Miracle in the Andes Page 23

  I am alive. I am alive. I am alive.

  Suddenly my thoughts were disturbed by shouting outside my door, and what sounded like a scuffle in the hallway. “Calm down!” barked a firm male voice. “No one is allowed in here.”

  A woman’s voice answered. “My brother is in there!” she shouted. “I have to see him! Please!”

  I stepped into the hallway just in time to see my sister Graciela pushing past a group of hospital orderlies. I called her name, and she began to sob when she saw me. In seconds she was in my arms, and my heart swelled with love as I held her. With her was her husband, Juan, his eyes bright with tears, and for a moment the three of us embraced without a word. Then I looked up. At the end of the hallway, standing motionless in the thin fluorescent light, was the slim, bowed figure of my father. I walked to him and embraced him, then I hoisted him in my arms until his feet left the ground. “You see, Papá,” I whispered as I set him down again, “I am still strong enough to lift you.” He pressed himself against me, touching me, convincing himself that I was real. I held him for a long time, feeling his body tremble gently as he wept. For a while neither of us spoke. Then, with his head still pressed to my chest, he whispered, “Mami? Susy?”

  I answered him with a gentle silence, and he sagged a little in my arms as he understood. A few moments later my sister came to us and led us back to my room. They gathered around my bed, and I told them the story of my life in the mountains. I described the crash, the cold, the fear, the long journey I had made with Roberto. I explained how my mother had died, and how I had comforted Susy. My father winced when I mentioned my sister, so I spared him the details of her suffering, thinking it was enough to tell him she was never alone and that she had died in my arms. Graciela wept softly as I spoke. She could not take her eyes off me. My father sat quietly beside my bed, listening, nodding, with a heartbreaking smile on his face. When I finished, there was a silence until my father found the strength to speak.

  “How did you survive, Nando?” he asked, “So many weeks without food …”

  I told him that we had eaten the flesh of those who didn’t survive. The expression on his face didn’t change.

  “You did what you had to do,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I am happy to have you home.”

  There was so much I wanted to tell him, that I had thought of him every moment, that his love had been the guiding light that led me to safety. But there would be time for that later. Right now I wanted to treasure every moment of our reunion, bittersweet as it was. At first it was hard to convince myself that this moment, the moment I had dreamed of for so long, was real. My mind was moving slowly, and my emotions were oddly muted. I felt no sense of elation or triumph, just a gentle glow of safety and peace. There were no words to explain how I felt, so I simply sat in silence. After a while we heard sounds of celebration in the hallway as the families of the other survivors found their sons. My sister rose and closed the door, and in the privacy of my room, I shared with what was left of my family the simple miracle of being together again.

  Chapter Ten

  After

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, December 23, the eight survivors who had been left on the mountain were flown to Santiago, where they were examined at a hospital known as the Posta Centrale. The doctors decided to hold Javier and Roy for observation—they were especially concerned about Roy, whose blood chemistry showed irregularities that could pose a threat to his heart—but the rest were released and moved to the Sheraton San Cristóbal Hotel, where many of them were joined by their families. The eight of us at St. John’s hospital were moved to Santiago that same afternoon. Alvaro and Coche, the weakest in our group, were admitted to the Posta Centrale, while the rest of us were released and taken to the Sheraton to be reunited with our friends.

  The atmosphere at the Sheraton, and throughout Santiago for that matter, was charged with an atmosphere of celebration and a sense of religious awe. The papers called our return “The Christmas Miracle,” and many people were regarding us as almost mystical figures: young boys who had been saved by the direct intercession of God, living proof of His love. News of our survival was making headlines around the globe, and public interest was intense. The Sheraton’s lobby and the streets outside the hotel were jammed, around the clock, with reporters and news crews waiting to pounce upon our every move. We could not go to a café for a snack, or have a quiet conversation with our families, without a horde of journalists poking microphones at us and firing flashbulbs in our faces.

