Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors Read online

  She nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘God wants us to survive.’

  ‘Yes. He wants us to survive.’

  ‘And there’s only one way.’

  ‘Yes. There’s only one way.’

  Slowly, because of their weakness, Javier and Liliana returned to the group of boys as they lined up to climb into the Fairchild.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Liliana said to Marcelo. ‘I will eat the meat.’

  Marcelo went to the roof of the plane and brought down a small portion of human flesh which had been drying in the sun. Liliana took a piece and forced it down into her stomach.

  Four

  1

  The news that the Chileans had abandoned the search for their sons after only eight days, on two of which all planes had been grounded because of bad weather, appalled those parents who were still convinced that their sons were alive. They felt bitterly disappointed in the Chileans for giving up so easily and angry with their own government for doing so little. In Chile, Páez Vilaró announced that his search would go on; in Carrasco, Madelon Rodríguez contacted Gerard Croiset.

  Gerard Croiset was born in 1910 of Dutch-Jewish parents and as a young man had been practically illiterate. In 1945 he was discovered by a man called Willem Tenhaeff, who had begun to do systematic research into the phenomenon of clairvoyance. In 1953, at the University of Utrecht, Tenhaeff was made Professor of Parapsychology – unprecedented as an accredited subject – and most astounding among the forty or so clairvoyants who worked with him was Croiset.

  Croiset’s most notable talent was for finding missing people, and for this reason he had often been consulted by the police in Holland and the United States. His method was to handle an object which had belonged to the missing person, or talk to someone involved, and then describe the picture or series of pictures that formed in his mind. If a case resembled some experience of his own he found that his psychic sense was keener; thus if a missing child had been drowned in a canal he was more likely to see it because he himself had almost drowned when he was young. He never accepted money for the use of his powers, and he responded less successfully to those who called on him simply to recover their property.

  Every case on which he worked was documented by Professor Tenhaeff, and after almost twenty years and several hundred experiments he had built up an impressive record of success.

  Madelon went to the Netherlands embassy in Montevideo and, using one of their staff as an interpreter, telephoned the Parapsychological Institute in Utrecht. She was told that Gerard Croiset was in a hospital recuperating after an operation. She pleaded nevertheless to be put in touch with him and eventually was connected to his son, Gerard Croiset, Jr, in Enschede, who was thirty-four years old and was thought to have inherited his father’s powers. Through the interpreter young Croiset asked for a map of the Andes to be sent to him.

  Madelon immediately dispatched an aeronautical chart of the area, with a rudimentary diagram marking the air corridors in Chile and Argentina. Arrows had been drawn on the chart, showing the route of the Fairchild, with a question mark on the point of the Planchon Pass.

  When she next telephoned young Croiset he told her that he had been in contact with the plane. One of its engines had broken down, and it had lost height. The pilot had not been flying the plane, but the copilot had crossed the Andes before and remembered a valley where he thought he could make an emergency landing. He had therefore turned to the left (the south) or possibly to the right (the north) and had crashed by a lake forty-one miles from Planchon. The plane lay ‘like a worm’; its nose was crushed. He could no longer see the pilots but he could see life. There were survivors.

  Madelon knew that a Japanese clairvoyant living in Córdoba in Argentina had said that the plane had flown south. This seemed to her to confirm the choice of south, not north, from Planchon. She went at once to the house of Rafael Ponce de León.

  Rafael, too, had been shocked when the search was called off, and he had made up his mind that while any of the parents still looked for their sons he would see to it that they had at their command a whole network of communication. For this purpose he kept in contact with a number of other radio hams in Chile. Through one of them he contacted Páez Vilaró, and Madelon told him of her conversation with Gerard Croiset, Jr.

  The news that the Dutch clairvoyant had made contact with the plane spread rapidly among the other parents. Although many of them treated it with scepticism, especially the fathers, they nevertheless appointed a delegation of three to go to the commander in chief of the Uruguayan Air Force. The delegation made a formal request for an Uruguayan aircraft to be sent to Chile to search for the Fairchild in the mountains around Talca, a town lying about 150 miles south of Santiago. This request was refused.

