Miracle in the Andes Page 7

  ON THE MORNING of October 17, our fifth day on the mountain, Carlitos, Roberto, Fito, and a twenty-four-year-old survivor named Numa Turcatti decided the time had come to climb. Numa was not an Old Christian—he had come on the trip as a guest of his friends Pancho Delgado and Gaston Costemalle—but he was as fit and sturdy as any of us, and had come through the crash with hardly a scratch. I did not yet know him well, but in the few difficult days we had spent together he had impressed me, and the others, with his calmness and his quiet strength. Numa never panicked or lost his temper. He never fell into self-pity or despair. There was something noble and selfless in Numa. Everybody saw it. He cared for the weaker ones and comforted the ones who wept or were afraid. He seemed to care about the welfare of the rest of us as much as he cared about himself, and we all drew strength from his example. From the first moments, I knew that if we would ever escape these mountains, Numa would have something to do with it, and I wasn’t surprised for a second that he had volunteered to go on the climb.

  And I was not surprised that Carlitos and Roberto had volunteered. Both of them had escaped injury in the crash and each, in his way, had made himself one of the more prominent personalities in our group: Roberto with his intelligence, medical knowledge, and sometimes belligerent nature; and Carlitos with his optimism and brave humor. Fito, a former player for the Old Christians, was a quiet, serious boy. He had suffered a mild concussion in the crash, but he had recovered fully now, and this was a good thing for us, for Fito would turn out to be one of the wisest and most resourceful of all the survivors. Shortly after the crash, when we were struggling to walk in the deep, soft snow surrounding the fuselage, Fito realized that if we tied the cushions of the Fairchild’s seats to our feet with seat belts or lengths of wire cable, they would serve as makeshift snowshoes, and allow us to walk without sinking into the snow. The four climbers had Fito’s snowshoes strapped to their boots now as they set off across the deep drifts toward the mountain. Their hope was to reach the summit and see what lay beyond. Along the way they would search for the Fairchild’s missing tail section, which we all hoped would be filled with food and warm clothing. We even wondered if there could be other survivors living inside it. And Carlos Roque, the Fairchild’s flight mechanic, who had slowly regained his senses, remembered the batteries that powered the Fairchild’s radio were stored in a compartment in the tail. If we found them, he said, it was possible we could fix the radio and broadcast a call for help.

  The weather was clear as they set off. I wished them well, then busied myself with caring for my sister. Afternoon shadows had fallen over the Fairchild by the time the climbers returned. I heard commotion in the fuselage as they arrived, and I looked up to see them stumble into the fuselage and sag to the floor. They were physically wasted and gasping for air. The others quickly surrounded them, badgering them with questions, eager for some promising news. I went to Numa and asked him how it was.

  He shook his head and scowled. “It was damned hard, Nando,” he said as he tried to catch his breath. “It is steep. Much steeper than it looks from here.”

  “There is not enough air,” Canessa said. “You can’t breathe. You can only move very slowly.”

  Numa nodded. “The snow is too deep, every step is agony. And there are crevasses under the snow. Fito almost fell into one.”

  “Did you see anything to the west?” I asked.

  “We barely made it halfway up the slope,” Numa said. “We couldn’t see anything. The mountains block the view. They are much higher than they seem.”

  I turned to Canessa. “Roberto,” I said, “what do you think? If we try again, can we climb it?”

  “I don’t know, man,” he whispered, “I don’t know …”

  “We can’t climb that mountain,” muttered Numa. “We must find another route—if there is one.”

  That night, gloom hung in the air of the fuselage. The four who had climbed were the strongest and healthiest among us, and the mountain had defeated them with ease. But I did not accept this defeat. Perhaps, if I had been in an ordinary state of mind, I would have seen in their faces, and in the dark glances they exchanged, the grim revelation the climb had shown them: that we could not escape this place, that we were all already dead. Instead, I told myself that they were soft, they were afraid, they had quit too easily. The mountain did not seem so treacherous to me. I was certain that if we chose the right route and the right time, and we simply refused to give in to the cold and the exhaustion, we could surely reach the summit. I clung to this belief with the same blind faith that kept the others praying for rescue. What choice did I have? To me it seemed gruesomely simple: Life is not possible here. I must move toward a place where life exists. I must go west, to Chile. My mind was filled with so much doubt and confusion that I clung desperately to the one thing I knew for certain to be true: To the west is Chile. To the west is Chile. I let those words echo in my mind like a mantra. I knew that someday I would have to climb.

