Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

  The next morning it was snowing slightly, but they loaded up the Samsonite sledge, filled their knapsacks, and went on down the valley to the northeast. They could see an enormous mountain to their left and estimated it might take them three days to walk around it to where the valley would turn to the west.

  The snow stopped, the sky cleared, and towards eleven o’clock in the morning it began to get very hot. The sun beat down on their backs and was reflected up at their faces by the snow. Every now and then they would stop to strip off a pair of trousers or a sweater, but it took a lot of their energy to do this and the garments were almost as tiresome to carry as they were to wear.

  At around midday they came to an outcrop of rock over which flowed a small trickle of water. It was almost a stream, and they decided to stop there and shelter from the sun, constructing a tent with the blankets and the metal poles they carried. They ate some of their meat and Vizintín went to drink some of the water, but it looked brackish and the other two preferred to make water from melted snow.

  As they lay there in the shade they stared at the huge mountain ahead of them. Its size defied all calculations of its distance from where they were. As the light changed it seemed to move farther away and the distant shadow where the valley might turn to the west farther still. The more Canessa studied what lay ahead, the more sceptical he became about their strategy. From what he could see, the valley continued to go east; thus every step they took, he thought, would take them farther into the Andes. But he said nothing about this to the other two that afternoon.

  They were tired and the sun was hot, but no sooner had it left them to sink behind the mountains to the west than the temperature plummeted to freezing and the light began to fade. They therefore decided to spend the night where they were. They dug a hole in the snow to give themselves some protection and, once they were lying in it, covered themselves with the blankets they had brought with them.

  It was a beautiful night with a clear sky. Because of the altitude they could see millions upon millions of bright stars. The air was quite still; there was no wind at all. Their situation might even have been enviable had it not been so cold, for as the night continued the temperature sank lower and lower and the three expeditionaries began to freeze. Their clothes and blankets seemed hardly to warm them at all. In desperation they lay on top of one another – Vizintín at the bottom, Parrado in the middle, and Canessa on the top. In this way they warmed one another with their bodies but got very little sleep.

  Canessa and Parrado were both awake when the sun rose the next morning. ‘It’s hopeless,’ said Canessa. ‘We won’t survive another night like that.’

  Parrado stood up and looked toward the northeast. ‘We’ve got to go on,’ he said. ‘They’re counting on us.’

  ‘We’ll be no use to them lying dead in the snow.’

  ‘I’m going on.’

  ‘Look,’ said Canessa, pointing towards the mountain. ‘There isn’t an opening. The valley doesn’t go to the west. We’re just walking farther into the Andes.’

  ‘You never know. If we go on—’

  ‘Don’t fool yourself.’

  Parrado looked again to the northeast and saw little there to encourage him. ‘Then what do you suggest we do?’ he asked.

  ‘Go back to the tail,’ said Canessa. ‘Take out the batteries and take them back up to the plane. Roque said that with the batteries we could make the radio work.’

  Parrado looked doubtful. He turned to Vizintín, who by this time had woken up. ‘What do you think, Tintin?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll go along with whatever you two decide.’

  ‘But what do you think we should do? Should we go on?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Or should we try and make the radio work?’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps we should do that.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  Parrado became furious with Vizintín for his indecisiveness and tried to make him come down on one side or the other. Eventually Vizintín sided with Canessa, for, as Canessa said, ‘If we nearly froze to death on a clear night, think what would happen if there was a storm. It would be suicide.’

  They set off back towards the tail, and though it was considerably more difficult climbing up the valley than it had been coming down, they reached it by early afternoon and collapsed onto the great comfort of the clothes-strewn floor of the luggage compartment. It was a most luxurious habitation, sheltering them from the sun during the day and keeping out the cold at night, and they were tempted by its comfort into staying there throughout the following two days. By then, however, their supplies of meat were running low, so they decided to return to the Fairchild. Canessa and Vizintín climbed through the small hatch into the part of the plane where the batteries were stored, disconnected them, and handed them out to Parrado. Vizintín also found that the large tubes which were part of the plane’s heating system were wrapped around with an insulating material about two feet wide and half an inch thick made of plastic and some artificial fibre. He cut off some strips of it, thinking it might make a good lining for his jacket.