  The news of the young Croiset’s vision did much to raise Páez Vilaró’s morale. He had always found magic more impressive than science. He had also flown over the area where the SAR thought the plane had come down, the Tinguiririca and Palomo volcanoes, and knew that there was nothing he could do to search among the mountains at such an altitude; but Croiset had put the site of the accident in the pre-cordillera, where the mountains were much lower. A labour of Hercules had been reduced to mortal proportions.

  Páez Vilaró immediately set out for the south, and the next day, Sunday, October 22, he was flying over the mountains around Talca in a plane obtained at the Aero Club of San Fernando.

  In the days which followed he lived in a frenzy of activity. He made a list of all those who owned private planes in Chile and asked the pilots for advice, which invariably became an offer of their services. Páez Vilaró could have had thirty planes at his disposal, and he only hesitated to use them because of the acute fuel shortage in Chile. He knew that the man who took him up in his plane for an hour would be sacrificing the use of his car for a month; yet many people, though personally convinced the boys were dead, did this without asking for payment.

  Next to be organized were the radio hams whom Rafael had recruited over the air from Carrasco. Many of these men offered Páez Vilaró not only their radios but their clothes and cars. Wherever he went in the mountains he would be followed by a Citroën Deux Chevaux with antennae waving like those of a grasshopper. The car could put him in touch with Rafael in Montevideo at a moment’s notice and, through Rafael, with anyone in the world.

  Páez Vilaró did not remain in Talca itself but set off on several expeditions into the Andes. Madelon Rodríguez and Diego Storm’s mother had arrived in Talca, which freed him to pursue his own plans. He was not content to have just the rich Chileans with their private aeroplanes help him find the boys; he wanted word to get around to the poorest peasant in the most remote valley of the Andes that a search was on for the survivors. In every village he came to, he asked if anyone had seen a plane fall from the sky, and he listened to many fascinating but irrelevant stories. He entertained those he questioned with a drink or a cup of coffee. At one time he had four rooms in four different hotels, in case the search took him in any one of those four directions. He still had no money, but the innkeepers and restaurateurs either wanted no money or were paid with a drawing on a plate, napkin or tablecloth.

  His reputation preceded him. Now, when he entered a village, a small crowd would gather and people would shout, ‘Here comes the lunatic who’s looking for his son!’ Páez Vilaró did not mind; he saw his mission as something magical and fantastic, an army deployed in search of a plane under the directions of a Dutch seer. The villagers considered him a wizard because he carried with him a Polaroid camera and would give gifts of their images to men who had never seen a photograph before.

  By plane and on foot he scoured the area forty-one miles from the air lane over Planchon, yet nothing was found. He asked Rafael over the radio to ring Croiset once again and ask for more details. This was done, and night after night at 2 a.m. Croiset, in his pyjamas, would answer the telephone and summon images of the Andes into his mind.

  He
was able to provide them with more details, but much of what he saw concerned the flight of the plane rather than its present situation. In stages, he described a fat man – probably the pilot – with food poisoning, and how he went from the cabin and left the controls in the hands of the copilot. He was wearing a blazer and fiddling with his spectacles. Then the plane’s engine went dead and the copilot flew the plane towards a beach, perhaps on the sea, perhaps on a lake, which he remembered from previous crossings of the Andes. He had found a lake – or, rather, a group of three lakes – and attempted to land, but the plane had crashed into the base of a mountain and was concealed by an overhanging shelf of rock. Near it there was a mountain ‘without a top’, and he saw danger – perhaps a road sign saying danger. He could no longer see life in the plane, but perhaps this only meant that the boys had left it and had taken shelter nearby.

  With each new detail Páez Vilaró and his Chilean friends set out again to search in the mountains, and by this time faith in Croiset’s vision had spread to others. Madelon had gone to Santiago and persuaded the SAR to send planes over the mountains around Talca. The commander of the army in Talca sent out a patrol towards the Cerro Picazo (which satisfied the description of a mountain without a top), and for five days these Chilean soldiers searched in the bitter cold for the wreck of the Fairchild. A group of Silesian priests also set out into the mountains and searched for three days among inaccessible mountains as a ‘prayer of hope’.

