‘And where did you get it, Pancho?’ Delgado was asked.
‘Muscles brought it up from the tail and gave it to me to give to Numa. So when Numa died …’
‘You kept it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why didn’t you give it back to the community?’
‘Give it back? I don’t know. It didn’t occur to me.’
The matter was discussed, and twelve good men and true found that Delgado had had no right to keep the toothpaste after Numa’s death, that he therefore had no right to exchange it with Roy for seven cigarettes, that the toothpaste was confiscated by the community, and that Delgado must make amends to Roy.
Roy was held to be blameless because he had been away at the tail for most of the time that Delgado had had the toothpaste and therefore could not have been expected to know that it was held in trust for Numa. Delgado was found guilty, but it was generally held that he had done what he did in good faith, and since he gracefully accepted the verdict of his peers and returned the cigarettes to Roy (though only four, because some of the toothpaste had been eaten), this particular incident was forgotten. The suspicion still remained, however, in the minds of some of his companions that Delgado had eaten the other tube of toothpaste; though no one accused him directly, they made angry and pointed remarks to his face.
While all of them pilfered extra pieces of meat quite openly – Inciarte when he cooked – Delgado did so in secret, and because he had less opportunity than the others he took more on each occasion. The officious Zerbino, therefore, true to his role as the detective, decided to set a trap. Daniel Fernández was cutting up a body some distance from the plane. He gave the larger pieces of meat to Zerbino, who – if he did not put them into his mouth – handed them to Delgado, who passed them on to Eduardo Strauch, where they were cut into smaller pieces. Two smaller pieces did not reach their destination. Zerbino immediately called to Fito to watch Delgado and then passed along a large piece of meat. Delgado, unaware that he was being watched, slipped it onto a tray by his seat and passed on a smaller piece to Eduardo.
Zerbino immediately pounced on him. ‘What’s going on?’ he said.
‘Going on?’ said Pancho.
‘What’s that on your tray?’ said Fito.
‘What are you talking about?’ said Pancho. ‘This? This piece of meat? Oh, it’s a bit that Daniel left behind this morning.’
Fito and Zerbino looked at him with contempt, keeping a tight hold of their tempers; then they turned their backs on him and went to tell the German. Eduardo was less able to contain himself. He did not speak directly to Delgado, who still sat on a seat a few feet away, but he abused him and cursed him to the others in a voice so loud that Delgado could not help but overhear.
‘What is this?’ he said to Eduardo. ‘Are you talking about me?’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Eduardo. ‘This is the seventh time that food has disappeared, and there you have it on your tray.’
Delgado turned pale and said nothing, and Fito took his cousin by the arm. ‘Leave it, let’s leave it,’ he said.
The German’s fury abated, but the disapprobation of the cousins was a severe disadvantage among the small community in the Fairchild. A strong feeling built up against Delgado. If anything was missing, pointed remarks were made in his hearing about the ‘opportunist’ or the ‘holy hand’. The feeling was shared even by Algorta, who slept with him at that time, and who remembered how Delgado had warmed him after the avalanche. Though he was by no means convinced that Delgado was responsible for any of the petty theft, he was swept up in the atmosphere of antagonism. He was even afraid that if he stuck up for Delgado he would himself be isolated by the group. Methol and Mangino would not turn against him but the only boy who still remained Delgado’s friend was Coche Inciarte, for he remembered how Pancho had lent him his coat when he was cold and had forced him to eat meat and fat when revulsion led him to starve. Yet Coche was so beloved, not only by the cousins but by all the boys, that no one would turn against him for the company he kept. This one factor kept Pancho Delgado from total isolation.
Incidents such as these with Delgado did little to improve their morale. As the days passed only bad news came over the radio. The cross that had been found on a mountain was not theirs but the work of a team of Argentinian geo-physicists from Mendoza. As a result the helicopters of the SAR had been grounded once again. Only the Uruguayan C-47 was continuing the search.
Then, one afternoon, they heard the drone of its engines in the sky. Once again – as when they had heard about the cross – they were thrown into paroxysms of excitement and fell to shouting and praying until, to their horror, the sound of the plane grew fainter. Then they were absolutely silent, standing in the snow and straining their ears to catch the slightest sound. The drone of the plane grew fainter, then louder again, then fainter, then louder still. They could not see it but they deduced from the sound that it was flying over the area in parallel lines. At once they prepared all their brightest garments and – realizing that the plane would be more likely to spot movement of some kind – practised an entire routine whereby the healthiest would run around in two circles while the lame would stand in a line waving up into the sky. So that all should know where to run and where to stand, they laid out the pattern with bones – a straight line with a circle on either side. They waited until evening, the sounds of the plane’s engines getting closer all the time; and when it grew dark and there was no longer any sound from the sky, they went to bed happy to think that it would almost certainly resume its search where it had left off the day before. That night, like other nights, they prayed to be rescued, but they prayed too that the expeditionaries would get help before the plane found them. The next morning – as if in partial answer to that prayer – they heard on the radio that the Uruguayan C-47 had developed engine trouble yet again and was grounded in Santiago.
