Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors

  Their first step was to prepare accommodation. The hospital was small and its buildings were old – a single-storey construction with interior courtyards and a covered verandah around each block. But there was a wing reserved for private patients, and it was decided that this should be evacuated for the use of the survivors. While this was being done the three doctors telephoned another Dr Valenzuela, the chief of the Intensive Care Unit in the Central Hospital in Santiago. They explained to him what treatment they had planned for the patients when they arrived, and they received his confirmation that it was correct.

  The ambulances arrived with the first eight survivors at ten past three. The boys were driven into the courtyard between the main building of the hospital and the brick chapel at the side and then wheeled in on stretchers – all except for Parrado, who insisted on walking himself, pushing his way through the crowd of nurses and visitors who were watching them arrive. When he reached the entrance to the private wing, he was stopped by the policeman who had been stationed there.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You can’t go in there. It’s for the survivors.’

  ‘But I am a survivor,’ said Parrado.

  The policeman looked at the tall youth in front of him, and only the beard and long, unkempt hair persuaded him that what Parrado said was true. The nurses, too, were incredulous and tried to get the expeditionary to bed, but he refused to lie down and be examined by the doctors until he had had a bath. The nurses looked bewildered and went to ask the doctors who shrugged their shoulders and said that they might as well let him have his way. It was their first intimation that their patients were not going to behave quite as they had expected them to.

  A bath was run for Parrado. He asked for some shampoo, and a nurse went to fetch her own bottle. Then, at last, Parrado took off his stinking clothes and sank his body into the bath. He washed himself all over and then lay back in the hot water for an hour and a half. After the bath he took a shower to wash off the dirty water and then put on the white tunic that the hospital had provided. He felt magnificent, and with a benign indifference he allowed the three perplexed doctors to examine him. They could find nothing wrong with him at all.

  Of course Parrado, like the other seven, was severely underweight. He weighed nearly 4 stone less than he normally did. Those who had lost least were Fernández, Páez, Algorta and Mangino, who had lost between 2 stone 2 and 2 stone 5 pounds each. Canessa had lost 2 stone 9½ pounds, Eduardo Strauch 3 stone 2 pounds, and Inciarte 7 stone 10 pounds. This enormous difference showed not only how thin they had become but how heavy they had been before; for while Fernández, Algorta, Mangino and Eduardo Strauch had weighed between 10 and 12 stone before the accident, Parrado and Inciarte had both weighed more than 14 stone. It surprised the doctors that Páez, who was not a tall boy, should weigh as much as 10 stone 11 pounds when he was admitted to the hospital of St John of God in San Fernando.

  Some of the boys had specific complaints which the doctors did what they could to treat. Mangino had a fractured leg; Inciarte’s leg was still badly infected; Algorta had a pain in the region of his liver. Mangino also had a slight fever, high blood pressure, and an irregular pulse. Furthermore, the tests that were taken revealed a deficiency of fats, proteins and vitamins in them all. They all also suffered from burned and blistered lips, conjunctivitis, and various skin infections.

  It soon became clear to the three doctors who were examining them that these eight boys had been nourished on something more than melted snow over the past ten weeks, and as he examined his leg one of them asked Inciarte, ‘What was the last thing you ate?’

  ‘Human flesh,’ Coche replied.

  The doctor continued to treat the leg without any comment and without showing any surprise.

  Fernández and Mangino both told the doctors what they had eaten up on the mountain, and again the doctors made no comment one way or the other, although they did issue strict instructions that no journalists were to be admitted to the hospital. Still, it did not occur to them to alter the instructions they had given for the feeding of the eight survivors. Mangino, Inciarte and Eduardo Strauch – who were the most critically undernourished – were fed intravenously, and the others were given liquids and modest portions of specially prepared jelly and left to rest.

  It was some time before the boys realized that this was all they were to be given for the time being. The only solid food they had seen since entering the hospital was the piece of cheese that Canessa had brought with him from Los Maitenes as a souvenir and kept on the table beside his bed. Each boy was in his separate room, but the stronger went from one to the other and it was soon agreed that they should ask the nurses for something more substantial to eat. The nurses replied to their request with the strict instructions of Doctors Melej, Ausin and Valenzuela that no further food was to be provided.

  Ruthlessness comes from necessity. Carlitos Páez had realized that he was in some sense a celebrity, and he promised the nurses all sorts of ‘special’ autographs and souvenirs if they would only get him something solid to eat. The charming Chilean nurses were not so easily bribed. The boys therefore began to draw up a special petition of complaint against Doctors Melej, Ausin and Valenzuela, who were, they said, starving them to death.

  The doctors returned to the ward and heard the petition. They replied by explaining the dangers of eating solid food after long periods of starvation.

  ‘But, doctor,’ said Canessa. ‘I had beans and macaroni for lunch yesterday, and I’m quite all right today.’

  The doctors gave up. They ordered the nurses to bring a full meal for each of the eight survivors.