  The batteries were loaded onto the sledge and an attempt was made to pull it, but the batteries were so heavy it would not move. Since some of the gradients in the ascent they were to make were as steep as 45 degrees, it was immediately apparent that to transport the batteries to the plane was not possible. They did not lose heart, however, because Canessa assured them that it would not be difficult to remove the radio from the pilot’s cabin and bring it down to the tail.

  Instead of the batteries, then, Canessa and Vizintín piled the sledge and filled their knapsacks with warm clothes for the other boys and thirty cartons of cigarettes, while Parrado went back to the galley and wrote above the sink in nail polish, ‘Go up. Eighteen people still alive’. He copied this message twice on other parts of the tail, using the neat lettering he had learned while labelling boxes of nuts and bolts in his father’s business. Canessa came into the galley to take out the medicine chest they had found there. It contained many different kinds of drugs, including cortisone, which could be used to relieve the asthma from which Sabella and Zerbino both suffered.

  When the two came out they found that Vizintín had stepped on and broken the Samsonite sledge. This put Parrado into a fury. He swore at Vizintín and cursed him for his clumsiness, but Canessa was able to repair the damage and at last they set out, plodding in their snowshoes over the soft, steep snow towards the plane.

  10

  The spirits of the boys they had left behind had risen in their absence. There was first of all the immense feeling of relief that at last something was being done about their rescue. They were all quite sure that their expeditionaries would find help. It was also more comfortable in the plane now that they were gone. There was more space to sleep in and less tension without Canessa and Vizintín.

  Some of them missed the expeditionaries. Mangino, for example, had lost the protection of Canessa. On the other hand, he now had less need of it because he had grown to be less spoiled. He was a little more stoical about his broken leg and therefore slightly easier to sleep beside. Methol, his partner – who had once told him that if he was his father he would beat him, so irritated was he by Mangino – now became the confidant of his remorse. ‘I used to be so spoiled,’ Mangino said to him. ‘Being up here makes one realize how dreadful one was before. I used to kick my brother if he annoyed me, or throw away the soup if it wasn’t just right. If only I could have that soup now.’

  They all felt that they had been through a purifying experience. Delgado, Turcatti, Zerbino and Fito Strauch once discussed how they were going through a kind of purgatory. They thought of Christ’s forty days in the desert, and since it was now forty days since the plane had crashed they felt sure that their ordeal was about to end; as if to demonstrate that their suffering had indeed made better men of them, they tried harder than ever not to quarrel with one another and to be kind to all
.

  Certainly their quarrels were never serious when compared to the strong bond of their common purpose. Especially when they prayed together at night they felt an almost mystical solidarity, not only amongst themselves but with God. They had called to Him in their need and now felt Him close at hand. Some had even come to see the avalanche as a miracle which had provided them with more food.

  This union was not just with God but with the friends who had died and whose bodies they were eating to survive. Those souls had been called to heaven because their work on earth had been done, but all who were now living would quite happily have exchanged roles. Nicolich, before the avalanche, and Algorta, while suffocating beneath the snow, had both been prepared to die and bequeath their bodies to their friends. It was also, as Turcatti said to the three others in that conversation about Christ’s ordeal in the desert, that their condition on the mountain was so terrible that any other would be better – even death.

  Numa Turcatti’s spirit continued to decline. He was still bitterly disappointed that he had not been allowed to go on the expedition, and he turned his anger not on the others but on himself. He despised his own weakness and seemed to abandon his own body as a punishment for letting him down. His ration, now that he was no longer an expeditionary, was no longer than that of anyone else, yet even so he would not finish it. He had always found the raw meat repulsive and had only eaten it to build up his strength for the expedition. Without this need, all his repugnance returned – and what he had been willing to do for the sake of all, he was unwilling to do for himself. He therefore put the meat aside and, when the Strauchs forced him to take it, hid it away around him.