It had been a week since Canessa and Parrado had left them, and in less than a week it would be Christmas Day. The thought that they were now almost certain to spend Christmas on the mountain was deeply depressing to almost all of them. Only Pedro Algorta felt reasonably content; he looked forward to the Havana cigar they were each to have to celebrate the occasion. For the others this prospect brought their spirits to their lowest ebb. Even Fito, having climbed the mountain with Zerbino and seen what surrounded them, felt doubtful that Parrado and Canessa would get through. He discussed another expedition with Páez, Zerbino and his cousins, but with none of the optimism and enthusiasm he had shown for the first. If their champions, the expeditionaries, had failed, what chance had they of success?
During the morning their minds were distracted from this pessimistic train of thought by the work of cutting the meat. It was after they had eaten and climbed back into the plane for a siesta that they became most depressed. They could neither work nor sleep but lay listlessly in the damp, stuffy cabin, waiting for the cool of the evening. Mangino moped for Canessa. Methol, finding for the first time the letter Liliana had written to his childeren, wept copiously as he read it.
At three or four in the afternoon they would come out again, and these hours before dark were the most pleasant of the day. They would sit concentrating on some little task, such as scraping meat off a bone or melting snow for water, and forget for a moment where they were. 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. The German blood was still strong enough in all three to make the idea of those celebrations going on without them particularly intolerable, and for the first time in many days ho
t tears began to roll down the cheeks not just of Eduardo and Daniel but of Fito as well.
Nine
1
At midday on December 12 the C-47 arrived at last at the airport of Los Cerrillos in Santiago. Páez Vilaró and his companions went to meet the pilot, who told them that he had had further trouble with the engines while flying over the Andes. It seemed that the intense cold at high altitudes affected the carburettors, and the pilot immediately arranged to have the engines checked and repaired. To assuage their impatience, the civilians tried to hire a helicopter from the ‘Helicopservices’ which had helped them before when they were in Talca. It proved impossible. Word had got around that the search was to be in the high peaks of the central Andes, which was no place for a small bubble helicopter.
At six the next morning the C-47 was ready to fly its first mission, and it took off with Nicolich and Rodríguez Escalada on board to fly over the area of Planchon. Páez Vilaró, meanwhile, made his way south. He wanted to enlist once again the help of his friends in the Radio Club of Talca and the Aero Club of San Fernando. His tactical objective was to arrange for landing rights and refuelling facilities for the C-47 at these small provincial airfields. Strategically, he wanted to stimulate interest once again in the search for the Fairchild.
On the following day – December 14 – Canessa and Harley travelled to Curicó. Their task was to try and find the miner, Camilo Figueroa. Since his original statement soon after the disappearance of the Fairchild that he had seen the plane fall out of the skies in flames and disappear into the side of a mountain, he had vanished from sight. They talked to his brother but could get no indication whatsoever as to where Camilo might be. On the other hand they were introduced to a great friend of the missing miner, Diego Rivera, who was a miner himself and secretary of the small cooperative of miners to which Figueroa belonged. Rivera and his wife had both been in the Teno valley on October 13 and said that they had heard the engines of the Fairchild but had not seen it because of the snow that was falling at the time. Figueroa, they said, had been working closer to the point where the aeroplane crashed; he had seen it fly from Planchon towards Santiago and then disappear behind the Gamboa and Colorado mountains.
Canessa and Harley were encouraged by this, for it would confirm everyone’s estimation that the plane must lie somewhere in the area of the Tinguiririca mountain. They immediately went to the house of one of the loyal radio hams, who put them in touch with Santiago. They talked to Nicolich, who had once again been up in the C-47, and were about to give him the information they had gleaned from Rivera when he interrupted them with the news that a cross had been seen in the snow on the side of the Santa Elena mountain.
The discovery of a cross, incontrovertibly made by men, on the slope of one of the highest mountains in the Andes range had a devastating effect in all three of the southernmost countries of the South American continent. Once again the newspapers carried headlines about the fate of the Uruguayan Fairchild; once again those parents in Montevideo who had long since despaired allowed themselves to hope; once again the air forces of Chile and Argentina began to search for survivors. And this time sorties were made not just from Santiago but from Mendoza, because the cross had been seen on the Argentine side of the border.
To the fathers who were in Chile – Páez Vilaró, Canessa, Harley and Nicolich – these flights were not enough. They had seen the cross and wanted to go to it at once. For this they needed a helicopter capable of flying to such heights, but still the Chilean SAR refused to make helicopters available until there was positive evidence of human life.
Canessa and Harley would not accept this decision, and armed with a photograph of the cross they went to demand an interview with the President of Chile, Salvador Allende. They were told that Allende himself could not see them – he was resting after a tour of the Soviet Union – but through an aide he promised the Uruguayans the use of his own presidential helicopter for the following day.