  It was clear by now that none of their eight patients was in a critical physical condition. The doctors’ concern shifted to the area of their mental health. They had noticed from the very first two symptoms among them – first the compulsion to talk and second a dread of being left alone. Coche Inciarte, who had been the first to enter the hospital, had grabbed Doctor Ausin’s hand from the stretcher and gripped it until he had been laid on his bed. Thereafter he talked to everyone who came into his room; so too did the others, especially Carlitos Páez.

  This behaviour was not extraordinary in young men who had spent ten weeks stranded in the Andes, but taken with the knowledge, newly acquired by the doctors, that their patients were alive thanks to a diet of human flesh, it could be the first manifestation of more extreme psychotic behaviour. For this reason the doctors gave instructions that no one was to be let in to see them – not even the mothers of Carlitos and Canessa, who had already arrived from Montevideo.

  One man, however, in the crowd of people crammed into the hall of the hospital, was made an exception to their rule. This was Father Andrés Rojas, the curate in the parish church of San Fernando Rey. Like everyone else in San Fernando, he had heard of the ‘Christmas Miracle’ (as the discovery of the survivors had now come to be called) and that afternoon had seen the helicopters fly over the town as they arrived from Los Maitenes. He had felt an immediate impulse to go to the hospital and offer what help he could, but this impulse had been countered by some reluctance to interfere with the hospital authorities. Later that afternoon, however, he had remembered some other business which gave him an excuse to go there.

  He was a young man of twenty-six and had been ordained only the year before. He looked even younger than his age, being small with dark hair, dark skin, and a boyish physiognomy. He dressed, too, not in a black clerical habit but in grey slacks and an open-necked grey shirt, so when he got to the hospital he might not have stood out from the crowd had not Doctors Ausin and Melej recognized him and invited him to visit the survivors.

  He was ushered to the private wing, and there he went into the first room leading off the corridor, which belonged to Coche Inciarte. It was a good choice, for no sooner was he identified as a priest than a gush of words poured out of the stuttering Coche. He told Father Andrés about the mountain – not in the cold language of a detached observer but in l
ofty mystical words which more accurately conveyed what the experience had meant to him.

  ‘It was something no one could have imagined. I used to go to mass every Sunday, and Holy Communion had become something automatic. But up there, seeing so many miracles, being so near God, almost touching Him, I learned otherwise. Now I pray to God to give me strength and stop me slipping back to what I used to be. I have learned that life is love, and that love is giving to your neighbour. The soul of a man is the best thing about him. There is nothing better than giving to a fellow human being …’

  As Father Andrés listened, he came to understand the exact nature of the gift to which Inciarte referred – the gift by his dead companions of their own flesh. No sooner did he realize this than the young priest reassured him that there was no sin in what he had done. ‘I shall be back this afternoon with Communion,’ he said.

  ‘Then I should like to confess,’ said Coche.

  ‘You have confessed,’ said the priest, ‘in this conversation.’

  When he came to see Alvaro Mangino, Father Andrés was faced with the same phenomenon – an intense desire to account for what he had done, told with a confusion of remorse and self-justification. Once again the priest reassured the worried boy; there was no sin in what he had done. He could take Communion that afternoon without confessing or, if he wished to be confessed, it should be to unburden himself of other sins.

  There was one question, however, which Inciarte had asked him and he could not answer. Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made out of it? ‘None,’ replied Father Andrés. ‘There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.’

  In permitting Father Andrés to visit the survivors, the doctors had chosen a most healing therapy. The decision to eat the bodies of their friends had been a severe trial for the consciences of many of the boys on the mountain. They were all Roman Catholics and were open to the judgment of their church on what they had done. Since it is the teaching of the Catholic Church that anthropophagy in extremis is permissible, this young priest was able not so much to forgive them as to tell them that they had done nothing wrong. This judgment, backed with all the authority of the church, assured the peace of mind at least of those who felt uncertain.

  Some of the survivors did not feel the need for reassurance – or did not admit to such a need – and they had little to say to Father Andrés. Algorta, for one, was not in the mood for talking to anyone – least of all to this youthful cleric with the saintly expression on his face.

  4

  The moment of reunion could not be postponed much longer. The parents and relatives of the survivors were not aware of the delicate matter which the doctors had to consider before admitting them, and though most were heroically patient while waiting to see their sons who had risen from the dead; others grew increasingly impatient.

  Graciela Berger, Parrado’s married sister, was incensed to be stopped by a policeman at the door of the private wing. ‘But I want to see my brother!’ she shouted.

  She heard from within Nando’s voice, shouting, ‘Graciela, I’m here!’ Whereupon the determined Uruguayan girl pushed her way past the policeman and into Parrado’s room. No sooner did she see him than she burst into tears. The combination of emotion at seeing Nando again, together with the shock of his unkempt and emaciated appearance, made too great an assault on her self-control.

  Behind her came her husband Juan, and after him the bowed, weeping figure of Seler Parrado. This poor man, who had lost all taste for life when his son, wife and daughter had disappeared in the Andes, had had his hopes raised again by a false list which had put all three as survivors. It was only now, just before coming to see his son, that he had been told the truth: only Nando was alive. He was therefore torn by the conflicting sentiments of joy and sorrow – but when he saw his son and took him in his arms, the former feeling overcame the latter and the tears which flowed from his eyes were tears of joy.