  IN THE FIRST few days of our ordeal, I rarely left my sister’s side. I spent all my time with her, rubbing her frozen feet, giving her sips of water I had melted, feeding her the little squares of chocolate that Marcelo would set aside. Mostly I tried to comfort her and keep her warm. I was never sure if she was aware of my presence. She was always semiconscious. Often she moaned. Her brow was constantly knit with worry and confusion, and there was always a forlorn sadness in her eyes. Sometimes she would pray, or sing a lullaby. Many times she would call for our mother. I would soothe her and whisper in her ear. Each moment with her was precious, even in this terrible place, and the softness of her warm breath on my cheek was a great comfort to me.

  Late in the afternoon of the eighth day, I was lying with my arms around Susy when suddenly I felt her change. The worried look faded from her face. The tenseness eased from her body. Her breathing grew shallow and slow, and I felt her life slipping from my arms, but I could do nothing to stop it. Then her breathing stopped, and she was still.

  “Susy?” I cried. “Oh God, Susy, please, no!”

  I scrambled to my knees, rolled her on her back, and began to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I was not even sure how to do this, but I was desperate to save her. “Come on, Susy, please,” I cried. “Don’t leave me!” I worked over her until I fell, exhausted, to the floor. Roberto took my place, with no success. Then Carlitos tried, but it was no good. The others gathered around me in silence.

  Roberto came to my side. “I’m sorry, Nando, she is gone,” he said. “Stay with her tonight. We will bury her in the morning.” I nodded and gathered my sister in my arms. Now at last I could embrace her with all my might, without the fear of hurting her. She was still warm. Her hair was soft against my face. But when I pressed my cheek against her lips, I no longer felt her warm breath on my skin. My Susy was gone. I tried to memorize this feeling of embracing her, the feel of her body, the smell of her hair. As I thought of all I was losing, the grief surged inside me, and my body was shaken by great, heaving sobs. But just as my sadness was about to overwhelm me, I heard, once again, that cool, disembodied voice whisper in my ear:

  Tears waste salt.

  I lay awake with her all night, my chest heaving with sobs, but I did not allow myself the luxury of tears.

  IN THE MORNING we tied some long nylon luggage straps around Susy’s torso and dragged her from the fuselage out into the snow. I watched as they pulled her to her gravesite. It seemed crude to treat her this way, but the others had learned from experience that dead bodies were heavy and limp and very hard to handle, and this was the most efficient way to move them, so I accepted it as normal.

  We dragged Susy to a spot in the snow to the left of the fuselage where the other dead were buried. The frozen corpses were clearly visible, their faces obscured by only a few inches of ice and snow. I stood above one of the graves, and easily made out the hazy shape of my mother’s blue dress. I dug a shallow grave for Susy next to my mother. I laid Susy on her side and brushed ba
ck her hair. Then I covered her slowly with handfuls of crystallized snow, leaving her face uncovered until the very end. She seemed peaceful, as if she were sleeping under a thick fleece blanket. I took one last look at her, my beautiful Susy, then I gently tossed handfuls of snow across her cheeks until her face had vanished beneath the sparkling crystals.

  After we finished, the others walked back inside the fuselage. I turned and looked up the slope of the glacier, to the ridges of mountains blocking our path to the west. I could still see the wide path the Fairchild had cut into the snow as it skied down the slope after clipping the ridge. I followed this path up the mountain to the very spot where we had fallen from the sky into the madness that was now the only reality we knew. How could this happen? We were boys on our way to play a game! Suddenly I was struck by a sickening sense of emptiness. Since my first moments on the mountain I had spent all my time and energy caring for my sister. Comforting her had given me purpose and stability. It had filled my hours and distracted me from my own pain and fear. Now I was so terribly alone, with nothing to distance me from the awful circumstances that surrounded me. My mother was dead. My sister was dead. My best friends had fallen from the plane in flight, or were buried here beneath the snow. We were injured, hungry, and freezing. More than a week had passed, and still the rescuers had not found us. I felt the brute power of the mountains gathered around me, saw the complete absence of warmth or mercy or softness in the landscape. As I understood, with a stinging new clarity, how far we were from home, I sank into despair, and for the first time I knew with certainty I would die.