  As a result, of course, he grew weak and was less able to resist the poison in his leg. Canessa’s operation had drained the pus, but the infections grew worse and he took this as an excuse to do less and less for the group or for himself. He would only melt snow and would ask others to do things such as pass a blanket which he was quite capable of doing for himself. The debility of his mind raced ahead of his body’s weakness. He once asked Fito to help him stand up. Fito refused, telling him that he could easily do it himself, and sure enough, a few moments later, Turcatti lifted himself from the ground and hobbled into the plane.

  It was not that he was angry with the group – he was angry with himself – but he took it out on them as if to say, You’re quite right, I’m weak and useless, but just wait and see how weak and useless I can be.

  Rafael Echavarren was the reverse. His spirit remained strong but the afflictions of his body slowly showed themselves to be stronger still. His wounded leg was now black and yellow from gangrene and pus, and because he could no longer get out of the plane he breathed only the dank air inside, which affected his lungs and gave him difficulty in breathing.

  It was cold up on the hammock, and Fernández tried bringing him down onto the floor for the night, but the pain this caused was too great and Echavarren preferred to go back to the hammock. Then one night he became delirious. ‘Who wants to come with me to the shops,’ he said, ‘to get some bread and Coca-Cola?’ Then he shouted, ‘Papa, Papa, come in! We’re in here.’

  Páez went up to him and said, ‘You can say what you like later, but now you’re going to pray with me. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee …”’

  Echavarren’s open, staring eyes turned toward Páez, and slowly his lips began to repeat the words of the prayer. For that short moment – the time it took them to say a Hail Mary and an Our Father – he was lucid. Then Páez went to sleep opposite Inciarte, and Echavarren returned to his incoherent raving.

  ‘Who’ll come with me to the shops?’

  ‘Not me, thanks,’ they shouted back, or ‘Let’s wait until tomorrow.’ They were quite hardened to the horror of it all. Soon, however, his delirium ceased; all they could hear was the rasping sound of his laboured breathing. Later it quickened and then stopped. Zerbino and Páez leaped up and pushed against his chest to try and start it again. Páez continued this artificial respiration for half an hour, but it was clear to the rest of them after a few minutes that Rafael Echavarren was dead.

  Echavarren’s death inevitably depressed them; it reminded each one that he too might die. Fito lay with blood seeping from his haemorrhoids, feeling more anxious, frightened, and lonely than ever before, yet just because he sensed his own death to be near, he felt close to God and prayed to Him for his own soul and for the well-being of all the others.

  What made his spirits rise again the next morning – as it did for all the fourteen who were left alive in the fuselage – was the thought that at that very moment the expeditionaries might have reached help; that before the next night was upon them he would hear and then see a fleet of helicopters coming to rescue them. All he heard, however, towards evening was the shout of the first of his companions to spot the three figures of the returning expeditionaries, and as Fito himself watched them, plodding and stumbling up the hill, all his pious resignation turned to rage. God had raised their hopes only to dash them; their return was proof that they were trapped. He wanted to scream like a madman and run off into the snow, yet he stood and watched with the others, their faces flaccid with expressions of bitter disappointment and deep despair.

  Canessa came first, followed by Parrado and Vizintín. When he came within earshot they could hear his piercing voice shouting, ‘Hey, boys, we’ve found the tail … all the suitcases … clothes … and cigarettes,’ and when he reached the plane they clustered around him and heard what had happened. ‘We wouldn’t have made it that way,’ said Canessa. ‘The valley doesn’t turn; it goes east. But we’ve found the tail and the batteries. All we have to do is to get ‘the radio and take it down there.’

