Miracle in the Andes Read online

  In the morning, I rested. The days I’d spent away from the Fairchild had given me perspective, and now I saw with fresh eyes the gruesomeness that had become a normal part of our daily lives. There were piles of bones scattered outside the fuselage. Large body parts—someone’s forearm, a human leg from hip to toes—were stored near the opening of the fuselage for easy access. Strips of fat were spread on the roof of the fuselage to dry in the sun. And for the first time I saw human skulls in the bone pile. When we first started eating human flesh, we consumed mostly small pieces of meat cut from the large muscles. But as time passed and the food supply diminished, we had no choice but to broaden our diet. For some time, we had been eating livers, kidneys, and hearts, but meat was in such short supply now that we would have to split skulls to get at the brains inside. While we’d been away, some of the survivors had been driven by their hunger to eat things we couldn’t stomach before: the lungs, parts of the hands and feet, and even the blood clots that form in the large blood vessels of the hearts. To the ordinary mind, these actions may seem incomprehensibly repulsive, but the instinct to survive runs very deep, and when death is so near, a human being gets used to anything. Still, despite the extreme depths of their hunger, and their desperate efforts to scour the slopes for bodies that had been lost, they had not broken their promise to Javier and me: the bodies of my mother, my sister, and Liliana, all in easy reach, had not been touched; they still lay whole under the snow. It moved me to think that even at the brink of starvation, a promise still meant something to my friends. The mountains had caused us such loss and anguish. They had stolen away our best friends and loved ones, forced us to face intolerable horrors, and changed us in ways that would take years to understand. But despite all the suffering my friends had endured, the principles of friendship, loyalty, compassion, and honor still mattered to them. The Andes had done so much to crush us, and each of us knew he was clinging to life by a thread. But we hadn’t surrendered to primitive instincts of self-survival. We were still fighting together, as a team. Our bodies were weakening, but our humanity survived. We hadn’t let the mountains steal away our souls.

  IN THE FIRST WEEK of December, we began to prepare in earnest for the westward climb. Fito and the cousins cut meat for us and stored it in the snow, while Antonio, Roberto, and I gathered the clothing and equipment we would need for the journey. An odd mixture of excitement and gloom hung over us as we readied ourselves for the final expedition. The earlier attempts to climb, and our failed expedition to the east, had shown us the daunting power of the Andes, but they had also schooled us in the fundamentals of mountain survival. We were still spectacularly ill equipped to challenge the wilderness around us, but at least we understood a little more clearly just how dangerous the mountains could be. We knew, for example, that we would face two great challenges on our journey. The first would be the severe demands that high-altitude climbing exerts upon the body. We had learned, from hard experience, that the thin mountain air turns even the slightest effort into a grueling test of stamina and will. There was nothing we could do about that, except to leave before we grew too weak, and to pace ourselves on the climb.

  The second challenge would be to protect ourselves from exposure, especially after sundown. At this time of year we could expect daytime temperatures well above freezing, but the nights were still cold enough to kill us, and we knew now that we couldn’t expect to find shelter on the open slopes. We needed a way to survive the long nights without freezing, and the quilted batts of insulation we’d taken from the tail section gave us our solution. The insulation was in small, rectangular patches, each about the size of a magazine. Since returning from the tail, we’d been stuffing the insulation between layers of our clothing, and we found that, despite their lightness and thinness, they were very effective in shielding us from the cold at night. As we brainstormed about the trip, we realized we could sew the patches together to create a large warm quilt. Then we realized that by folding the quilt in half and stitching the seams together, we could create an insulated sleeping bag large enough for all three expeditionaries to sleep in. With the warmth of three bodies trapped by the insulating cloth, we might be able to weather the coldest nights.

  Carlitos took on the challenge. His mother had taught him to sew when he was a boy, and with the needles and thread from the sewing kit I’d found in my mother’s cosmetics case, he began to work. It was meticulous labor, and he had to make sure all his stitching was strong enough to withstand hard use. To speed the progress, Carlitos taught others to sew, and we all took our turns, but many of us were too thick-fingered for the job; Carlitos, Coche, Gustavo, and Fito turned out to be our best and fastest tailors.

  While the work progressed, Tintin and I prepared for the trek, but Roberto was slow in gathering his gear. Worried that he was having second thoughts about the climb, I approached him one afternoon while he was resting outside the fuselage.

  “The sleeping bag will be finished soon,” I said. “Everything else is ready. We should leave as soon as possible.”

  Roberto shook his head. “It would be foolish to leave just as they are looking for us again,” he said.

  “We had a deal,” I said. “The radio didn’t work, now it’s time to go west.”

  “Yes, we will go west,” he replied. “Let’s just give them some time.”

  “How much time?”

  “Let’s give them ten days,” said Roberto. “It only makes sense to give them a chance.”

  “Look, Roberto,” I said, “no one knows better than you that we don’t have that much time. In ten days, half of us could be dead.”

  Roberto shot me a belligerent glare. “So what is your brilliant idea, Nando?” he snapped. “To stomp off into the mountains just when we know a rescue team is trying to find us?”

