Text copyright © 2012 by Eduardo Strauch Urioste, Mireya Soriano

Translation copyright © 2019 by Jennie Erikson

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
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the publisher.

Originally published as Desde el silencio, Eduardo Strauch Urioste con

Mireya Soriano (Montevideo: Random House Mondadori, Editorial
Sudamericana Uruguaya S.A., 2012). Translated from Spanish by Jennie
Erikson. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2019.

Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of

Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

ISBN-13: 9781542042956
ISBN-10: 154204295X

Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

To my two baby granddaughters—You’ve got a friend in me. And to my wife,
Laura—Keep on being yourself, never minding what other people say.

—Eduardo Strauch
 CONTENTS

1 SILENCE
2 THE MOUNTAIN
3 THE BODY
4 DEATH
5 THE MIND
6 HOPE
7 FEAR
8 REBIRTH
9 LOVE
10 TIME
11 TRANSCENDENCE
12 NATURE
13 FAMILY
14 MYSTERY
15 MEMORY
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD BY LAURA BRAGA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
 1

SILENCE

Each moment was different from the one before, but each had its own unique
threat, its own unmistakable sign that something serious was happening. The
plane was still moving, so I knew it hadn’t yet crashed against one of those
peaks that had come into view much too close to the little window I had been
resting my head against only seconds earlier. The dark mountain faces,
partially covered in snow, which rose up and vanished rapidly behind the
clouds, had in a single heartbeat eradicated my sleepiness as the furious
turbulence threw us about in air pockets, each one deeper than the last.
The first silence arrived together with stillness after the shaking that had
been tossing us about violently during that brief yet eternal time when I
awaited death, eyes closed, huddled in my seat, listening to the deep roar of
the engines and their final, desperate screeching. There was a strong impact,
followed by other terrifying and incomprehensible noises, and suddenly I
smelled gasoline and felt frigid air whipping against my face.
But the first silence was not the silence of death, although at first I
thought it was and felt amazement that consciousness still existed, even
without life. I opened my eyes. I had been saved. I wouldn’t be causing my
parents that grief that I had feared so much in those moments that I believed
were my last. It was not the silence of death, but death had come much too
close and was still hovering right there; and I, caught awkwardly in my seat,
facing backward, could see the face of a woman fatally wounded, lying on
the floor a short distance away.
“Adolfo, what happened?” I cried out, even though I couldn’t see him.
“We fucking crashed in the cordillera,” answered the voice of my
cousin from far away.
 It wasn’t hard to realize the truth of this just by looking around, but it
seemed necessary for someone to say it out loud, as if the words themselves
would clarify the shocking reality nearly impossible to believe: we had
crashed into the cordillera of the Andes, the same cordillera that most of us
had been admiring a short time before from the air as a stunning and majestic
landscape. But that view, as distant and unreachable as any scenic panorama,
had suddenly become the surface on which we now rested: the surface of
those stiff and desolate peaks, where nothing existed but snow and rock.
I called out at once to my other cousins and to my friend Marcelo.
Everyone answered me except my cousin Daniel Shaw, and that small silence
in itself gave me a response that I wasn’t ready to process.
I moved with great difficulty but finally managed to free myself. I took
a few steps through the fuselage, now transformed into a cave of twisted
metal filled mostly with a dense jumble of seats and scattered with bloody
limbs and crumpled bodies.
The first silence, ghostly and profound, was nevertheless brief because
little by little, faint moans were beginning to arise like the opening notes of a
terrible symphony, one made up of screams and cries of pain.
I headed toward the back of the plane, avoiding all kinds of objects
strewn about as if there had been an explosion. The floor was bent, and the
battered fuselage ended abruptly in a jagged opening leading to the
inhospitable exterior. I reached the edge, and my aimless steps took me
outside, where I sank into the snow. Someone grabbed me by the arm.
“Eduardo, where are you going?” I turned around and went back into the
fuselage. Some people were finding extra clothes to protect themselves from
the cold. I found a pair of jeans and put them on over the ones I was wearing.
Out in the distance, on the white expanse that surrounded us, we saw a
boy struggling on the slopes above us. We recognized Carlos Valeta, and we
called out to him like he was a friend lagging behind on a simple outing and
not somebody who had literally fallen out of an airplane in midflight, which
is exactly what had happened to all those sitting in the seats at the back. All
of a sudden he disappeared from sight. His friend Carlos Páez, whom we
called Carlitos, tried to go and help him, but he couldn’t move through the
snow. It was so soft that he sank into it nearly up to his waist.