  Nothing was found, and since low flying over the mountains was exceptionally dangerous, the SAR again called off the search. Only helicopters could fly low enough to see a plane half hidden by a mountain or Uruguayan boys sheltering under pine trees, and at a time when soap and cigarettes were unobtainable in Chile, helicopters were practically impossible to come by.

  But to Madelon, this was only a minor obstacle, and she decided to apply to President Salvador Allende himself for the use of his personal helicopter. Before she did so, however, a friend told her of an acquaintance who hired out small ‘choppers’ for spraying crops and raising high-voltage cables onto pylons, and in ten minutes it was arranged that when these helicopters were available, Madelon should hire them at the charitable rate of ten dollars an hour.

  Meanwhile, Páez Vilaró and Rafael Ponce de Léon agreed, on the afternoon of October 28, that as much as possible had been done without helicopters to follow up the vision of Gerard Croiset.

  2

  On Sunday, October 29, the anniversary of the death of Marcelo Pérez’s father, his mother, Estela, invited the parents of the boys who had gone in the Fairchild to come to her house that afternoon for a meeting. More than parents came; there were also brothers, sisters, and novias of many of the Old Christians.

  The table in Estela’s spacious living room was covered with maps of the Andes, with circles and lines drawn around Talca to show what areas had already been covered by Páez Vilaró. On a sideboard, someone had put a pile of mushrooms which were known to grow in the cordillera and were perhaps the food on which their sons were now living.

  The atmosphere in the room was black. There was none of the optimism that had been shown the week before, when Croiset had first given them the fruit of his clairvoyance. By their fidgeting mannerisms and blurted speech, many of the women, especially the girls, showed themselves to be on the brink of hysteria. Others simply sat in the stunned silence of their despair.

  Estela started the meeting. ‘I have asked you here,’ she said, ‘because I feel that we must do something. We can’t just sit here in Montevideo, waiting—’

  ‘Páez Vilaró is searching,’ said a voice from among the group of parents.

  ‘Yes,’ said Estela. ‘One man in the whole cordillera.’

  ‘I really don’t think that there’s much more to be done,’ said one of the fathers.

  At this, one of the girls said contemptuously, ‘It looks as if Páez Vilaró is the only father for all those boys. No one else is with him …’ She paused, then spat out, ‘Or must we women go to Chile?’

  The room exploded with different voices and different opinions. When finally there was quiet, Jorge Zerbino, a lawyer and businessman, turned to Luis Surraco, a doctor, and said, ‘I’m going to Chile, Luis. Do you want to come with me?’

  Dr Surraco, the father of Roberto Canessa’s novia, was adept at reading maps, and they listened to him describe where the two might search. The views of the majority remained that they should follow the instructions of Croiset. The clairvoyant had sent some new scraps of information, and though Zerbino and Surraco both had grave misgivings about Croiset, they knew quite well that their expedition was not so much to find the boys as to keep up the spirits of the women at home. They agreed, therefore, to search around Talca.

  When the meeting broke up, Rafael Ponce de León got in touch with Páez Vilaró over the radio. ‘Zerbino and Surraco are coming to Chile,’ he said. ‘They’re coming to help you.’

  The voice which answered did not respond to his optimistic tone. ‘They shouldn’t bother,’ said Páez Vilaró despondently. ‘There isn’t much point.’

  Rafael was astonished. How, after all this, could Carlos not want them to come?

  ‘Are you alone?’ the painter asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Rafael.

  ‘Don’t tell the others,’ said Páez Vilaró, his voice slow and heavy, ‘but it’s hopeless. I’ve lost all faith in finding them, my boys. I still search for them with the Cross in one hand and the signs of the Zodiac in the other, but I don’t believe that they’re alive any more.’

  There was a pause; then Rafael said, ‘Come back, Carlos. Everyone would understand if you came back.’

