Miracle in the Andes Read online

  “We are leaving soon,” I snapped. “You’d better be ready.”

  Roberto spent several days studying the radio, and as I waited for him to finish, I grew more and more concerned about Numa. Since we had dropped him from the expeditionary team, his spirits had tumbled. Withdrawn into a brooding silence, he had grown furious with himself and the way his body had betrayed him. He was irritable and morose, and, worst of all, he refused to eat anything at all. As a result, he lost weight more rapidly, and the sores on his legs got worse. There were two large boils on his leg now, each larger than a golf ball, and each of them clearly infected. But what worried me most was the look of resignation in his eyes. Numa was one of the strongest and most selfless of all the survivors, and he had battled as bravely as anyone to keep us all alive. But now that he could battle for us no longer, and had only himself to care for, he seemed to be losing heart. One night I sat beside him and tried to raise his spirits.

  “Are you going to eat something for me, Numa?” I asked. “We are going to the tail soon. It would be nice to see you eat before I leave.”

  He shook his head feebly. “I can’t. It is too painful for me.”

  “It’s painful for all of us,” I said, “but you must do it. You must remember it is only meat now.”

  “I only ate before to strengthen myself for the trip,” he said. “What reason do I have to force myself now?”

  “Don’t give up,” I told him. “Hold on. We are going to get out of here.”

  Numa shook his head. “I am so weak, Nando. I can’t even stand anymore. I don’t think I’m going to last much longer.”

  “Don’t talk that way, Numa. You will not die.”

  Numa sighed. “It’s okay, Nando,” he said. “I have examined my life, and I know that if I die tomorrow, I have still had wonderful years.”

  I laughed. “That’s exactly what Panchito used to say,” I said. “And he lived his life according to those words. He was reckless, daring; he always thought that things would go his way. And usually they did.”

  “He was famous for that,” said Numa. “How old was he?”

  “He was only eighteen. But he lived so many lifetimes, had so many adventures, and, macho, he made love to so many beautiful girls.”

  “Maybe that’s why God took him,” said Numa. “So that there would be a few girls for the rest of us.”

  “There will be plenty of girls for you, Numa,” I said. “But first you must eat, and live. I want you to live.”

  Numa smiled and nodded. “I will try,” he said. But later, when they brought him some meat, I saw him wave it away.

  We left the next morning at 8:00 a.m., and made fast progress down the slope. As we approached the tail, I spotted a red leather bag lying in the snow, and immediately recognized it as my mother’s cosmetics case. Inside I found some lipstick that I could use to protect my lips from the sun, some candy, and a little sewing kit. I stashed these items in our knapsacks and kept hiking. Less than two hours after leaving the Fairchild, we were once again at the tail.

  We rested that first day. The next morning, Roy and Roberto started working on the radio. They worked hard, trying to make the proper connections to the battery, but they were feeling their way by trial and error, and just when it seemed they were making progress, the wires would flash and sizzle and we’d hear a loud electrical pop. Roberto would swear and badger Roy to be more careful, and they’d start over.

  Daytime temperatures were milder now, and the snow around the tail was melting fast. Suitcases that had been buried only days ago, when we first found the fuselage, were now lying in plain view. While Roy and Roberto tinkered with the radio, Tintin and I rummaged through the suitcases scattered around the tail. In one of the bags we found two bottles of rum. We opened one of the bottles and took a few swigs.

  “We’ll save the other,” I said. “We can use it when we climb.”

  Tintin nodded. We both knew the radio would never work, but Roy and Roberto were still working furiously. They tinkered with it all afternoon and into the next morning. I was getting anxious to finish this experiment, and get back to the fuselage, where we could prepare for the climb.

  “How much longer do you think, Roberto?” I asked.

  He glanced at me with irritation in his eyes. “It will take as long as it takes,” he grumbled.

  “We’re running low on food,” I said. “I think Tintin and I should go back and get more.”

  “That’s a good idea,” he said. “We’ll keep working.”

