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in spite of it all, I’m all right.
Marcelo dropped the aerial, covered his face with his hands, and wept with despair. The others who had clustered around Roy, upon hearing the news, began to sob and pray, all except Parrado, who looked calmly up at the mountains which rose to the west.
‘What shall we tell the others?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t tell them,’ said Marcelo. ‘At least let them go on hoping.’ ‘No,’ said Nicolich. ‘We must tell them. They must know the worst.’ ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ said Marcelo, still sobbing into his hands.
‘It’s like Holy Communion. When Christ died he gave his body to us so that we could have spiritual life. My friend has given us his body so that we can have physical life.’
Platero did not hesitate. ‘Do what you have to do,’ he said, and lay back on the door.
She remained close to her husband, helping him because he was weaker, sometimes even a little irritable with him because the altitude sickness made his movements clumsy and slow, but with death so near, their partnership did not falter.
Canessa remained awake, trying to communicate telepathically with his mother in Montevideo. He held a strong image of her in his mind and repeated over and over again in emphatic whispers which were inaudible to the others, ‘Mama, I am alive, I am alive, I am alive …’ Eventually he too dozed off.
They all immediately began to burrow with their bare hands in the packed snow, and the first they dug for was Marcelo. When they found his face, however, they saw that he was already dead.
Finally, he was freed by Zerbino, and together they dug for Liliana. When they found her she was dead. Javier slumped down onto the snow, weeping, overwhelmed by grief. His only consolation came from his conviction that she who had given him such love and solace on earth must now be watching over him from heaven.
It was October 30 and Numa Turcatti’s twenty-fifth birthday. The boys gave him an extra cigarette and made a birthday cake out of the snow.
The nearness of God in the still landscape set a seal on his conviction.
One night, when part of the wall blew down in a strong wind, it was Parrado who climbed out from under the blankets to build it up again. When he returned he was so cold that those sleeping on either side of him had to punch and massage his body to bring back the circulation; but when, half an hour later, the wall blew down again, Parrado once again rose to rebuild it.
He was utterly determined to escape. Every morning he would say to himself, ‘I am Rafael Echavarren and I swear I shall return,’
In the plane he lay alone, his wide green eyes staring out of his emaciated face, a small beard on his chin.
He remembered that he had had a premonition as a child that he would die at the age of twenty-one. He told Parrado that he knew he was going to die.
One night, as they were settling down to sleep, Arturo asked if he could lead the rosary. They agreed that he should, and Páez handed him his beads. Arturo then spoke his intentions, praying to God for their families, their country, their companions who were dead and those who were there. He spoke with such feeling in his voice that the other eighteen – some of whom thought of the rosary as another way of counting sheep – were struck with a new respect and affection for him.
Strength. Life is hard but it is worth living. Even suffering. Courage.
Carlitos dreamed of an orange suspended in the air above him. He reached for it but could not touch it. On another occasion he dreamed that a flying saucer came and hovered over the plane. Stairs were lowered and a stewardess came out. He asked her for a strawberry milkshake but was given only a glass of water with a strawberry floating on the top. He flew off in the flying saucer and landed at Kennedy Airport, New York, where his mother and grandmother were there to meet him. He crossed the lobby and bought a glass of strawberry milkshake but it was empty.
Roy dreamed that he was in a bakery where biscuits were being shovelled out of the oven. He tried to tell the baker that they were up in the Andes but could not make him understand.
It was one of the disadvantages of his place in the plane that he could not see out of a window, but once, in exchange for the pot, Fito held up a pocket mirror so that Carlitos could see the reflection of his beloved moon.
To Pedro, God was the love which existed between two human beings, or a group of human beings. Thus love was all important.
There was the odd coarse joke about Fito’s piles, and they laughed when Coche Inciarte stretched up to fetch something from the hat rack and brushed his face against a lifeless hand which had been brought in to stave off hunger in the night.
‘The loser stays’ was the nearest they came to saying that the weak would die. ‘A man never dies who fights,’ they would say, or ‘We’ve beaten the cold,’ and over and over again they would repeat the only fact they knew to be true: ‘To the west is Chile.’
one night, when the winds were particularly violent, they prayed a rosary to the Virgin to protect them – and by the time they had finished, the storm had died down.