  “They’re not a rescue team,” I answered. “They’re looking for bodies. They’re in no hurry to find us.”

  Roberto scowled and turned away. “It’s not time,” he muttered. “It’s too soon.”

  BY THE MIDDLE of the first week in December, the sleeping bag was finished. Our gear was all gathered, the meat for the trip was cut and packed into socks, and everyone knew the time had come for our departure—everyone but Roberto, who found one maddening reason after another to delay the trip. First he complained that the sleeping bag wasn’t strong enough, and insisted it be reinforced. Then he said he couldn’t leave while Coche and Roy and the others needed his medical attention so badly. Finally he declared that he hadn’t rested up sufficiently for the climb, and would need several more days to gather his strength. Fito and the cousins tried to pressure him into action, but Roberto angrily rejected their authority. He lashed out at anyone, in fact, who suggested he was dragging his feet, and he loudly made it clear that he would not leave one moment before he was ready.

  As the rest of us grew more annoyed with his stubbornness, Roberto became increasingly tense and confrontational. He bullied the weaker boys. He picked fights without provocation. Once, after some trivial squabble, he grabbed his close friend Alvaro Mangino by the hair and slammed him against the wall. Moments later, full of remorse, he apologized to Mangino and they embraced, but I had seen enough. I followed Roberto and waited until we were alone.

  “This can’t continue,” I told him. “You know it’s time to go.”

  “Yes,” said Roberto, “we will go soon, but we must wait for the weather to improve.”

  “I’m tired of waiting,” I said softly.

  “I told you,” he snapped, “we’ll leave when the weather is better!”

  I was trying to stay calm, but Roberto’s aggressive tone set me off. “Look around!” I shouted. “We are running out of food! Our friends are dying. Coche has started to rave at night. He doesn’t have much time left. Roy is even worse, skin and bone. Javier is fading, and the younger guys, Sabella, Mangino, Bobby, they are all so weak. And look at us! You and I are wasting away by the hour. We have to climb before we’re too weak to sta
nd!”

  “You listen to me, Nando,” Roberto shot back, “we had a bad storm two days ago. Do you remember that? If it had caught us on the slopes, it would have killed us.”

  “And an avalanche would kill us,” I said, “or we could fall into a crevasse. We could loose our footing and fall a thousand feet onto the rocks! We can’t eliminate these risks, Roberto, and we can’t wait any longer!”

  Roberto glanced away, dismissing my comments. I rose to my feet.

  “I picked a date, Roberto. I am leaving the morning of December twelfth. If you aren’t ready, I’ll go without you.”

  “You can’t go without me, you stupid bastard.”

  “You heard me,” I said, as I walked away. “I’m leaving on the twelfth. With you or without you.”

  DECEMBER 9 WAS my twenty-third birthday. That night in the fuselage, the guys gave me one of the cigars we’d found in the luggage at the tail.

  “It’s not Punta del Este, as we planned,” joked Carlitos, “but that is a Havana cigar.”

  “The quality is lost on me,” I said, choking as I inhaled. “All I know is that the smoke is warm.”

  “We missed our birthdays,” said Carlitos, “but I know in my heart we will be with our families for Christmas. You will make it, Nando. I am certain of it.”

  I didn’t answer Carlitos, and I was glad the shadows of the fuselage hid the doubt in my eyes. “Get some sleep,” I told him, then I blew a cloud of expensive Cuban smoke in his face.

  ON DECEMBER 10, Gustavo and I spoke with concern about Numa. “He asked me to check a sore on his backside,” Gustavo said, “and I got a look under his clothes. There is no flesh at all on his bones. He can’t last more than a couple of days.”

  I left Gustavo and knelt at Numa’s side.

  “How are you feeling, Numa?”

  Numa smiled weakly. “I don’t think it will be much longer for me.”

  I saw a look of acceptance in his eyes. He was facing his death with courage, and I did not want to dishonor this by telling him lies.

  “Try to hold on,” I said. “We’ll be climbing soon. We are going west, at last.”

  “ ‘To the west is Chile,’ ” he said, with a weary smile. “I will get there or die trying.” “You will make it, you are strong.”

  “You must be strong, Numa, for your family. You will see them again.”

  Numa just smiled. “It’s funny,” he said. “I think most men die regretting errors they have made in their lives, but I have no regrets. I have tried to live a good life. I have tried to treat people well. I hope God will take that into account.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Numa.”

  “But I’m at peace,” he said. “I’m ready for whatever lies ahead.”

  ON THE MORNING of December 11, Numa slipped into a coma. He was dead that afternoon. Numa was one of the best of us, a young man who seemed to have no bad side, a person whose compassion and generosity never wavered, no matter how much he suffered. It maddened me that such a man should die from a simple bump to the leg, a minor bruise, the kind of injury that in the ordinary world would not have deserved a second thought.

