Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Read online

  The third team was the water-makers. Their only difficulty was in finding uncontaminated snow, for around the plane it was pink from the blood of the dead and wounded, and polluted by oil from the plane and by urine. There was no shortage of pure snow a few yards away, but either it was so soft that it was impossible to walk those few yards or, as in the early morning when the surface was frozen, it was hard enough to bear their weight but too hard to scoop up onto the aluminium pans. It was therefore decided that two areas only should be used as lavatories – one just by the entrance and the other beneath the front wheel of the plane underneath the pilots’ cabin.

  At midday Marcelo was to give out the ration of food. For each there was to be a deodorant cap filled with wine and a taste of jam. A square of chocolate would be kept for the evening meal. There were some complaints that there should have been a little bit more for their Sunday lunch, but the majority agreed that it was better to be careful.

  There was now one more to share the rations. Parrado, once left for dead, had regained consciousness that day, and when the blood was washed from his face it was found that most of it had come from the blow on his head. His skull was intact, but he was weak and somewhat confused. His first thought had been for his mother and sister.

  ‘Your mother died at once in the crash,’ Canessa told him. ‘Her body is out in the snow. But don’t think of that. You must help Susana. Rub her feet and help her to eat and drink.’

  Susana’s condition had deteriorated. Her face was still covered with cuts and bruises, and, worse still, her feet were now black from that first night. She was usually conscious yet seemed unaware of where she was. She still cried for her mother.

  Nando massaged her frostbitten feet, but it was useless. No warmth returned, and when he rubbed them harder the skin came away in his hand. From then on he devoted himself to her care. When Susana mumbled that she was thirsty, Nando held to her lips the mixture of snow and crème de menthe and the little pieces of chocolate which Marcelo had set aside for her. And when she murmured, ‘Mama, Mama, I want to go to the bathroom,’ he rose and went to consult Canessa and Zerbino.

  They came to her and Nando told her they were doctors.

  ‘Oh, doctor,’ said Susana, ‘I would like a bedpan.’

  ‘But you have one,’ Zerbino answered. ‘Just go to the bathroom. It will be all right.’

  Shortly after noon, the boys saw a plane flying directly overhead. It was a jet and flying high above the mountains, but all those who were out in the snow jumped up, waved, shouted, and flashed pieces of metal up into the sky. Many cried with joy.

  At mid-afternoon a turboprop flew over them from east to west, this time at a much lower altitude, and soon after that another like it flew over them from north to south. Again the survivors waved and shouted, but the plane continued on its course and disappeared over the mountains.

  There now arose a division among the boys as to whether they had been seen or not, and to settle the dispute they turned to Roque, who was emphatic that a plane flying so low would have seen them.

  ‘Then why didn’t it circle,’ asked Fito Strauch, ‘or dip its wings to let us know that we’d been seen?’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Roque. ‘The mountains are too high for that sort of manoeuvre.’

  The sceptics among them did not trust Roque’s judgment; his behaviour was still irrational and infantile at times and his optimism only made them more doubtful. Some of them began to think that perhaps the hulk of the Fairchild, with its white roof half buried in the snow, might be more difficult to spot from the air than they had imagined. As a result they started to paint a scarlet sos on the roof of the plane with lipstick and nail polish from the women’s handbags, but as soon as they had completed the first s they realized that it would be much too small to make any difference.

  Then, at half past four, they all heard the engines of an aeroplane much nearer to them than ever before, and there appeared from behind the mountains a small biplane following a course which would pass directly over them. They waved frantically and tried to reflect the sun up into the eyes of the pilot with their small pieces of metal, and to their intense joy the biplane, as it flew over them, dipped its wings as if signalling that they had been seen.

  Nothing now could stop the boys believing what they wanted so much to believe, and while some simply sat in the snow waiting for the arrival of helicopters, Canessa opened a bottle of the Mendoza wine and with the wounded who were in his charge gulped it down to celebrate their salvation.

  Shortly afterwards it began to grow dark. The sun went behind the mountains and the bitter cold returned. No sound broke the silence. It was clear that they would not be rescued that night. Marcelo gave out the ration of chocolate to the survivors, who then shuffled back into the plane, some jockeying for position to avoid sleeping near the entrance. Marcelo pleaded with the strong to sleep with him in the cold, but several refused to give up the territory they had claimed in the warmer luggage area, saying that if they slept by the entrance every night they would certainly freeze to death.

  For a long time that Sunday night no one slept. They talked of rescue – some arguing that helicopters would come the next day, others contending that they were too high for helicopters, that rescue might take longer, perhaps even a week. It was a sobering thought, and Canessa was rebuked severely by Marcelo for the thoughtless gluttony with which he and his patients had consumed a whole bottle of wine. And there was one among them who would have been more severely rebuked still if his identity had been known, for Marcelo had discovered that two pieces of chocolate and one bar of nougat had been stolen from the dressing case in which he kept their supplies.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Marcelo, pleading rhetorically with the unknown thief. ‘Don’t you realize that you’re playing with our lives?’