  On Christmas Eve, a party was arranged for us in a ballroom at the hotel. There was an air of joy and gratitude, as many of the survivors and their families gave thanks to God for saving us from death. “I told you we would be home for Christmas,” Carlitos said to me, with the same smile of certainty he had shown in the mountains. “I told you God would not abandon us.” I was happy for him, and for the others, but as I watched them sharing their joy with their loved ones, I realized that except for Javier, every one of my fellow survivors was returning to a life that was just as it had been before. Many of them had lost friends in the disaster, that was true, and all of them had endured an incredible nightmare, but now, for them, it was over. Their families were intact. They would be embraced again by their parents, brothers and sisters, girlfriends. Their worlds would begin again, and things would be just as they were before the crash interrupted their lives. But my world had been destroyed, and the party only underscored for me how much I had lost. I would never spend another Christmas with my mother, or with Susy. It was clear to me that my father had been shattered by the ordeal, and I wondered if he would ever again be the man I had known. I tried to share in the celebration that night, but I felt very alone, understanding that what was a triumph for the others was the beginning of a new and uncertain future for me.

  After three days in Santiago, the circus atmosphere at the hotel became too much to bear, and my father moved us to a house in the Chilean beach resort of Viña del Mar. We spent three quiet days there, resting, driving around, lying in the sun. On the beach I felt like an oddity. My picture had been in all the papers, and with my long beard and my bones showing through my skin, it was easy to recognize me as a survivor. I couldn’t walk far without being accosted by strangers, so I stayed close to the house, and spent many hours with my father. He didn’t ask many questions about what happened to me in the mountains, and I sensed that he was still not yet ready to hear the details, but he was willing to share with me what his life had been like in the long weeks I was gone. He told me that at three-thirty in the afternoon of October 13, the very hour the plane had fallen from the sky, he was on his way to make a deposit at a bank near his office in Montevideo when, suddenly, something stopped him in his tracks.

  “The door of the bank was only a few steps away,” he told me, “but I couldn’t make myself go any farther. It was so strange. I lost all interest in the bank. My stomach tightened. I just wanted to go home.” In all his life, my father had missed work only a handful of times, but that day he forgot about the office and drove to our house in Carrasco. He poured himself a cup of mate and turned on the television, where special bulletins were reporting that a Uruguayan charter plane had been lost in the Andes. Not knowing about our unscheduled overnight stay in Mendoza, he calmed himself with the thought that we would have reached Santiago the previous afternoon. Still, a sense of dread haunted him as he watched the news. Then, about an hour after he had gotten home, there was a knock on the door.

  “It was Colonel Jaume,” my father explained, mentioning the name of a friend who was an officer in the Uruguayan air force. “He said, ‘I have a car waiting. I want you to come with me. I’m afraid I have bad news …’ ” The colonel took my father to his house, where he confirmed the worst—the lost plane was, in fact, our flight. The next day my father was on a plane to Santiago, bound for a meeting with Chilean officials who would explain what they knew of the crash. His route took him above the Andes, and as he gazed down into
the mountains below, he was chilled by the thought that his wife and children had fallen into such a merciless place. “In that moment,” he told me, “I lost all hope. I knew I would never see any of you again.”

  The following weeks were as horrific as anything I had imagined for him in the mountains. He couldn’t sleep or eat. He found no comfort in prayer or in the company of others. Many parents of other crash victims found ways to keep their hopes alive. Some of the mothers met regularly to pray for us. A group of the fathers, led by Carlitos’s father, Carlos Paez-Villaro, had even mounted their own search efforts, hiring planes and helicopters to fly over the Andes in places where the authorities thought the Fairchild might have fallen. My father contributed money to these search efforts, though he was certain they were nothing but a waste of time. “When a plane falls into the Andes, it is lost forever,” he said. “I knew we would be lucky if the mountains gave up even a small fragment of the wreckage.”

  With no hope to cling to, my father’s emotional condition declined rapidly. He grew withdrawn and apathetic. He would sit alone, in silence, for hours, or wander aimlessly on the beach, with my dog, Jimmy, as his only companion. “Your mother was my strength,” he told me. “I needed her so badly then, but she was gone, and without her I was lost.” As days passed he grew increasingly apathetic and withdrawn, and more than once his grief led him to the edge of madness. “One day I was eating lunch with Lina,” he said. “The house was so quiet. There were so many empty places at the table. I set down my fork and said, ‘Mamá, I can’t stay here.’ Then I left the house and began to walk.”