It was not to be; before Allende’s helicopter could come to their assistance it broke down. This further disappointment drove the fathers to distraction. After so long they had found a positive sign from their sons that they were alive, and now – there was no way of going to their rescue. Immediately Páez Vilaró, Canessa and Nicolich set off again in their own C-47 to fly over the cross once again and see if anywhere in the vicinity there was some trace of the plane itself. But when they flew into the Andes one of the engines of the C-47 failed yet again. As the four men watched the propeller come slowly to a stop – the plane lurching, righting itself, and then turning to return to Santiago – it seemed as if some malign fate were trying to frustrate them at the last moment of their momentous quest.
That morning – December 16 – the Chilean Ministry of the Interior stated that the cross was a distress signal. There were, however, even among the five Uruguayans, those who had their doubts that the cross had been made by the boys because it was constructed with such geometric perfection. In Montevideo the hopes of those mothers who had had hope before were confirmed, but others were more cautious, as if afraid to let themselves believe once again that their sons might be alive. They were confused, too, because the five men in Santiago did not agree. They crowded around the radio of Rafael Ponce de León, listening to the news and talking to Páez Vilaró, Harley, Nicolich, Rodríguez Escalada, and finally to Canessa. When the last named came to the radio, Señora Nogueira took hold of the microphone and asked him what he thought, for she had great faith in his judgment.
‘When I heard about the cross,’ Dr Canessa said, ‘I wanted to parachute down. But when I saw the photograph I realized that it was much too perfect to have been made by our boys.’
After that Señora Nogueira said nothing but returned home to her husband and said, ‘It’s not the boys’ cross.’
Señora Delgado, on the other hand, who had resigned herself to the fact of Pancho’s death only four or five days after the accident, now came to believe once again that he was certainly alive. Her hopes were short-lived. That very afternoon – the afternoon of December 16 – it was announced from Argentina that the cross had been identified as the work of a geophysical expedition from Mendoza. Twenty cones had been buried in the snow in a shape of an X. By photographing it from the air at regular intervals, the scientists could gauge the speed with which the snow was melting in the mountains and, from that, the amount of water that could be expected to pour down into the arid valleys of Argentina.
2
The effect of this news was dreadful. Señora Delgado became ill, the planes were grounded once again, and the ground patrol of the Colchagua Regiment that had been sent out in search of the cross by the commander in San Fernando, Colonel Morel, was ordered to return. But in spite of the disillusion in both countries, the five Uruguayans in Chile did not return to Montevideo. They had pledged themselves to continue the search and this they did. On December 17, Canessa and Harley returned to Curicó to bring the miner, Diego Rivera, to Santiago. There he gave a more precise description of where the plane had been seen falling into the mountains, which once again confirmed the hypothesis that they must search in the area of the Tinguiririca volcano. The other miner, Camilo Figueroa, who had been yet nearer to the accident was still not to be found.
The next day, December 18, Páez Vilaró hired a plane to fly over the Tinguiririca, and this time he took with him not only the miner, Rivera, but Claudio Lucero, commander of the all-volunteer Chilean Andean Rescue Corps, the Cuerpo de Socorro Andino. On their second sortie they flew over a snow-covered lake leading west from the Tinguiririca, and suddenly Lucero noticed that on the lake there were the marks of human feet. The plane turned and went back for another run over the lake, flying lower so that Páez Vilaró, too, could see the footprints in the snow. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Lucero.
‘They’re certainly human footprints.’
‘The boys?’
‘Impossible. No. It must be some shepherd.’
?
??What would he be doing walking in the snow in the middle of nowhere?’
Lucero shrugged his shoulders.
After the disappointment of the cross on the Santa Elena mountain, Páez Vilaró did not let himself believe that the footprints were those of survivors from the Fairchild. The idea which did take hold of him, however, was that they were the trail of the missing miner Figueroa, on his way to rob the dead bodies of the forty-five Uruguayans. When they landed in San Fernando he said as much to Rodríguez Escalada, adding, ‘Rulo, if you’ll come with me, we’ll get there before the robbers.’
Meanwhile Dr Canessa discussed the same prints with Lucero. ‘Are you sure it’s not the boys?’ he asked.
Lucero looked sadly at Canessa. ‘Doctor,’ he said. ‘It’s been over two months.’
Undeterred by Lucero’s scepticism, Páez Vilaró went to see the army commander, Colonel Morel, with whom by this time he had established a warm friendship. The colonel agreed to send a patrol to the area, and that afternoon he summoned an army helicopter to take him to the valley to see for himself. He was unable to find even the footprints that Páez Vilaró and Lucero had seen, but when he returned he was still optimistic. ‘Listen, Carlitos,’ he said to Páez Vilaró. ‘Go home for Christmas, and while you’re gone, this is what we’ll do. We’ll keep a patrol in the area to see if anything turns up, and in two or three days’ time we’ll land a group of the Rescue Corps to see what they can find. If nothing comes of all that, then you come back after Christmas and we’ll start all over again.’