  In the face of this forceful optimism their spirits lifted. They wept and embraced and then clustered around the sledge to pick trousers, sweaters and socks, while Pancho Delgado took charge of the cigarettes.

  Six

  1

  On the same day as the first expedition left the Fairchild, Madelon Rodríguez and Estela Pérez flew back to Chile. With them went Ricardo Echavarren, the father of Rafael; Juan Manuel Pérez, the brother of Marcelo; and Raul Rodríguez Escalada, the most experienced pilot of Pluna, the Uruguayan National Airline, and a cousin of Madelon. The two Strauch brothers had also intended to be part of this expedition, but both suffered from high blood pressure and were advised to remain behind.

  Madelon had been galled by Surraco’s scepticism about Gerard Croiset, Jr, and was determined to prove him wrong. Both she and Estela Pérez were as confident now as they had been thirty-six days before, when the plane had first disappeared, that their sons were still alive. The men who were with them were less sanguine about finding survivors, but they thought it important to establish just what had happened to the Fairchild.

  On November 18 they reached Talca and began to explore around the Descabezado Grande. First they rented a plane and made several flights around the area. From the air they saw, by the Laguna del Alto, a piece of country which matched almost exactly the drawing which Croiset had sent them. They flew back to Talca to hire guides and horses and then set off on horseback to return and explore it more closely. The horses were specially trained to pick their way along the narrow mountain paths, with precipitous falls beside them, but the Uruguayans had to bandage their eyes for fear of vertigo. As they approached their goal they found another clue which fitted into Croiset’s vision, a sign saying ‘Danger’. There too was the lake and the mountain without a top. It seemed as if at last they were near to finding the Fairchild, yet they felt no exhilaration, for, though the valley had some vegetation on which human beings could survive, it was only a day’s walk from Talca.

  They found nothing and returned to Talca, where a Dutch mountain climber told them, ‘You may find the plane, but it’ll be in the middle of a flock of vultures.’ It was the sentiment of most people they spoke to.

  César Charlone, the Uruguayan chargé d’affaires in Santiag
o, also seemed to have little faith in their venture. When the group returned to Santiago on November 25, he told them he was too embarrassed to ask the Chilean government to exempt them from the obligation to change ten US dollars a day into Chilean currency at the unfavourable official rate. Madelon Rodríguez and Estela Pérez were furious. Before they had left Montevideo they had specifically gone to the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry to make sure that Charlone would be told to seek the exemption.

  The sum outstanding was five hundred and fifty dollars, which would not have bankrupted the families involved, but the anger of these two spirited women was aroused. Estela Pérez, the daughter of a proud Blanco family (she was the cousin of a Blanco leader Wilson Ferreira), did not intend to allow herself to be frustated by a Colorado. With Madelon she went straight to the Chilean Foreign Ministry, where they were received by the foreign minister himself, Clodomiro Almeyda, who listened to them and then immediately wrote a letter which exempted them from the exchange.

  With this exemption arranged, the five were able to return to Montevideo, and they did so on November 25. Páez Vilaró had gone to Brazil, and for almost the first time since the plane had disappeared there was no one searching in Chile. But before they left Chile, they had scattered many of the leaflets offering a reward of 300,000 escudos over the mountains around Talca. They hoped for results from that; otherwise, their energies could only be channelled into prayer.

  There were few now who had any faith in young Croiset, and it was around this time that Ponce de León spoke to him for almost the last time. He had said quite recently that when he saw the plane now it was empty, and the mothers had taken this to mean that their sons had set out in search of help, but Rafael began to suspect that it might mean they were all dead. When he had pressed Croiset before, Croiset always said he had lost contact. This time, as he spoke to Croiset, Rafael reminded him of what he had said – that the plane was now empty – and told him of the interpretation the mothers had put on this. ‘My own feelings,’ he went on, ‘are different. I take it to mean that they’re dead.’