The air was thin. It was hard to breathe and I couldn’t think clearly. I
gradually started to notice that something was wrong with my right leg, as it
was burning with pain, but I didn’t bother to examine it. I struggled to walk
and my steps were erratic.
I wandered around a bit dazed, while some of the others already seemed
somewhat organized with tasks intended to slightly diminish the chaos.
Most of the forty-five people on the plane were my friends or
acquaintances, because the flight had been chartered in Montevideo to bring a
Uruguayan school rugby team to Chile, a team of which most of us were
either members or followers.
The captain of the rugby team, Marcelo Pérez del Castillo, had been my
friend since childhood, from the age of seven. We had shared many
experiences and wonderful times together, including studying architecture
together in school and even working in an architecture studio together before
the crash. We had never suspected that at the age of twenty-five, we would
go through such a traumatic event as the one we were now living. He was,
like me, almost completely unharmed, and from the first moment, he took it
upon himself to organize the work of freeing those who were still trapped and
dragging the dead bodies out of the plane.
Two of our friends who were studying medicine in school immediately
set about attending to the wounded. I approached those busy groups and tried
to help them, dazed as I was.
I was able to join in the tasks that were set up by the others, but I
couldn’t quite manage to take the initiative on anything. I could lend my arms
and what little strength I possessed, but it was difficult for me to think
clearly.
Every endeavor was absolutely exhausting. The pieces of the wreckage
were tangled up in an impenetrable heap, and it took great effort to separate
them. As we were freeing the bodies from this mess, we were silently sorting
them based on their condition or on the gravity of their injuries. Those who
had fractures or severe contusions were carried out to the snow, and we
dragged the dead outside using some plastic straps that we found in the
baggage compartment.
It became clear that the plane had lost its wings and that the fuselage
had been severed into two pieces, losing the rear part somewhere along the
mountain. What remained of the damaged plane must have slid hundreds of
yards downhill on the slope, and the tremendous friction against the ground,
along with the brutal impact of the plane’s abrupt stop against a small
mountain of snow, had made all the seats break loose, propelling them
forward violently against the front partition wall of the cabin.
I was so terribly thirsty that I tried to alleviate it by bringing a handful
of filthy snow that was saturated in gasoline up to my mouth, as it was
impossible to find an area of clean snow nearby.
The wild thirst exacerbated my deep sense of unease, and this was more
torturous than the cold, which I wouldn’t have even noticed if it weren’t for
the constant shivering of my body.
In a moment of rest, I looked around me at all that distant and clear
space, and, strangely, I couldn’t help but admire its beauty, despite the
situation.
The remains of the fuselage had ended up on the eastern slope of an
enormous snow-covered mountain, and two other peaks surrounded us to the
north and the south. Only toward the east could we see in the distance a long
and narrow valley that wound through the mountains.
We thought that rescue would come in a matter of hours, but at the same
time we figured that because of how late in the afternoon it was, we might
have to spend the night in the cordillera. At 6:00 p.m. Marcelo told us to stop
all our tasks and carry the wounded back inside what was left of the airplane.
Despite all the work we had done, the area we had managed to clear
inside the fuselage was not enough. We predicted that the temperature would
drop in the night to twenty degrees below zero, so Marcelo, with the help of
others, started to build a precarious wall using the suitcases, metal fragments,
and broken seats to at least partially close up the back part of the fuselage, the
gaping hole that had been left when the tail broke off.
We settled in as best we could in that makeshift shelter. We barely fit
inside and were piled on top of each other in a tiny, cramped space that we
shared with several corpses, which we hadn’t had time to remove.
When I stopped the activity that had kept me distracted, the pain in my
leg seemed to get worse. But in the midst of so many seriously wounded
people fighting for their lives, my injury seemed insignificant, so I just
ignored it.
The moaning was not letting up, and the cold was reaching a level of
intensity previously unimaginable, even to me, who had some experience in
mountains, first during a student retreat in Bariloche, though in summertime,
and then on a trip to the Alps, where we stayed in hostels.
 Because of the position I was forced into among that heap of tangled
bodies, I accidentally stepped on a very badly injured woman, who screamed
in her delirium that I was trying to kill her.
The little windows of the fuselage let in a faint glow of light, but inside
it was pure darkness. I closed my eyes. The sounds of fear and of pain and
the cries and moans of the dying were magnified in the shadows, and after a
while in that choir, at first disorganized and confused, I could discern a