  ‘The son of a bitch is trying to kill us,’ said Gustavo Nicolich.

  It was cold and dark. They lapsed into silence, and each boy was left alone with his thoughts. Parrado slept with Susana clasped in his arms, enveloping her with his tall body to give her all the warmth he could, aware of her fitful breathing, the irregular movement in and out of her lungs, broken by cries for her dead mother. When he was able to look into Susana’s large eyes he saw all the sorrow, pain and confusion that she could not express in words. Others, too, slept only fitfully, clutching the makeshift blankets around them. Confined in a space measuring twenty feet by eight, they could fit in only by lying sandwiched together in couples, end to end, the feet of one resting on the shoulders of another. The plane itself was tilted on its axis. Those who lay full length on the floor were at an angle of 30 degrees. Those opposite had only their legs on the floor, resting their backs against the wall of the cabin and their buttocks on the overhead rack, which they had torn down and used as a slat to break the angle between the floor and the wall.

  Though there was some comfort provided by the cushions, the space was so cramped that for one to move his position meant that all had to do the same. Any movement whatsoever caused agony to those with broken legs, and the poor wretch who wished to scratch himself or urinate precipitated a flood of abuse from those around him. Often their movements were involuntary. A boy would move his leg in his sleep and in so doing kick the face of the one opposite. Every now and then one of their number would sleep-walk. ‘I’m off to get some Coca-Cola!’ he would shout, and then start to climb over the bodies which lay between him and the door.

  No one reacted more irritably to the disturbances than Roberto Canessa, stung with remorse at the wine episode and by nature high-strung and volatile. Psychological testing four years earlier had revealed him as a boy with violent instincts, a fact that had at least partly determined the choice of both rugby and medical study for him; the demanding physical contest and the practice of surgery, it was thought, would help to channel his aggressive tendencies. Whenever a boy shrieked in pain, Canessa screamed at him to shut up, although he knew the boy could not be blamed. It
was in this way that the idea entered his inventive mind of building some kind of hammock in which the most severely injured could sleep at night, away from their companions.

  When he suggested it the next morning, his idea was met with contempt. ‘You’re a fool,’ they said. ‘You’ll kill us all with your hammock.’

  ‘Well, at least let me try,’ said Canessa, and with Daniel Maspons he began to look around for suitable materials. The Fairchild had been designed so that the seats could be removed and the passenger compartment used for freight. For this purpose a large number of nylon straps and poles had been stowed in the luggage area. They were fitted with nozzles which clipped into various fittings in the passenger cabin. Canessa and Maspons discovered that if they took two of the metal poles with the webbing between them, placed them in the joint of the floor and the wall on the left-hand side of the plane, put straps on the other end and attached the straps to the fittings on the top of the ceiling, it created a hammock which swung horizontally away from the floor because of the tilt of the plane. The poles did not stay parallel, but the hammock was large enough for two of the wounded to sleep undisturbed.

  They also found that the door which had stood between the passenger compartment and the luggage area could be suspended in the same way and that a seat could be swung up to make a bunk on which two others could sleep. That night Platero lay on the door. Two of the boys with broken legs went up on the bunk, and another, with one of his friends, slept on the hammock. They were all more comfortable, and the others were spared their repeated cries of agony – but in solving one problem they had created another. The warmth of other bodies had been lost and, being suspended fully in the path of the freezing wind which blew into the plane past the inadequate barricade, they suffered acutely from the cold. They were given extra blankets, but this did not make up for the lost warmth from their friends’ bodies. The choice had to be made between the pain of the biting cold and the agony of lying with the others. One by one, they chose to come down, until only two remained, Rafael Echavarren and Arturo Nogueira.

  8

  By Monday morning, the fourth day, some of the most seriously injured had started to show signs of recovery in spite of the rudimentary medical attention. Many were still in considerable pain, but much of the swelling had gone down and open wounds had started to heal.

  Vizintín, whom Canessa and Zerbino had thought might die from loss of blood, now called Zerbino to help him out to urinate into the snow. His urine was a dark brown colour, which led Zerbino to tell his patient that he might have hepatitis.

  ‘That’s all I need,’ said Vizintín, before stumbling back to his berth on the luggage compartment.

  Parrado’s recovery was remarkably rapid despite the strain of nursing Susana. The effect of her condition was not to make him despair. Quite the contrary, as he regained his strength there grew within him a lunatic determination to escape. While most of his companions only thought of being rescued, Parrado considered the active option of somehow getting back to civilization by his own efforts, and he confided this determination to Carlitos Páez, who also wanted to leave.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Carlitos. ‘You’d freeze to death in the snow.’

  ‘Not if I wore enough clothes.’

  ‘Then you’d starve to death. You can’t climb mountains on a little piece of chocolate and a sip of wine.’