  Tintin and I gathered our things, and in minutes we were climbing up the valley toward the Fairchild. Once again I was struck by how much more difficult it was to climb these slopes than it was to descend them. We trudged for hours, stopping frequently to gasp for air, and finally reached the plane in late afternoon. Once again we received a sullen welcome, and I couldn’t help noticing that the others seemed to have grown even weaker and more listless than when we’d left them.

  “We came for more meat,” I said. “The radio is taking longer than expected.”

  Fito frowned. “We are running low on food. We’ve been looking everywhere for the bodies that were lost in the avalanche, but the snow is so deep and we are so tired. We even climbed up the slopes several times to fetch the bodies that Gustavo found when he climbed.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “Tintin and I will dig.”

  “How is it going with the radio?”

  “Not well,” I said. “I don’t think it is going to work.”

  “We are running out of time,” said Fito. “Every one of us is weak. The food won’t last much longer.”

  “We need to go west,” I said. “It may be impossible, but it is our only chance. We have to go as soon as possible.”

  “Does Roberto think the same?”

  “I don’t know what he is thinking,” I said. “You know Roberto. He will do what he wants to do.”

  “If he refuses,” said Fito, “I will go with you.”

  I smiled warmly at Fito. “That’s brave of you,” I said, “but with those sores in your ass, you can barely walk fifteen feet. No, we must persuade Roberto to go west, and to go very soon.”

  Tintin and I stayed at the fuselage for two days, digging through the snow in search of fresh bodies. When we found what we were looking for, Fito and his cousins cut the meat for us, and after resting a while, we hiked down the glacier once more. We reached the tail section at midmorning and found Roy and Roberto hard at work on the radio. They thought they had the connections right, but when they powered up the radio, they heard nothing but static. Roy thought the radio’s antenna, which had been damaged in the crash, might be defective, so he made a new one from copper wire he stripped from the electrical circuits in the tail. Roy and Roberto attached the new antenna to the Fairchild’s radio, and stretched the long copper wires on the snow. The radio worked no better. Roy disconnected the antenna and attached it to the small transistor radio, which he’d brought along. The long antenna gave the transistor a strong signal. Roy tuned in a station with some music that we liked, and went back to work. Moments later the music was interrupted by a bulletin, and we heard the surprising news that the Uruguayan air force was sending a specially equipped Douglas C-47 to search for us.

  Roy whooped in joy at the news. Roberto turned to me, smiling broadly.

  “Did you hear that, Nando!? They’re looking for us!”

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” I said. “Remember what Gustavo said—from the slopes the Fairchild is just another speck on the glacier.”

  “But this is a specially equipped plane,” said Roberto.

  “And the Andes are huge,” I said. “They don’t know where we are. Even if they do find us, it could take months.”

  “We need to make a sign for them,” Roberto said, ignoring my skeptical glare. In minutes he had us gathering suitcases and arranging them on the snow in the shape of a large cross.

  When we’d finished, I asked Roberto about the radi
o.

  “I don’t think we can fix it,” he said. “We should go back to the plane.”

  “And get ready to go west,” I said, “as we agreed.”

  Roberto nodded absently and went to gather his things. As I rounded up my own gear, Tintin came to me with a small rectangular piece of cloth insulation he had taken from the tail. “This stuff is wrapped around all the pipes in there,” he said. “There must be some way we can use it.”

  I felt the material between my fingers. It was light and strong, fluffy inside, with a tough, smooth fabric cover. “Maybe we can use it to line our clothes,” I said. “It seems like it would keep us warm.”

  Tintin nodded, and we went into the tail. In moments we had stripped all the insulation from the pipes and stuffed it into our knapsacks. As we worked, we heard a racket outside, and when we looked, we saw Roy angrily stomping the radio to pieces.

  “He should save his energy,” I said to Tintin. “This climb is going to be tough.”