certain pattern. Within that strong and continuous clamor, there was a rhythm
in which groans and cries were repeated at somewhat predictable intervals.
As time passed I could recognize each voice, although I couldn’t tell who it
belonged to. Then in my drowsiness and weariness, I started assigning a
different face to each moan, perhaps one entirely imagined that I had never
seen in the airplane or anywhere else. It was the voice of pain, of human
suffering, that in some moments I imagined in the form of some ghostly
creature, or without any form at all, just a deep or acute sound, a death rattle
trembling in the blackness. Each groan had its pattern, its own way of
repeating itself, and I, with a morbid expectation, waited for it to sound again
in that sinister concert, as if it was a necessary piece of the harmonic whole.
Sometimes a new voice would call out, a voice asking for someone to
rub his ice-cold feet, or a voice calling out for his mother, or one begging for
someone to help him because he felt like he was freezing to death. But many
of the most insistent voices were gradually losing their strength, or simply
stopping altogether. So when a groan or cry that had been recurrent
abandoned the choir of suffering, I felt an inexplicable need to hear it again,
wanting that pattern, which had been broken, to be restored. I waited with
bated breath for its return, secretly needing it as a small piece of stability and
order in the Dantean scene in which we were living. And when it became
clear that one of those moaning voices had been finally extinguished through
the hand of sleep or death, I was able to detect that silence, like a small
change in the endless chorus, and I grieved the loss of it. I don’t know if it
was because I was in an altered state of consciousness from the shock or
because I sensed that that voice had been silenced forever.
Despite the pain that surrounded me, I felt fortunate in the midst of so
much suffering. I was almost completely unhurt and so were two of my
cousins and my friend Marcelo. I thought we would all be sleeping in our
own beds by the next night. That first night that we spent on the mountain
with no water, with only the smallest amount of food, taking refuge among
dead bodies in the remains of a shattered airplane—I imagined I would
remember it for years to come as the worst night of my life, a horrifying
experience that we had nevertheless been able to overcome.
But then the next day rescue did not come, and there was a second
night, then a third and a fourth. Things weren’t going as we had expected,
and I began to fear that they were only going to get worse. Then I
remembered God. I hadn’t prayed, not even during the crash.
My God, let them find us. Let rescue come. Let us be saved.
But rescue still didn’t come; not the next day, the day after, or the day
after that.
God was not answering me. What did it mean?
A decade earlier, when I was fifteen years old, I had gone with a group
from school on a spiritual retreat in the mountains. Things were so naively
clear to me then. This is what I would have believed then: that He was
delaying His response; that if He was keeping quiet, it was because He was
holding something better aside for me; that my human limitation was
preventing me from seeing what was right; that the pain, the suffering, and
even death itself were just illusions.
But in the intervening years my beliefs had been changing and, up there
in the cordillera, growing weaker with each day that passed, seeing my
friends dying, sinking into greater uncertainty as the days went by, I was not
certain that God even existed.
My God. Let them find us. Let rescue come. Let us be saved.
At fifteen, not having any answer, I would have repeated the words that
Jesus said, moments before dying on the cross: “My God, my God, why have
you forsaken me?” But I couldn’t even say those words anymore, because
perhaps I hadn’t even been forsaken. Perhaps God wasn’t answering me
simply because He did not exist.
In the evenings we prayed the rosary, and that brought me closer to my
friends. The repetition of that mantra helped me feel that we were one
cohesive group, but I had no other feeling of transcendence beyond that. I
suppose each one of us repeated the prayers with someone on our minds. But
there was no Virgin Mary present in my mind, no Jesus, and no holy saint,
not even my guardian angel. I had my friends, but my spirit was very alone in
the cordillera, and it was soaring over the peaks, exploring the infinite blue
sky.
The silence outside, with its overpowering majesty, had changed the
way we spoke among ourselves. Already we were speaking with softer
voices, and with less frequency. Communication between us had been
stripped of every triviality, becoming at once simpler and more powerful. The
environment was forcing us to be economical in everything, to conserve
every strength and eliminate every word that wasn’t absolutely necessary.
Within this quiet, important decisions, which would later contribute to
saving us, were incubating. In the cordillera I saw clearly things that are so
difficult to perceive in civilization and in our daily lives. The silence of the
mountain instilled in me the possibility of inner silence, and it was in that
silencing of my thoughts that I found a lasting peace capable of expanding all
the abilities and gifts that humans possess.