  In fact, I was dead already. My life had been stolen from me. The future I had dreamed of was not to be. The woman I would have married would never know me. My children would not be born. I would never again enjoy the loving gaze of my grandmother, or feel the warm embrace of my sister Graciela. And I would never return to my father. In my mind I saw him again, in his suffering, and I felt such a violent longing to be with him that it almost drove me to my knees. I gagged on the impotent rage that rose in my throat, and I felt so beaten and trapped that for a moment I thought I would lose my mind. Then I saw my father on that river in Argentina, wasted, defeated, on the verge of surrender, and I remembered his words of defiance: I decided I would not quit. I decided I would suffer a little longer.

  It was my favorite story, but now I realized it was more than that: it was a sign from my father, a gift of wisdom and strength. For a moment I felt him with me. An eerie calmness settled over me. I stared at the great mountains to the west, and imagined a path leading over them and back to my home. I felt my love for my father tugging at me like a lifeline, drawing me toward those barren slopes. Staring west, I made a silent vow to my father. I will struggle. I will come home. I will not let the bond between us be broken. I promise you, I will not die here! I will not die here!

  Chapter Four

  Breathe Once More

  IN THE HOURS after we buried Susy, I sat alone in the dark fuselage, slumped against the Fairchild’s tilting wall with my shattered skull cradled in my hands. Powerful emotions stormed my heart—disbelief, outrage, sorrow, and fear—and then, finally, a sense of weary acceptance washed over me like a sigh. I was too depressed and confused to see it at the time, but it seemed my mind was racing through the stages of grief at breakneck speed. In my old life, my ordinary life in Montevideo, the loss of my little sister would have brought my existence to a standstill and left me emotionally staggered for months. But nothing was ordinary anymore, and something primal in me understood that in this unforgiving place, I could not afford the luxury of grieving. Once again I heard that cold, steady voice in my head rise above the emotional chaos. Look forward, it said. Save your strength for the things you can change. If you cling to the past, you will die. I didn’t want to let go of my sorrow. I missed having Susy with me in the fuselage, where I could comfort and care for her, and my sadness was my only connection to her now, but I seemed to have no say in the matter. As the long night passed and I struggled to fight the cold, the intensity of my emotions began to fade and my feelings for my sister simply dissolved, the way a dream dissolves as you wake. By morning all I felt was a sour, dull emptiness as my beloved Susy, like my mother and Panchito, drifted into my past, a past that was already beginning to feel distant and unreal. The mountains were forcing me to change. My mind was growing colder and simpler as it adjusted to my new reality. I began to see life as it must appear to an animal struggling to survive—as a simple game of win or lose, life or death, risk and opportunity. Basic instincts were taking hold, suppressing complex emotions and narrowing the focus of my mind until my entire existence seemed to revolve around the two new organizing principles of my life: the chilling apprehension that I was going to die, and the searing need to be with my father.

  In the days after Susy died, my love for my father was the only thing that kept me sane, and time after time I would calm myself by reaffirming the promise I had made at Susy’s grave: to return to him; to show him I had survived and to ease his suffering a little. My heart swelled with longing to be with him, and not a moment passed that I did not picture him in his anguish. Who was comforting him? How was he fighting off despair? I imagined him wandering at night from one empty room to another, or tossing until dawn in his bed. How it must torture him to feel so helpless. How betrayed he must feel—to have spent a lifetime protecting and providing for the family he cherished, only to have that family ripped away. He was the strongest man I knew, but was he strong enough to endure this kind of loss? Would he keep his sanity? Would he lose all hope and his will to live? Sometimes my imagination got the best of me, and I worried that he might harm himself, choosing to end his suffering and join his loved ones in death.

