?” he cried. “This radio could save our lives.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I will help you. But if it doesn’t work, then we climb. Do we have a deal?”

  Roberto nodded, and after allowing ourselves two more luxurious nights in the tail’s luggage hold, we set off in the afternoon of November 21 to climb our way back to the fuselage. The walk down the valley from the crash site had been easy—so easy, in fact, that I hadn’t appreciated the steepness of the slopes. Now, just minutes into our uphill trek, we found ourselves pushed to the limits of our stamina. In places we faced inclines as sharp as forty-five degrees, and the snow was often as deep as my hips. Battling up the mountain quickly sapped my strength. I was gasping for air, my muscles were burning with fatigue, and I found myself forced to rest for thirty seconds or more after every few steps. Our progress was excruciatingly slow; it had taken us less than two hours to descend from the Fairchild to the tail; it would take us twice as long to make the same trip in reverse.

  We reached the crash site in midafternoon, and the survivors at the fuselage gave us a somber greeting. It was six days since we had left them, and they had hoped we’d be close to civilization by now. Our return had dashed those hopes, but that was not the only reason for their low spirits; while we were gone, Rafael Echavarren had died.

  “At the end he was delirious,” Carlitos told me, “He kept calling to his father to come get him. On his last night, I made him pray with me and that calmed him a little. A few hours later he began to gasp for air, then he was gone. Gustavo and I tried to revive him, but it was too late.”

  Rafael’s death was a serious blow. He had become such a symbol of courage and defiance for us that to see him struck down after all his brave resistance was one more reason to believe that the mountain would sooner or later claim us all. Was there no rhyme or reason to our suffering? This one struggles bravely and is taken away, that one doesn’t fight at all and still survives? Since the avalanche, some of the others had clung to the belief that God had seen nineteen of us through that disaster because we were the ones he’d chosen to survive. Rafael’s passing made it harder to believe that God was paying any attention at all.

  As we settled into the fuselage that night, Roberto explained the reason for our return. “The route to the east is no good,” he said. “It only leads deeper into the mountains. But we found the tail section, and most of the luggage. We brought warm clothes for everyone. And lots of cigarettes. But the good news is we found the batteries.”

  The others listened quietly as Roberto explained his plan to fix the Fairchild’s radio. It was worth a try, they all agreed, but there was little enthusiasm in their reaction. There was a new look in their eyes now, of weary acceptance. Some of them had the dim, vacant stare I’d seen in pictures of concentration camp survivors. Just weeks ago, these were all vigorous young men. Now they stooped and wobbled when they walked, like feeble old men, and their clothing hung loose on the hard angles of their bony hips and shoulders. They were looking more and more like animated corpses, and I knew that I looked no better. I felt their hopes were flickering, and I couldn’t blame them. We had suffered so much, and the signs were so bad: despite his brave resistance, Rafael was dead. Our escape to the east had failed. Two attempts to climb the mountains to the west had ended in near disaster. It seemed that every door we tried to walk through was slammed in our faces. Yes, they agreed, we should try the radio. But none of them seemed to see any reason to expect that it would work.

  The next morning, Roberto and I started working to remove the Fairchild’s radio. The cockpit was packed with dials, toggles, and complex instrumentation, and in our ignorance it took some guesswork to decide what was part of the radio and what was not. Finally we figured out that the radio was made up of two components, one anchored in the cockpit’s control panel and the other hidden behind a plastic panel in the wall of the luggage compartment. The component in the control panel, to which the earphones and microphone were attached, came out easily after we’d removed a few screws. The second component, tucked into a dark, cramped, and shallow cavity in the wall, was anchored more firmly and was much more difficult to get at. Working clumsily with our fingers and the bits of metal and plastic we used for tools, we struggled to loosen the bolts and clips holding the transmitter in place, but it was two frustrating days before we were able to remove it from the wall. When we finally pulled it free and set it beside the component from the cockpit, I saw the futility of our efforts.

  “Carajo!” I cried. “Look at this mess!”

  Bristling from the back of each component was a crazy tangle of tiny electrical wires. “This is impossible, Roberto! How will we ever match these wires?”

  Roberto ignored me, and carefully counted the wires on each component.

  “There are sixty-seven wires coming out of the back of this piece,” he said, “and sixty-seven coming out of the transmitter.”

  “But which wire connects to which?” I said. “It’s impossible! There are too many combinations.”

  “Do you see these markings?” he replied. “Each wire has a different mark. The marks will tell us which wires match.”

  “I don’t know, Roberto,” I said. “All this time we are spending, and we don’t even know if the radio still works.”

  Roberto’s eyes flashed with anger. “This radio can save our lives!” he snapped. “We owe it to ourselves to try this before we go off blundering into the mountains and throw our lives away.”

  “Okay! Okay!” I said, to
calm him. “Está bien. But let’s ask Roy to take a look.”

  I called Roy over and showed him the radio. He frowned and shook his head.

  “I don’t think this can be fixed,” he said.

  “We are going to fix it,” Roberto replied. “You are going to fix it.”

  “I can’t fix this!” Roy cried, his voice growing thin and shrill in protest. “It’s much too complicated. I don’t know the first thing about a radio like this!”

  “Get hold of yourself, Roy,” said Roberto. “We’re going to take this radio to the tail. You are coming with us. We are going to make this radio work and we are going to use it to call for help.”

  Roy’s eyes went wide with terror at the news. “I can’t go there!” he shrieked, “I’m too weak! Look at me! I can barely walk. Please, I won’t make it to the tail and back!”

  “You’ll make it because you have to,” Roberto replied.

  “But this radio is ruined!” he wailed. “It’s impossible!”

  “Maybe it is,” said Roberto, “but we have to try, and you’re the only one who has a chance of making it work.”

  Roy’s face crumpled and he began to sob. The thought of leaving the fuselage terrified him, and in the following days he pleaded with anyone who would listen that he should be excused from the mission. Fito and the cousins were firm with him, insisting that he go. They pressured him to think of the good of the others. They even forced him to train for the mission by walking back and forth outside the fuselage. Roy reluctantly obeyed, but often he would weep as he paced in the snow.

  Roy was no coward. I knew that about him long before the crash, from the way he played rugby and from how he lived his life. In the early days of our ordeal, while he was still strong, he had been a productive member of our group. Roy had been at Marcelo’s side as they organized the plane in the immediate aftermath of the crash, and had helped Marcelo with the difficult work of building the wall that kept us all from freezing. And I couldn’t forget that if not for Roy’s quick action in the wake of the avalanche, we all would have suffocated beneath the snow. But he was very young. I knew his suffering had shattered his nerves, and it was clear to see how the ordeal had ravaged his body. He was a skeleton covered in skin now, one of the thinnest and weakest among us, and I should have felt as much compassion for him as I felt for the others. In all our time on the mountain, I had rarely grown angry with any of my fellow survivors. I understood their fears, and the pressures they were under, especially the younger guys, so it was easy to be patient with them when their suffering made them selfish or lazy or afraid. Roy had suffered as much as any of the others, and he deserved the same consideration from me, but as he weakened and his emotional state continued to crumble, I found myself infuriated by his frequent displays of distress, and for some reason it became more and more difficult for me to show him kindness. So, when he begged me, in desperation, not to make him go with us to the tail, I didn’t even look him in the eyes.