  Farther along the corridor, also in a room of his own, Canessa lay on his bed listening to the voices of the relatives as they entered. Suddenly he looked up and saw at the door the face of his novia, Laura Surraco. His first reaction was shock. He had always thought, up in the mountains, that he would see her again in Montevideo. Her presence here in Chile was somehow wrong – and when she rushed toward him and burst into tears he drew back from her.

  Laura Surraco was followed by Mecha Canessa. She walked in with serenity and said, ‘Merry Christmas, Roberto.’ Then she began to cry also as she saw the wizened face of an old man beneath the beard of her son. When Dr Canessa entered the room, he too burst into tears, and this torrent of emotion set Roberto crying until his parents feared for his health and offered to leave him. But he would not let them go, and when everyone was calmer he began to tell them about the accident and their survival, including the fact that they had eaten human flesh. Of the three who received this information, only the father started in shock before gaining sufficient control of himself to conceal his feelings. The two women seemed so happy to have Roberto there that they hardly cared what he said. The doctor, on the other hand, knew just what horrors his son must have been through and just what trials would await him.

  The reunion of Eduardo Strauch with his mother and father and his Aunt Rosina had some of the same awkwardness about it. Sarah Strauch did her best to appear calm but she was naturally nervous, and the moment of reunion with Eduardo was almost too much for her self-control. Being possessed all at once by joy at seeing him alive, shock at seeing him so wasted, and spiritual exhilaration at this answer to her prayers to the Virgin of Garabandal, she could not control the aghast expression on her face when Eduardo told her of the extremes to which they had gone to make this miracle come true.

  In the same way Madelon Rodríguez gave an involuntary grimace of horror when Carlitos told her what they had eaten to stay alive. Like many of the other mothers who still had faith in their sons’ survival, she had not thought, in detail, of how their miracle might be achieved; she had assumed that there would be woods to shelter them, with rabbits running over the pine needles and fish swimming in the streams. Neither she nor any of the other parents and relatives of the boys had imagined that they might be eating the bodies of the dead. It was inevitable, therefore, that the first knowledge that this was what had happened should appal them, and the boys – even in the raw state in which their ordeal had left them – retained sufficient judgment and intelligence about human behaviour outside the Andes to understand that this should be so.

  The exception was Algorta. He lay on his bed in his private room, without any compulsion to talk, and sent the pious priest on his way. He was visited by his father, and a woman who he recognized as the mother of the girl he had been going to see in Santiago. He asked after her daughter, and the next morning the girl herself came to visit him. At once he felt all the affection for her that had existed before the accident. The only flaw to the reunion was the expression of horror on the mother’s face when Algorta told her what he had eaten to survive. Her shock shocked him. How could she be surprised that they ate the dead when it was such a normal and obvious thing to do?

  Coche Inciarte, who was the most vulnerable to the involuntary expressions of censure in others, avoided such reactions by speaking of their experiences only in the most lofty terms.

  ‘Carlos,’ he said to his uncle – the first of twelve relatives to arrive in Chile – ‘Carlos, I’m full of God.’

  And his uncle replied in the same kind. ‘Christ wanted you to come down from the Andes, Coche, and now He is with you.’

  Fourteen

  1

  The eight survivors who were left behind watched the ascent of the two helicopters until both had disappeared over the mountain. Then Zerbino turned to Lucero, one of the three Andinists, and invited him to visit their ‘home’ – the hulk
of the Fairchild – while waiting for the helicopters to return. As they made their way towards the entrance, Lucero glanced at the fragments of human bodies which lay scattered over the snow and said, ‘Have the condors been eating the bodies?’

  ‘No,’ Zerbino replied, following the direction of his eyes. ‘We have.’

  Lucero said nothing and showed no surprise, but when he reached the Fairchild – its roof covered with strips of fat – he hesitated a moment. Then he stooped and went in. Zerbino came in with him and explained how they had lived and slept in the confined quarters for so long, and how the avalanche had swept down the mountain and killed eight of those who had survived the accident. Lucero listened with great sympathy and interest but was unable to ignore the stench which pervaded the inside of the plane. Unfortunately his host seemed unaware that there was any smell at all. The Andinist was too polite to mention it, but he returned as quickly as he could to the open air.

  Meanwhile, the other visitor had been seeing to the remaining survivors – to their medical needs and to the more urgent demands of their bellies. First came steak sandwiches – slabs of cooked beef between slices of unleavened bread. Then came orange juice, lemon juice, soup (heated on the Andinists’ stove), and finally some fruitcake which Díaz had brought because it was his birthday. It was a feast. The boys ate and drank with gusto and delight, scooping up the butter with their fingers.

  In preparation for the return of the helicopters, the Andinists now tried to construct a landing pad in the snow. They demolished the wall at the entrance to the plane, took a large slab of plastic which had once been part of the partition between the passenger cabin and the luggage area, and laid it on the snow in as horizontal a position as possible. They used pieces of cardboard to make a make-shift landing pad for the helicopters, which had been gone for some time.