  As I looked at my friends, I wondered if their families, who had sent them off as hearty young men, would even know them now, with their faces drawn, their brows and sunken cheeks ridged with bone, like the withered faces of gargoyles and goblins, and most of them barely strong enough to stand without wobbling. Whatever hope they had managed to keep alive was fading now, I could see it in their eyes. Their bodies were dry and empty husks. Life was fading from them the way the color fades from a fallen leaf. I thought of all the others who had died, and imagined their ghosts gathering around us, twenty-nine gray figures huddled in silence on the snow, and Numa taking his place among them. So much death, so many lives cut short. I felt a heavy sense of weariness overtake me.

  Enough of this, I muttered. Enough. It was time to bring the story to a close. I found Roberto outside the fuselage, slumped against the hull of the Fairchild. “Everything is ready,” I told him. “Tintin and I are set to go. Tomorrow morning we leave. Are you coming with us?”

  Roberto glanced at the mountains to the west. I saw in his eyes that he was as shaken by Numa’s death as the rest of us. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll be ready. It’s time to go.”

  ON THE EVENING of December 11, our sixtieth evening in the Andes, I sat outside the fuselage, on one of the seats we’d dragged out from inside the plane, and stared west at the mountains that blocked me from my home. As night fell, the largest of the mountains, the one I’d have to climb, grew darker and more forbidding. I saw no hostility in it, just hugeness and power and cruel indifference. It was hard to convince myself that the moment I had longed for and feared had finally arrived. My mind was a blizzard of questions. What is it like to freeze to death? I wondered. Is it a painful death or an easy one? Is it fast or slow? It seems like a lonely way to die. How does one die of exhaustion? Do you simply drop in your tracks? It would be horrible to starve to death, but I would rather starve than fall. Please, God, don’t let me fall. That is my greatest fear—to slide down some steep slope for hundreds of feet, clutching at the snow, knowing I am heading for a cliff and a long, hopeless drop to the rocks a thousand feet below. What would it feel like to fall that far? Would my mind shut itself down to spare me the horror, or would I be lucid until I hit the ground? Please, God, protect me from that kind of death.

  Suddenly an image flashed in my mind. I saw myself from above, as a motionless figure curled in the snow. The life was ebbing from my body. I had found my limits, the place and the moment of my death. What would that moment be like? What would be the last thing that I saw? The snow? The sky? The shadow of a rock? The face of a friend? Would I be alone? Would my eyes be open or shut when my spirit left my body? Would I accept my death peacefully, as I did under the avalanche, or would I wail and claw for one more moment of life?

  Death felt so real, so close, and, feeling its presence, I began to tremble, knowing I didn’t have the courage to face what lay ahead.

  I cannot do this. I don’t want to die. I resolved that I would tell the others I had changed my mind. I was staying. Perhaps Roberto was right, and the rescuers would find us after all …

  But I knew better. We were almost out of food. How long would it be until we ran out completely, and began the horrific wait for someone to die? Who would go first? How long would we wait to cut him? And what would it be like for the last one left alive? I looked again at the mountain, and knew that nothing it could do to me would be worse than the future that waited for me here. I spoke to the mountain, hoping there was mercy in its slopes. “Tell me your secrets,” I whispered. “Show me how to climb.” The mountain, of course, was silent. I gazed at the soaring ridges, trying, with an amateur’s eye, to trace the best path to the summit. But soon night was falling. The slopes disappeared into darkness. I went inside the Fairchild, lay down with my friends one last time, and tried to sleep.

  Chapter Eight

  The Opposite of Death

  IF I SLEPT AT ALL that night, it was never for more than a few restless moments at a time, and when the first light of morning glowed weakly in the Fairchild’s windows, I had been lying awake for hours. Some of the others were up, but none of them spoke to me as I rose from the floor and readied myself to go. I had dressed for the mountain the night before. Next to my skin were a cotton polo shirt and a pair of woolen slacks. They were women’s slacks I’d found in someone’s luggage—Liliana’s, probably—but after two months in the mountains I had no trouble slipping them over my bony hips. I had three pairs of jeans over the slacks, and three sweaters over the polo. I wore four pairs of socks, and now I covered the socks with plastic supermarket bags to keep them dry in the snow. I stuffed my feet into my battered rugby boots and carefully tied the laces, then I pulled a wool cap over my head and topped it with the hood and shoulders I’d cut from Susy’s antelope coat. Everything I did that morning had the feel of ceremony, of
consequence. My thoughts were razor sharp, but reality seemed muffled and dreamlike, and I had the feeling I was watching myself from a distance. The others stood by quietly, not sure what to say. I had left them before, when we’d set off on the eastern trek, but I’d known from the start that that trip was merely an exercise. This morning I felt a heavy sense of finality about my departure, and the others felt it, too. After so many weeks of intense camaraderie and common struggle, there was suddenly a distance between us. I had already begun to leave them.

  I grabbed the aluminum pole I would use as a walking stick, and took my backpack down from the luggage compartment above me. It was packed with my rations of meat and whatever odds and ends I thought might be useful—some bands of cloth I could wrap around my hands to keep them warm, a lipstick to protect my blistered lips from the wind and sun. I had readied the pack before going to bed. I wanted my departure to be as swift and simple as possible; delays would only give me time to lose my nerve.