  He walked the streets for hours, all through the afternoon and into the night. His mind was blank except for the unformed thought that he must keep moving, that through simple forward motion he might distance himself from his pain. Finally he found himself on the broad lawn of the Plaza Matriz, Montevideo’s historic central square. In front of him rose the dark, ornate towers of the Catedral Metropolitana, built by Spanish colonists in 1740. My father was not a religious man, but something drew him into the church, a yearning for peace, or some small comfort he could cling to. He knelt and tried to pray, but he felt nothing. Slumping in the pew, he looked at his watch, and was shocked to see that he had been walking for more than ten hours. Fearing that he was losing his mind, he left the church and, in the darkness, made his way home.

  “I told myself, ‘I have to change everything,’ ” he said. Then, as if he could shed his pain by severing his physical connections to the past, my father began to dismantle his life. He sold his prized Mercedes and my mother’s beloved Rover. He put the flat in Punta del Este on the market, and prepared to sell our house in Carrasco. He even tried to sell the businesses he had labored a lifetime to build, but Graciela and Juan caught wind of his plans and talked him out of his recklessness before too much damage had been done. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he told me. “Sometimes I could think clearly, and others times I was absolutely loco. Nothing mattered to me in those days. Nothing made sense after the plane went down.”

  When my father heard that Roberto and I had been found in the mountains, he refused to believe it, but slowly he allowed himself to accept that it was true. On the morning of December 23, he boarded a charter flight, with Graciela and Juan and families of other victims of the crash, bound for Santiago. The names of the other survivors had not yet been released, and as my father flew over the Andes once again, he allowed his hopes to soar. “If anyone is alive,” he told my sister, “it is because your mother got them out.” Hours later he was in my arms, and I was letting him know that his hopes were false; my mother and sister had not survived.

  “Papa,” I said to him one day in Viña del Mar, “I am sorry I could not save Mami and Susy.” He smiled sadly and took my arm. “When I was certain all of you were dead,” he said, “I knew I would never recover from the loss. It was as if my house had burned to the ground, and I had lost everything I owned, forever. And now, to have you back, it’s as if I have stumbled on something precious in the ashes. I feel I am reborn. My life can begin again. From now on, I will try not to feel sorry for what was taken from me, but to be happy for what was given back.” He advised me to do the same. “The sun will come up tomorrow,” he told me, “and the day after that, and the day after that. Don’t let this be the most important thing that ever happens to you. Look forward,” he said. “You will have a future. You will live a life.”

  WE LEFT VIÑA DEL MAR on December 30 in a plane bound for Montevideo. I was terrified to fly across the Andes again, but with the help of sedatives prescribed by a Chilean doctor, I made myself board the plane. When we arrived at our house in Carrasco, a crowd of friends and neighbors had gathered in the street to meet me. I shook hands and embraced them as I climbed the long set of steps from the sidewalk to the front door, where my grandmother Lina was waiting. I fell into her arms, and she hugged me with such force and bittersweet affection that I knew in her mind she was embracing Susy and my mother, too. We all stepped inside. Ahead of me, lying on the tile floor of the hallway, was my dog, Jimmy. He had been fast asleep, and now, hearing us enter, he opened his eyes wearily without lifting his big square head from his paws. He gave me a curious glance, then his ears perked and he sat up and cocked his head as if in disbelief. For a long moment he studied me, then, with a happy yelp, he launched himself toward me so fast that at first he ran in place as his paws scrabbled on the slippery tile. I hugged him as he leaped into my arms, and let him lick my face with his warm, wet tongue. Everyone laughed at Jimmy’s happiness, and for me it was a fine welcome home.

  Those first moments in the house were eerie for me. I was happy, and amazed, to be in my home again, but the rooms thundered with the absence of my mother and my sister. I walked to my old bedroom. Graciela had moved in with my father just after the crash, and her two-year-old son was using my room now. I saw that all my things were gone. In his tortured efforts to purge himself of his past, my father had gotten rid of all my things—my clothes, my books, my sports equipment and racing magazines, even the poster of Jackie Stewart that had hung on the wall for years. In the living room I saw my photograph on the mantel, arranged with photos of my mother and Susy in a somber memorial. I glanced out the window. Cars were passing on the street. Lights were coming on in other houses where people were going on with their lives. This is how life would look if I had died, I thought. I did not leave a very big hole. The world has gone on without me.