  We set off up the slope in midmorning. The skies were overcast as we departed, and the ceiling was very low, but temperatures were mild and the weather was calm. Roberto and Tintin were in the lead, Roy was straggling behind me. As before, fighting up the slope through the knee-deep snow was exhausting, and we stopped often to rest. I knew Roy was suffering from the effort, so I kept my eye on him, and slowed my pace to keep him from slipping too far behind. About an hour into our trek, I glanced at the sky as I rested, and was startled by what I saw. The clouds had swollen and turned an ominous dark gray. They hung so low I felt I could touch them. Then, as I watched, the clouds rushed at us, like the crest of a killer wave. Before I could react, the sky seemed to fall, and we were swept up in one of the blitzkrieg blizzards that those who know the Andes call a “white wind.” In a matter of seconds, everything was chaos. The temperature plummeted. The wind shoved and tugged at me so fiercely I had to stagger back and forth to keep from falling down. Snow swirled in thick whirlpools around me, stinging my face and robbing me of my bearings. I squinted into the blizzard, but visibility was close to zero now, and I saw no sign of the others. For a moment I panicked. “Which way is up?” I asked myself. “Which way do I go?”

  Then I heard Roberto’s voice, sounding faint and distant in the huge roar of the storm.

  “Nando! Can you hear me?”

  “Roberto! I am here!”

  I looked behind me. Roy had vanished.

  “Roy? Where are you?”

  There was no response. About thirty feet behind me, I saw a blurred gray heap in the snow, and I realized Roy had fallen. “Roy!” I bellowed. “Come on!”

  He didn’t move, so I stumbled down the slope to the spot where he lay. He was curled up in the snow, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around his body.

  “Move your ass!” I shouted. “This storm will kill us if we don’t keep moving!”

  “I can’t,” Roy whimpered. “I can’t go another step.”

  “Get up, you bastard!” I shouted. “We’ll die here!”

  Roy looked up at me, his face twisted into a grimace of fear. “No, please,” he sobbed, “I can’t. Just leave me.”

  The storm was gathering power by the second, and as I stood over Roy, the winds gusted so ferociously I thought they would lift me off my feet. We were trapped in a total white-out now. I had completely lost my sense of direction, and my only hope of making it back to the fuselage was to follow the tracks Roberto and Tintin were leaving. But the heavy snow was rapidly burying their footprints. I knew they would not wait for us—they were fighting for their lives, too—and I knew that each second I stayed with Roy brought us both closer to disaster. I looked down at Roy. His shoulders were quaking as he wept, and he was already half-covered in snow.

  I have to leave him or I will die, I thought. Can I do it? Do I have it in me to leave him here to die? I did not answer these questions in words, but with action. Without another thought, I turned away from Roy and followed the tracks of the others up the slope. As I staggered against the force of the winds, I pictured Roy lying in the snow. I thought of him watching my shadow disappear into the storm. It would be the last thing he ever saw. How long will it take for him to lose consciousness? I wondered. How long will he suffer? I was perhaps fifteen yards away now, and I couldn’t erase the picture of him from my mind: slumped on the snow, so helpless, so pathetic, so defeated. I felt a wild surge of contempt for his weakness and lack of courage, or at least that was what it felt like then. In retrospect, things look quite different. Roy was no weakling. He had suffered more than most of us and had found the strength to endure, but he was so young and his body had been ravaged so badly that all his resources, physical and mental, had simply been overwhelmed. We were all being forced toward our limits, but Roy had been pushed too hard and too fast. It bothers me now that I did not show him more patience and encouragement in the mountains, and I have realized, after years of reflection, that the reason I treated him as I did was that I saw too much of myself in him. I know now that the grating whine in Roy’s trembling voice was unbearable to me because it was such a vivid expression of the terror I felt in my own heart, and that the twisted grimace he wore on his face maddened me only because it was a mirror of my own despair. When Roy surrendered and lay down in the snow I knew he had reached the end of his struggle. He had found the place where death would take him at last. Thinking of Roy lying still on the slope, slowly disappearing beneath the snow, I was forced to wonder how close my own moment of surrender might be. Where was the place where my own will and strength would fail? Where, and when, would I give up the struggle and lie down, frightened and defeated like Roy, in the soft comfort of the snow?

  This was the true source of my anger: Roy was showing me my future, and in that moment I hated him for it.