  Thinking of my father this way always triggered in me a burst of love so radiant and urgent that it took my breath away. I couldn’t stand the thought that he would suffer one second longer. In my desperation, I raged silently at the great peaks that loomed above the crash site, blocking the path to my father, and trapping me in this evil place where I could do nothing to ease his pain. That claustrophobic frustration gnawed at me until, like a man buried alive, I began to panic. Every moment that passed was filled with a visceral fear, as if the earth beneath my feet were a ticking bomb that might explode at any second; as if I stood blindfolded before a firing squad, waiting to feel the bullets slam into my chest. This terrifying sense of vulnerability—the certainty that doom was only moments away—never rested. It filled every moment of my time on the mountain. It became the backdrop for every thought and conversation. And it produced in me a manic urge to flee. I fought this fear the best I could, trying to calm myself and think clearly, but there were moments when animal instinct threatened to overcome reason, and it would take all my strength to keep from bolting off blindly into the cordillera.

  At first, the only way I could quiet these fears was to picture in my mind the moment when rescuers would arrive to save us. In the early days of the ordeal, this was the hope we all clung to. Marcelo fed these hopes with his assurances, but as the days passed and the absence of the rescuers became harder to explain, Marcelo, a deeply devout Catholic, began to rely more and more upon the beliefs that had always shaped his life. “God loves us,” he would say. “He would not ask us to endure such suffering only to turn his back on us and allow us to die meaningless deaths.” It was not our place to ask why God was testing us so harshly, Marcelo insisted. Our duty—to God, to our families, and to each other—was to survive from one moment to the next, to accept our fears and suffering, and to be alive when the rescuers finally found us.

  Marcelo’s words had a powerful effect on the others, most of whom embraced his arguments without question. I wanted to believe in Marcelo so badly, but as time passed I could not silence the doubts that were growing in my mind. We had always assumed that the authorities knew roughly where our plane had gone down. They must have known our route through the mountains, we told ourselves, and surely th
e pilots had radioed along the way. It would simply be a matter of searching along the flight path, beginning at the point of the last radio contact. How hard could it be to spot the wreckage of a large airplane lying in plain view on an open glacier?

  But surely, I thought, a concentrated search would have found us by now, and the fact that rescue hadn’t come forced me to consider two grim conclusions: either they had a mistaken idea of where we had fallen, and were searching some other stretch of the cordillera, or, they had no idea at all where in the sprawling mountains we might be, and no efficient way to narrow their search. I remembered the wildness of the mountains as we flew through Planchón Pass, all those steep-walled ravines plunging thousands of feet along the slopes of so many black, winding ridges, and nothing but more slopes and ridges as far as the eye could see. These thoughts forced me to a grim conclusion: They haven’t found us yet because they have no idea where we are, and if they don’t know even roughly where we are, they will never find us.

  At first I kept these thoughts to myself, telling myself I didn’t want to dash the hopes of the others. But perhaps I had motives that were not so selfless. Perhaps I didn’t want to speak my feelings out loud because I feared that would make them real. When hope is lost, the mind protects us with denial, and my denial protected me from facing what I knew. Despite all my doubts about the likelihood of rescue, I still wanted what the others wanted—for someone to come and lift me out of this hell, to take me home and give me back my life. No matter how forcefully my instincts told me to abandon wishful thinking, I could not allow myself to shut the door on the possibility of a miracle. Ignoring the hopelessness of our plight, my heart continued to hope just as naturally as it continued to beat. So I prayed every night with the others, beseeching God to speed the rescuers on their way. I listened for the fluttering drone of helicopters approaching. I nodded in agreement when Marcelo urged us all to keep faith. Still, my doubts would never rest, and in every quiet moment my mind would drift off to the west, to the massive ridges that penned us in, and a barrage of frightful questions would erupt in my brain. What if we have to climb out of here on our own? I wondered. Do I have the strength to survive a trek through this wilderness? How steep are the slopes? How cold at night? Is the footing stable? What path should I follow? What would happen if I fell? And always: What lies to the west, beyond those black ridges?