Out of the Silence: After the Crash

by Eduardo Strauch Urioste

Why some and not others? What was that strange distribution of life and death based on, that distribution that seemed completely random?

The fear in this case had been misplaced, and it hadn’t served any purpose either. You can’t know when fear is truly justified, but in any case, it is always lost energy, useless strain. Yet even so it seems unavoidable in any situation of risk and uncertainty.

Gustavo had much more valuable cargo. He had been saving things from those who had died and from the bodies the expeditionaries had found, and he had a bag with him where the most important belongings of the twenty-nine people who had departed this world were stored together. He had promised to bring home to fathers, mothers, and girlfriends those small memories, and he protectively guarded that collection of crosses, chains, rings, small medals, photographs, letters, documents, and watches.

At last a bed, though at first I couldn’t lie down normally because after having spent seventy-two nights sleeping on a sloped surface, I felt like I was falling backward.

“Did you eat rabbits and birds?” she asked, as if giving me the chance to answer yes. Rabbits and birds, things a human can eat even in normal circumstances. She hadn’t even said insects or lizards, or other basically repulsive creatures. It would have been easy to reassure her, to tell her yes, and leave the truth of the matter for later. But I felt that the intensity of our reunion would not permit those delays, and so I answered her: “No, Mom, there are no rabbits or birds at that altitude. We ate the dead.”

the paper he had written: “There is a man on the way there whom I have sent,” and he added, “Tell me what you want,” like the words of one of those supernatural beings who appear in fairy tales in moments of greatest trouble. So Nando, on the other side of the paper, wrote that famous response, which was soon published in the media all around the world: “I come from a plane that crashed in the mountains. I am Uruguayan. We have been walking for ten days. I have a wounded friend up there. There are fourteen injured people still in the plane. We have to get out of here quickly and we don’t know how. We have no food. We are weak. When are you going to come for us? Please, we can’t even walk. Where are we?”

What did I learn about love in the silence of the mountain? That it is the most important thing in life. And that if it is not present in some form, no action, however right it may seem, makes any sense at all.

For my friends the arrieros (mule drivers), that sense of belonging must be even stronger, but in the constant motion of the city, struggling through traffic, riding up and down in elevators, going from the office to the shopping center, taking refuge in our air-conditioned homes, the word nature usually brings to mind a distant reality, the dream of vacations, associated at best with relaxing on the weekend. We think that nature is outside of us, and while we don’t go to meet it, we let it peek timidly out of the flowerpots decorating our balconies or from an aquarium with fish swimming back and forth in a way that makes us think of the bottom of the sea.

The mountain made friendship and love transcend all barriers,