They thrust the rosary into Fito’s hands and told him to pray. The sceptic was as frightened as the believers. He said the rosary with the most specific intention that they might be saved from the volcano, and by the time he had finished the decade the rumbling had stopped.
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.
‘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.
‘Now you’re not my friend any more,’ Mangino said, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Canessa, sitting back, his temper once more under control. ‘It’s just that I’m feeling so ill.’
Delgado returned immediately to the cabin and went to the side of his friend. Numa lay there with his eyes open, but he seemed unaware of Delgado’s presence. His breathing was slow and laboured. Delgado knelt beside him and began to say the rosary. As he prayed, the breathing stopped.
After they had gone about five hundred yards, Pancho Delgado came hobbling out of the plane. ‘Wait,’ he shouted, waving a small statue in his hand, ‘you’ve forgotten the Virgin of Lujan!’ Canessa stopped and turned back. ‘Don’t worry!’ he shouted back. ‘If she wants to stay, let her stay. We’ll go with God in our hearts.’
The view from where they lay was magnificent. There spread before them a huge landscape of snow-covered mountains lit by the pale light of the moon and stars. They felt strange lying there – Canessa in the middle – half possessed by terror and despair, yet half marvelling at the magnificence of this icy beauty before them.
When they reached the Fairchild an extraordinary sight met their eyes. The other survivors were all out of the plane, standing in the middle of the cross and staring up at the sky. Some were embracing one another; others were praying aloud to God.
Then, as the sun set behind the mountains to the west, they would climb a little way up the valley and sit on cushions to smoke their last cigarette in the evening light. At this moment of the day they were almost happy. They would talk together about anything except their homes and their families; but on the evening of December 20, as the two Strauchs and Daniel Fernández sat waiting for the cold and the dark, they could not stop themselves from thinking of the Christmases of earlier years that they had all celebrated so beautifully together.
Canessa began a continuous dialogue with God. He had seen the film Fiddler on the Roof and remembered how Tevye had spoken to God as a friend; he now took the same tone with his Creator. ‘You can make it tough, God,’ he prayed, ‘but don’t make it impossible.’
The view which met his eyes was of paradise. The snow stopped. From under its white shell there poured forth a torrent of grey water which flowed with tremendous force into a gorge and tumbled over boulders and stones to the west. And more beautiful still, everywhere he looked there were patches of green – moss, grass, rushes, gorse bushes, and yellow and purple flowers.
There would be no Christmas in the Andes; in an hour or two the helicopters would arrive and take them away. They opened the box of Romeo and Juliet Havanas and each took one and lit up, puffing the ineffable luxury of the thick smoke into the dry mountain air. Those who still had cigarettes shared them with those who wanted them, and these were lit too.
Eduardo lay back on a bed of grass as though it were finer than the finest satin. He turned his head and saw a daisy growing by his nose. He picked it, sniffed it, and then handed it to Carlitos, who lay beside him. Carlitos took it from him and was about to smell it too, but instead he crammed it into his mouth and ate it.
the doors slid back and Páez Vilaró the father saw the face of Páez the son. With a cry he surged forward and would have flung himself into the swirling blades of the helicopter had not Charlone held him back.
‘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.
‘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 …’
‘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.’
‘But will people understand?’ the boys asked him. ‘Of course,’ he reassured them. ‘When the full facts are known, everyone will understand that you did what had to be done.’ At midnight Díaz was forty-eight years old, and the eight Uruguayans sang ‘Happy birthday to you.’
And it was not just these physical manifestations of starvation and privation which told them what he had suffered; there was also the expression in his eyes.
and ugly struggle to survive. Now those same mouths which had eaten the bodies of their friends hungered for the body and blood of Christ; and once again, from the hands of the priests of their church, they received the sacrament of Holy Communion.
Here they buried those bodies which were still intact and all the remains of those which were not. A rough stone altar was built beside the grave, and over it was placed an iron cross about three feet high.