  THOSE FIRST WEEKS at home were a kind of limbo for me. So much had changed, and I couldn’t seem to find my way back into my life. With Guido and Panchito gone, I passed much of my time alone. I played with Jimmy and spent hours riding my motorcycle—my father had sold it in my absence, but the friend who had bought it returned it the moment he heard of our rescue. Sometimes I walked the streets, but I was recognized everywhere I went, and after a while it was easier to stay at home. When I did go out, I could not avoid reminders of what had happened to me. Once, at La Mascota, a neighborhood pizza parlor I had patronized since I was a child, the owner and waiter made a fuss about what an honor it was to have me there, and they refused to take my money. They meant well, I know, but it was a long time before I went back. On the sidewalk, strangers approached me to shake my hand, as if I were some kind of conquering hero who had brought honor to Uruguay by my exploits. In fact, our survival had become a matter of national pride. Our ordeal was being celebrated as a glorious adventure. People compared our accomplishments with the heroic achievements of the Uruguayan soccer team that had won the World Cup in 1950. Some people even went so far as to tell me that they envied me for my experience in the Andes, and wished they had been there with me. I didn’t know how to explain to them that there was no glory in those mountains. It was all ugliness and fear and desperation, and the obscenity of watching so many innocent people die.

  I was also shaken by the sensationalism with which many in the press covered the matter of what we had eaten to survive. Shortly after
our rescue, officials of the Catholic Church announced that according to church doctrine we had committed no sin by eating the flesh of the dead. As Roberto had argued on the mountain, they told the world that the sin would have been to allow ourselves to die. More satisfying for me was the fact that many of the parents of the boys who died had publicly expressed their support for us, telling the world they understood and accepted what we had done to survive. I will always be grateful for the courage and generosity they showed in their support for us. Despite these gestures, many news reports focused on the matter of our diet, in reckless and exploitive ways. Some newspapers ran lurid headlines above grisly front-page photos, taken after our rescue by members of the Andean Rescue Corps, showing piles of bones near the fuselage, and human body parts scattered around on the snow. In the wake of this exploitative coverage, rumors began to rise, including one theory that the avalanche had never happened, and that we had actually killed the people who died in that disaster so we could use them as food.

  Graciela and Juan were a great help to me in those days, but I missed Susy and my mother intensely. My father was my comrade in suffering, but, reeling from grief, he was just as lost as I was. I soon learned that in his loneliness he had sought comfort in the company of another woman, and he was seeing her still. I didn’t blame him for this. I knew he was a man who needed a strong emotional center in his life, and that the death of my mother had taken from him a sense of completeness and balance he couldn’t live without. Still, it was hard for me to see the two of them together so soon after the disaster, and just one more indication that my old life was gone forever. So, as summer approached, I decided I would escape Montevideo, and all the memories there, to spend some time alone at my father’s flat in Punta del Este. Our family had summered there for years, ever since the days when Susy and I were small children playing on the beach. Everything was different now, of course. Everyone knew me, and wherever I went I was surrounded by gawkers, well-wishers, and strangers seeking autographs. At first I hid out in my flat, but as time passed, I must admit, part of me began to enjoy the attention—especially when I realized that so many attractive young women seemed determined to get to know me. I had always envied Panchito’s effortless ability to attract the prettiest girls on the beach, and now these same girls were drawn just as powerfully to me. Were they attracted because of who I was, or what I had done? Or was it simply my new celebrity? I didn’t care. For the first time in my life, girls found me fascinating—irresistible, in fact—and I did my best to make the most of it. For weeks on end I partied with one beautiful woman after another, sometimes with two or three in a single day, and always I kept my eye peeled for someone new. I became one of Punta del Este’s most visible libertines, with my picture appearing often in the newspaper’s society pages—Nando at one fancy party or another, lifting a glass, living the leisurely life of a full-time playboy, and always with a flashy girl or two on his arms.