  Of course, there was no time for such introspective thought on that storm-swept mountain. I was acting on instinct alone, and as I pictured Roy sobbing in the snow, all the scorn and derision I had felt toward him in the last few weeks exploded into a murderous fury. Impulsively, I swore like a madman into the gusting winds. “Mierda! Carajo! La reconcha de la reputisima madre! La reputa madre que lo recontra mil y una parió!” I was out of my mind with anger, and before I knew it, I was crashing down the slope to where Roy had fallen. When I reached him, I kicked him savagely in the ribcage. I fell on him, slamming my knees into his side. Kneeling on him, I balled my fist and battered him with hard punches. As he rolled and screamed in the snow, I abused him verbally just as viciously as I attacked him with my fists.

  “You son of a whore!” I shouted, “You filthy bastard! Get on your fucking feet, you miserable motherfucker. Stand up or I’ll kill you! You bastard, I swear it.” I had struggled, since my first moment on the mountain, to maintain my composure and avoid wasting energy venting my angers and fears. But now, as I hovered over Roy, I felt my soul emptying itself of all the fear and venom that my time on the mountain had given me. I stomped Roy’s hips and shoulders with my rugby boots. I shoved him into the snow. I called him every foul name I could think of, and insulted his mother in ways I do not like to remember. Roy wept and screamed as I abused him, but finally he rose to his feet. I shoved him forward, so hard that he almost fell again. And I kept shoving him roughly, forcing him to stumble up the slope a few feet at a time.

  We battled through the blizzard. Roy suffered terribly from the exertion, and my own strength was rapidly fading. The aggressiveness of the storm was frightening. As I struggled to breathe the thin air, the swirling winds would snatch my breath away, then force it down my throat again, forcing me to sputter and choke as if I were drowning. The cold hammered me, and wading through the deep, heavy snow pushed me beyond exhaustion. Soon my muscles were utterly spent, and each step required a monumental act of will. I kept Roy in front of me, where I could keep shoving him forward, and we climbed foot by foot. But after a few hundred yards he slumped forward and fell, and I knew he had spent the last of his strengt
h. This time I didn’t try to rouse him. Instead I reached around him and lifted him from the snow. Even through all the layers of his clothing, I could feel how thin and weak he had become, and my heart softened. “Think of your mother, Roy,” I told him, with my lips pressed to his ear so he could hear me in the storm. “If you want to see her again, you must suffer for her now.” His jaw was slack, and his eyes were rolling up under their eyelids. He was on the verge of passing out, but still he managed a feeble nod: he would fight. For me, this moment of bravery was as remarkable as any of the other acts of courage and strength that we saw in the mountains, and now, when I think of Roy, I always think of him in this moment, as a hero.

  Roy leaned against me, and together we climbed. He struggled with all he had, but soon we reached a point where the slope swept upward in a sharp incline. Roy looked at me calmly, in resignation, knowing the climb was simply beyond his strength. I squinted into the stinging snow, trying to gauge the steepness of the rise, then I tightened my grip around Roy’s waist, and with what little strength I still had, I lifted him off the ground, so that I bore his weight on my shoulder. Then, taking one slow, labored step at a time, I carried him up the rise. Light was fading now, and the tracks of the others were difficult to see. I climbed by intuition, and as I felt my way toward the crash site, I was constantly tormented by the thought that I had drifted off course and was walking into the wild. But finally, as the last lights of afternoon were fading, I saw the faint silhouette of the Fairchild through the heavy snow. I was dragging Roy more than carrying him now, but with the plane in sight I felt a boost of energy, and at last we reached the plane. The others took Roy from my shoulders as we stumbled into the fuselage. Roberto and Tintin had collapsed on the floor, and I fell heavily beside them. I couldn’t stop shivering, and my muscles burned and quivered with the most profound exhaustion I’d ever felt. I’ve burned myself out, I thought. I will never recover. I will never have the strength to climb out of here. But I was too tired to care. I burrowed into the heap of bodies pressing around me, drawing warmth from the others, and for the first time I fell asleep quickly and slept soundly for hours.