  ‘Then I’ll cut meat from one of the pilots,’ said Parrado. ‘After all, they got us into this mess.’

  Carlitos was not shocked by this because he did not take it seriously. He was, however, among those who were increasingly concerned at the length of time it was taking to rescue them. It was now four days since the plane had crashed and, apart from the biplane which had dipped its wings while flying over them the day before, there had been no sign that the outside world even knew that any of them were still alive. Because the thought that they could not be seen from the air, or that they had been given up for lost, was so terrible, few of the survivors would permit it to enter their minds. They evolved the theory that they had been seen but were too high in the cordillera to be rescued by helicopter, so an expedition was coming by land. Marcelo believed this, and so did Pancho Delgado, a law student who hobbled around the plane on his own good leg talking cheerfully to the others and eloquently insisting that God would not forsake them in their predicament.

  Most of the boys were grateful to Delgado because he calmed the panic that was rising within them. They were less favourably disposed toward the smaller group of pessimists – notably Canessa, Zerbino, Parrado, and the Strauch cousins – who questioned the hypothesis that help was on its way.

  ‘Why,’ asked Fito Strauch, ‘if they know where we are, don’t they drop some supplies?’

  ‘Because they know that they’d be buried in the snow,’ said Marcelo, ‘and we wouldn’t be able to get at them.’

  None of the boys had any real idea of where they were. They had found charts in the pilot’s cabin which they studied for hour after hour, huddled out of the wind in the dark cabin. None of them knew how to read aeronautical charts, but Arturo Nogueira, a shy, withdrawn boy who had broken both his legs, appointed himself map reader to the group and found Curicó among the many towns and villages. They remembered that the copilot had said repeatedly that they had passed Curicó, and it was plain from the map that Curicó was well into Chile on the western side of the Andes. Thus they must be somewhere in the foothills. The needle on the altimeter pointed to 7,000 feet. To the west, Chilean villages could not be very far away.

  The difficulty facing them was that any path to the west was blocked by the gigantic mountains, and the valley in which they were trapped led to the east – back, they thought, into the middle of the cordillera. They were convinced that if only they could climb to the top of the mountains to the west, they would be met by a view of green valleys and Chilean farmhouses.

  They had been able to walk away from the plane only until nine or so in the morning. After that, if there was any sun, the crust soon melted and they sank up to their thighs in the soft powder. This had so far prevented any of them from venturing more than a few yards from the plane, for they feared that, like Valeta, they might simply disappear in the deep snow. Fito Strauch, their inventor, discovered, however, that if cushions from the passenger seats were tied to their boots, they made passable snowshoes. Walking in this way was difficult but it was possible, and both he and Canessa immediately wanted to set off up the mountain, not only to see what was on the other side but to discover if any of their friends – and in Fito’s case, another of his cousins – had survived the crash and were living in the tail.

  There were other incentives. Roque had told them that in the tail they would find batteries to power the VHF radio. There might also be suitcases scattered down the mountainside, for the track the plane had followed was still visible in the snow. These would provide them with extra clothes.

  Carlitos Páez and Numa Turcatti, among others, were also eager to climb the mountain, and at seven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, October 17, all four set out. The sky was clear but it was still bitterly cold so the surface was firm. Wearing rugby boots, they made quite good progress. Canessa wore some gloves he had made out of a pair of socks.

  They walked for an hour, rested, and then walked on. The air was thin and the going hard; as the sun rose in the sky, the crust melted, and they had to tie on the cushions, which soon became sodden. To avoid one foot stepping on the other, they had to walk bowlegged. None of them had eaten anything substantial for nearly five days, and soon Canessa suggested that they turn back. He was overruled and they struggled on, but a short time later Fito sank waist deep in snow on the brink of a crevasse. This frightened them all. The plane beneath them seemed small in the vast landscape; the boys around it were specks on the snow. There were no suitcases to be seen and no sign of the tail.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy getting out of here,’ said Canessa.

  ‘But if we aren�
��t rescued, we’ll have to walk out,’ said Fito.

  ‘We’d never make it,’ said Canessa. ‘Look how weak we’ve become without food.’

  ‘Do you know what Nando said to me?’ Carlitos said to Fito. ‘He said that if we weren’t rescued, he’d eat one of the pilots to get out of here.’ There was a pause; then Carlitos added, ‘That hit on the head must have made him slightly mad.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Fito, his honest, serious features quite composed. ‘It might be the only way to survive.’

  Carlitos said nothing, and they turned to go back down the mountain.

  9

  The experience of the expedition depressed them all. During the following days Liliana Methol continued to comfort those who were afraid, and Pancho Delgado did his best to keep up their spirit of optimism, but the days were passing without the least sign that rescue might come, and they had all seen how the toughest among them had fared on a short climb up the side of the mountain. What hope, then, could there be for the weak and injured?