  ‘No,’ said Páez Vilaró. ‘Madelon still believes they are alive. I can’t leave her to despair.’ Rafael could hear him sobbing into the microphone.

  The next day Rafael told Dr Zerbino and Dr Surraco something of this exchange, but they refused to be discouraged. They spoke to Páez Vilaró over the radio, telling him that they had already booked seats on a plane to come to Chile, and Páez Vilaró did not rebuff them. ‘Come on out,’ he said with his usual warmth, ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

  The crowd around the radio transmitter became alive with excitement. Help, advice, money and maps were pressed upon Zerbino and Surraco. The fathers of Daniel Shaw and Roy Harley formed a fund to finance the search, and contributions came in even from those men like Seler Parrado who were sure that their sons were dead. Parrado had been among the most desolate of those affected by the accident. His despair was total. Not only had he lost the wife upon whom he had depended so much but two of his children as well. He had toiled all his life to build up a business, not for his own satisfaction but for the sake of his family. Now they were gone. His one surviving daughter had moved into her father’s house to look after him, but the life had gone from Seler Parrado’s eyes. He could see no reason to go on; there was nothing left to live for. With a dead heart he had sold Nando’s Suzuki motorcycle to a boy who had once been his friend. Still, he felt he wanted to contribute to the fund.

  That night it was announced on the radio that because of unprecedented falls of snow in the Andes, the SAR would not resume their search for the wreck of the Fairchild in January, as previously announced, but would wait until February. The news did not daunt Zerbino and Surraco. Their suitcases were packed. They would leave the next day.

  Dr Zerbino and Dr Surraco, joined by Guillermo Risso, a friend of Gaston Costemalle, flew to Santiago on November I. There they met Madelon and Señora de Storm, who had left Talca and were on their way to Córdoba in Argentina to try and bring the Japanese clairvoyant to Santiago. The two women told them what had happened in Talca, and in the afternoon Zerbino and Surraco and Risso continued their journey in a hired car. The political situation in Chile had deteriorated still further, and the enemies of Allende’s government had strewn the streets leading out of Santiago with hooks and nails in an attempt to bring all traffic to a standstill. The resul
t was that the car in which the three Uruguayans were travelling suffered a series of punctures which greatly hampered its progress.

  Páez Vilaró was waiting for them in jail. That morning he had flown over a power station and the local police, nervous no doubt because of the political situation, had decided that he and the young Uruguayan who was with him, a friend of the boys, were spies. They were treated politely; Páez Vilaró was able to make contact with Ponce de León, to whom he tried to communicate his predicament without actually describing it because he had no wish to upset the women who he knew would be crowding around Rafael’s radio transmitter. ‘I’m sitting here,’ he said, ‘with a lot of little bars in front of me … there’s a beautiful view just like that from the Punta Garreta’ – the chief prison in Montevideo.

  By late afternoon, however, the police had discovered that Páez Vilaró was not an agent of a foreign power but ‘the lunatic who’s looking for his boy’, and the two Uruguayans were released just in time to welcome Zerbino, Surraco, and Risso. Páez Vilaró at once took them on a tour of inspection and surprised them with the extent and efficiency of his organization. That evening they were able to speak to Croiset in the Netherlands through the link of Ponce de León in Montevideo and were given another clue for the search: in the lake where the plane had crashed there was an island.

  Páez Vilaró remembered that on a former flight in the hired helicopter he had seen just such a lake about sixty miles from Talca. The next day he flew to it again and searched in the area to the right of two mountains which had no peaks, the Cerro Azul and the Cerro Picazo. They flew down canyons and into boxes between mountains, but the result was always negative.

  The next day the Uruguayans wanted to search the same area, but the helicopter had to return to Santiago. ‘Anyway,’ the pilot of the helicopter told them, ‘if the plane had crashed in country like that, it would have been buried by the snow.’ They were not discouraged. Under Dr Surraco’s direction, they built a cardboard model of the area and then inquired about professional mountaineers who might be engaged to assist them.