Miracle in the Andes Read online

  But to me, Panchito was more a brother than a friend, and my family felt the same about him. From the moment they met, my father and mother embraced Panchito as a son, and gave him no other choice but to think of our home as his own. Panchito warmly accepted this invitation, and soon he was a natural part of our world. He spent weekends with us, traveled with us, was a part of all our holidays and family celebrations. He shared, with my father and me, a love for cars and driving, and he loved going with us to auto races. To Susy, he was a second big brother. My mother had a special affection for him. I remember that he would boost himself up on the kitchen counter while she cooked, and they would talk for hours. Often she would tease him about his obsession with girls. “It’s all you think about,” she would say. “When are you going to grow up?”

  “When I grow up I’m really going to chase them!” Panchito would reply. “I’m just eighteen, Mrs. Parrado! I’m only getting started.”

  I could see much strength and depth in Panchito, in his loyalty as a friend to me, in the fiercely protective way he watched out for Susy, in the quiet respect he showed my parents, even in the affection with which he treated the servants at his father’s house, who loved him like a son. More than anything, though, I saw in him a man who wanted nothing more in life than the joys of a happy family. I knew his heart. I could see his future. He would meet the woman who would tame him. He would become a good husband and a loving father. I would marry, too. Our families would be like one; our children would grow up together. We never spoke of these things, of course—we were boys in our teens—but I think he knew I understood these things about him, and I think that knowledge strengthened the bonds of our friendship.

  Still, we were young men and the future was just a distant rumor. Ambition and responsibility could wait. Like Panchito, I lived for the moment. There would be time to be serious later. I was young, now was the time to play, and play was definitely the focus of my life. It’s not that I was lazy or self-centered. I thought of myself as a good son, a hard worker, a trustworthy friend, and an honest and decent person. I simply was in no hurry to grow up. Life for me was something that was happening today. I had no strong principles, no defining goals or drives. In those days, if you had asked me the purpose of life, I might have laughed and answered, “To have fun.” It did not occur to me at the time that I could only afford the luxury of this carefree attitude because of the sacrifices of my father, who, from a very young age, had taken his life seriously, planned his goals carefully, and, through years of discipline and self-reliance, had given me the life of privilege, security, and leisure I so casually took for granted.

  My father, Seler Parrado, was born at Estación Gonzales, a dusty outpost in Uruguay’s rich agricultural interior, where vast cattle ranches, or estancias, produced the prized high-quality beef for which Uruguay is known. His own father was a poor peddler who traveled in a horse-drawn cart from one estancia to the next, selling saddles, bridles, boots, and other staples of farm life to the ranch owners themselves, or directly to the rugged gauchos who watched over their herds. It was a difficult life, full of hardship and uncertainty and very few comforts. (Whenever I grumbled about my life, my father would remind me that when he was a boy, his bathroom was a tin shed fifty feet from the house, and that he never saw a roll of toilet paper until he was eleven years old and his family moved to Montevideo.)

  Life in the country allowed little time for rest or play. Each day my father walked the dirt roads back and forth to school, but still he was expected to do his part in his family’s day-to-day struggle to survive. When he was six years old he was already working long hours at his family’s small homestead—minding chickens and ducks, carrying water from the well, gathering firewood, and helping to tend his mother’s vegetable garden. By the time he was eight he had become his father’s assistant, spending long hours in the peddler’s cart as they made their rounds from one ranch to another. His childhood was not carefree, but it showed him the value of hard work, and taught him that nothing would be handed to him, that his life would be only what he made of it.

  When my father was eleven years old his family moved to Montevideo, where his father opened a shop selling the same goods he had peddled to ranchers and farmers in the countryside. Seler became an auto mechanic—he had had a passion for cars and engines since he was a very young boy—but when he was in his mid-twenties my grandfather decided to retire, and my father assumed ownership of the shop. Grandfather had located the shop wisely, near Montevideo’s main railway station. In those days the railroad was the main method of travel from the country to the city, and when ranchers and gauchos came to town to buy supplies, they would step off the trains and walk directly past his door. But by the time Seler took control of the business, things had changed. Buses had replaced trains as the most popular form of transportation, and the bus station was nowhere near the shop. To make things worse, the machine age had reached the Uruguayan countryside. Trucks and tractors were rapidly reducing the farmer’s dependence on horses and mules, and that meant a dramatic drop in demand for the saddles and bridles my father was selling. Sales lagged. It seemed the business would fail. Then Seler tried an experiment—he cleared the farm goods from half of his store’s floor space and devoted that space to basic hardware—nuts and bolts, nails and screws, wire and hinges. Immediately his business began to thrive. Within months he had removed all the country goods and stocked the shelves with hardware. He was still living on the edge of poverty, and sleeping on the floor in a room above the shop, but as sales continued to rise, he knew that he had found his future.

  In 1945 that future became richer when Seler married my mother, Eugenia. She was just as ambitious and independent as he was, and from the very start they were more than a married couple; they were a strong team who shared a bright vision of the future. Like my father, Eugenia had struggled through a difficult youth. In 1939, when she was sixteen years old, she had emigrated from the Ukraine, with her parents and grandmother, to escape the ravages of World War II. Her parents, beekeepers in the Ukraine, settled in the Uruguayan countryside and managed a modest living by raising bees and selling honey. It was a life of hard work and limited opportunity, so, when she was twenty, Eugenia moved to Montevideo, like my father, to seek a better future. She had a clerical job at a large medical laboratory in the city when she married my father, and at first she helped out at the hardware store only in her spare time. In the early days of their marriage, they struggled. Money was so tight that they could not afford furniture, and they began their lives together in an empty apartment. But eventually their hard work paid off, and the hardware store began to turn a profit. By the time my older sister, Graciela, was born in 1947, my mother was able to quit her job at the laboratory and work full-time with my father. I came along in 1949. Susy followed three years later. By then, Eugenia had become a major force in the family business, and her hard work and business savvy had helped to give us a very nice standard of living. But despite the importance of her work, the center of my mother’s life was always her home and family. One day, when I was twelve, she announced that she had found the perfect house for us in Carrasco, one of Montevideo’s finest residential districts. I’ll never forget the look of happiness in her eyes as she described the house: it was a modern, two-story home near the beach, she said, with big windows and large bright rooms, broad lawns and a breezy veranda. The house had a beautiful view of the sea, and this more than anything made my mother love it. I still remember the delight in her voice when she told us, “We can watch the sunset over the water!” Her blue eyes were shining with tears. She had started out with so little, and now she had found her dream house, a place that would be home for a lifetime.

  In Montevideo, a Carrasco address is a mark of prestige, and in this new house we found ourselves living among the upper crust of Uruguayan society. Our neighbors were the nation’s most prominent industrialists, professionals, artists, and politicians. It was a place of status and power, a far cry
from the humble world my mother had been born into, and she must have felt a great sense of satisfaction in earning a spot for us there. But she had her feet planted too firmly on the ground to be overly impressed with the neighborhood, or with herself for living there. No matter how successful we might have grown, my mother was not about to abandon the values she was raised on, or ever forget who she was.

  One of the first things my mother did at the house was to help her own mother, Lina, who had lived with us since we were small, dig up a broad patch of lush, green lawn behind the house to make way for a huge vegetable garden. (Lina also raised a small flock of ducks and chickens in the yard, and it must have startled the neighbors when they realized that this blue-eyed, white-haired old woman, who dressed with the simplicity of a European peasant and wore her gardening tools on a leather belt slung on her hips, was running a small working farm in one of the city’s most mannered and manicured neighborhoods.) Under Lina’s loving attention, the garden was soon producing bumper crops of beans, peas, greens, peppers, squash, corn, tomatoes—far too much for us to eat, but my mother would not let any of it go to waste. She spent hours in the kitchen with Lina, canning the surplus produce in mason jars, and storing it all in the pantry so that we could enjoy the fruits of the garden all year round. My mother hated waste and pretense, valued frugality, and never lost her faith in the value of hard work. My father’s business demanded much from her, and she labored long and hard to make it successful, but she was also very active in our lives, always there to send us off to school or welcome us home, never missing my soccer and rugby games, or my sisters’ plays and recitals at school. She was a woman of great, quiet energy, full of encouragement and sage advice, with deep reserves of resourcefulness and good judgment that won her the respect of everyone who knew her and time and again she proved herself to be a woman worthy of their trust.

  Once, for example, as part of a Rotary Club expedition, my mother escorted fifteen young children from Carrasco on a weekend visit to Buenos Aires. Hours after they arrived, a military coup erupted in that city, with the purpose of toppling the Argentine government. Chaos reigned in the streets, and the phone at our house rang off the hook with calls from worried parents wanting to know if their children were safe. Again and again I heard my father reassure them, with total confidence in his voice, saying, “They are with Xenia, they will be all right.” And they were all right, thanks to the efforts of my mother. It was near midnight. Buenos Aires was no longer safe, and my mother knew the last ferry to Montevideo would be leaving in minutes, so she phoned the ferry company and persuaded the jittery pilots to hold the last departure until she arrived with the children. Then she gathered all the kids and their things and led them through the unsettled streets of Buenos Aires to the dark waterfront where the ferry was docked. They all boarded safely, and the ferry set off just after 3:00 a.m., three hours after its scheduled departure. She was a true tower of strength, but her strength was always based in warmth and love and because of her love and protection I grew up believing the world was a safe, familiar place.

  By the time I was in high school my parents owned three large, thriving hardware stores in Uruguay. My father was also importing merchandise from all over the world and wholesaling it to smaller hardware stores across South America. The poor country boy from Estación Gonzales had come a long way in life, and I think this gave him a great sense of satisfaction, but there was never a doubt in my mind that he had done it all for us. He had given us a life of comfort and privilege such as his own father never could have imagined, he had provided for us and protected us in the best way he could, and though he was not an emotionally expressive man, he always showed his love for us subtly, quietly, and in ways that were true to the man he was. When I was small, he would take me to the hardware store, walk me along the shelves, and patiently share with me the secrets of all the shiny merchandise on which our family’s prosperity had been founded: This is a toggle bolt, Nando. You use this to fasten things to a hollow wall. This is a grommet—it reinforces a hole in a canvas tarp so you can thread a rope through it to tie it down. This is an anchor bolt. This is a carriage bolt. These are wing nuts. Here is where we keep the washers—split washers, lock washers, ring washers, and flat washers in every size. We have lag screws, Phillips head screws, slotted screws, machine screws, wood screws, self-tapping screws … there are common nails, finish nails, roofing nails, ring-shank nails, box nails, masonry nails, double-headed nails, more kinds of nails than you can imagine.…

  These were precious moments for me. I loved the gentle seriousness with which he shared his knowledge, and it made me feel close to him to know he thought I was a big enough boy to be trusted with this knowledge. In fact, he wasn’t simply playing, he was teaching me the things I would need to know to help him at the store. But even as a kid I sensed he was teaching me a deeper lesson: that life is orderly, life makes sense. See, Nando, for every job there is the right nut or bolt or hinge or tool. Whether he intended it or not, he was teaching me the great lesson his years of struggle had taught him: Don’t let your head get lost in the clouds. Pay attention to the details, to the nuts-and-bolts realities of things. You can’t build a life on a foundation of dreams and wishes. A good life isn’t plucked from the sky. You build a life up from the ground, with hard work and clear thinking. Things make sense. There are rules and realities that will not change to suit your needs. It’s your job to understand those rules. If you do, and if you work hard and work smart, you will be all right.

  This was the wisdom that had shaped my father’s life, and he passed it along to me in so many ways. Cars were especially important to him, and he handed down this passion to me. He made sure I understood what was under the hood of a car, how each of the systems worked and what routine maintenance was required. He taught me to bleed the brakes, to change the oil, and to keep the engine in tune. A great fan of motorsports and an avid amateur racer, he spent hours teaching me how to drive well—with spirit, yes, but smoothly and safely and always with balance and control. From Seler I learned to double-clutch as I shifted, to save wear and tear on the gearbox. He taught me to listen to and understand the sound of the engine, so that I could accelerate and shift at just the right moments—to be in harmony with the car and coax from it the best performance. He showed me how to find the precise line to follow through a curve, and the correct way to take a curve at speed: you brake hard just before entering the curve, then downshift and accelerate smoothly through the curve. Car enthusiasts call this technique “heel-and-toe” driving because of the footwork involved—as the left foot works the clutch, the right foot pivots on its heel back and forth from the brake pedal to the throttle. It is a style of driving that requires skill and concentration, but my father insisted I learn it because it was the right way to drive. It kept the car balanced and responsive, but, most important, it gave the driver the control he needed to resist the physical forces of weight and momentum which, if ignored, could toss the car off the road or send it fishtailing into disaster. If you are not driving this way, my father told me, your car is simply floating through curves. You are driving blind, relinquishing control to the forces acting against you, and trusting that the road ahead will hold no surprises.

  My respect for my father was endless, as was my appreciation for the life he gave us. I wanted desperately to be like him, but by the time I reached high school I had to face the fact that we were very different men. I did not have his clear vision, or his pragmatic tenacity. We saw the world in starkly different ways. For my father, life was something you created out of hard work and careful planning and sheer force of will. For me, the future was like a story that slowly unfolds, with plots and subplots that twist and turn so that you can never see too far down the road. Life was something to be discovered, something that arrived in its own time. I was not lazy or self-indulgent, but I was something of a dreamer. Most of my friends knew their future—they would work at family businesses or in the same professions their fath
ers had pursued. It was generally expected that I would do the same. But I could not imagine myself selling hardware all my life. I wanted to travel. I wanted adventure and excitement and creativity. More than anything, I dreamed of becoming a racing car driver like my idol Jackie Stewart, the three-time world champion and maybe the greatest driver of all time. Like Jackie, I knew that driving was about more than horsepower and raw speed, it was about balance and rhythm, there was poetry in the harmony between a driver and his car. I understood that a great driver is more than a daredevil, he is a virtuoso with the guts and the talent to push his cars to limits of its capabilities, defying danger and nudging the laws of physics as he streaks along a razor’s edge between control and disaster. This is the magic of racing. This was the kind of driver I dreamed I would be. When I stared at the poster of Jackie Stewart that hung in my room, I was convinced that he would understand this. I even dreamed he would see in me a kindred soul.

  But these dreams seemed unreachable, and so when it finally came time to choose a college, I decided to enroll in agricultural school, because that was where my closest friends were going. When my father heard the news, he shrugged and smiled. “Nando,” he said, “your friends’ families own farms and ranches. We have hardware stores.” It was not hard for him to talk me into changing my mind. In the end I did what made sense: I entered business school with no serious thought about what school would mean for me or where this decision might lead. I would graduate or I would not. I would run the hardware stores or maybe I wouldn’t. My life would present itself to me when it was ready. In the meantime I spent the summer being Nando: I played rugby, I chased girls with Panchito, I raced my little Renault along the beach roads at Punte del Este, I went to parties and lay in the sun, I lived for the moment, drifting with the tide, waiting for my future to reveal itself, always happy to let others lead the way.