In February of 2005 I received a phone call from a Mexican mountaineer who

introduced himself as Ricardo Peña. He told me that during his explorations
in the cordillera where our plane had fallen, he had found some personal
items of mine that he wanted to give back to me.
Very near the site of the plane’s first impact, at an altitude of 14,200
feet, hidden among some rocks, he had noticed a piece of dark fabric.
Thinking that it might be part of a body, he extricated it carefully and was
able to recover the blue jacket I had brought with me on that trip that I had
stuffed into the overhead compartment twenty minutes before the crash,
shortly after taking off from El Plumerillo Airport in Mendoza, where we had
had a layover.
I remembered perfectly well that I had put my sunglasses in the top left
pocket, and Ricardo had found these as well, although without the lenses, a
few yards from where he had found the jacket. In the other pocket, he found
my wallet with money still inside, my identification card, and my driver’s
license. My passport was there, too, stamped with all the countries I had
visited on the first long trip of my life, when I had traveled with friends for
six months across Europe.
The discovery of these objects, in particular my identification
documents, which had remained preserved in the harshest conditions that
exist at those altitudes, caused me to reflect on the experience I had lived
through, a subject I had kept a respectful silence about for more than thirty
years. It felt as if the cordillera were calling to me—reminding me that a
piece of myself lay buried beneath her snow. While many of my fellow
survivors had written or spoken publicly about our experience, I had never
felt capable of doing so.
Ricardo’s discovery seemed to represent my own journey over the
course of time, from the day of the crash until that moment.
I had brought the silence of the mountains back with me, inside me, and
I had built my life around its rich and mysterious presence. But now, perhaps,
it was time to merge my two worlds, to let them flow into each other. Perhaps
it was time to break the silence.
 2

THE MOUNTAIN

On one of those nights of helpless waiting, I dared to leave the shelter of the
fuselage to urinate outside. The unimaginable cold was like a thousand
knives cutting into my skin. I knew that the slightest delay outside in those
conditions would be very reckless, but I couldn’t help pausing for a few
seconds before the beauty of the sky, shining with more stars than I had ever
seen before.
I recognized constellations that would peek out some nights through the
hazy sky above the city where I had grown up. Now I saw them glittering in
all their glory like immeasurable brilliant pinpoints marking the depth of the
sky, against which the silhouette of the mountain was outlined.
It was just there, imposing and enigmatic. The twinkling glimmer of the
stars fluttered over its contours dazzlingly, and yet it was the mountain, with
all the serenity of permanence, that captured my gaze.
I watched it from my human smallness. I was no more than a fleeting,
insignificant being before its thousands of millennia, so tiny in the face of its
majestic presence. Even more, I was a man weakened by thirst, hunger, and
fatigue, tortured by uncertainty and fear, but even so, I felt a strange sense of
harmony, as if that tremendous mass of rock were connected to me, reflected
in me, as if through my consciousness of it, the mountain might develop its
own.
Powerful and mighty, this mountain represented all mountains,
including those I had admired since childhood and those I had visited on trips
to Bariloche or to the Swiss and Italian Alps.
But this mountain was the mother of them all, not just because of its
greater height but because of the intensity of our dialogue.
 This time the encounter was profound and raw. No skiing or playing
games in the snow, no friendly gatherings around the fire in a comfortable
hotel. Here I am, it seemed to be saying, from one being to another. Far from
depressing me, its presence gave me strength. I returned to the inside of our
miserable shelter, revitalized by that moment of supreme beauty and by the
silent voice of the rock, which had transferred to me some crumbs of its
power.
I had a hard time squeezing myself between the bodies of the others,
who grumbled in the darkness. Every movement caused a great disturbance
in that small and jumbled space. I closed my eyes, and for an instant I saw
again the magnificence of what I had just looked upon: the deep night, the
flickering of the stars, and the perfection of that inert world of rock, space,
and vast expanses. That seemingly inanimate world, where I had been able to
perceive a connection with my own consciousness. The connection was
vague and ill defined, but it was strong enough to make me understand why
the ancients used to build temples on the tops of mountains. Mountains had
been sites of revelations and spiritual strength for many cultures, and here in
this place, in spite of the hardships that we were experiencing, those qualities
were present as well.
I started moving again, trying to find a more bearable position. Another
grunt, another protest. My clothes had brought a breath of icy vapor into the
fuselage, and that, unfortunately, was the only part of the mystical encounter
that I was able to pass on to my dozing friends. The vastness of the distant
and cold universe, the close tutelage of the mountain, remained inside me as a
faint emotion, fluttering like an injured bird.
I tried to sleep a little, and in that liminal place between sleep and
wakefulness, in order to chase away other thoughts, I tried to recall the
origins of my fascination with mountains. I tried to remember the pages
illustrating the Rolex calendars, which came from Switzerland to my father’s
jewelry shop. There were landscapes where you could see houses built in the
Alpine style, similar to the one my family had in El Pinar, a seaside resort
twenty miles from Montevideo. El Pinar had the beach and the forest nearby,
but nothing like what could be seen in those calendar photographs that
showed a world as remote as it was unreachable.
I was born and grew up in a country without mountains. In Uruguay the
gently rolling green plains, as they used to tell us in school, only rarely form
hills, whose highest altitude barely exceeds fifteen hundred feet. Perhaps that
was why I had been so enthralled by those images of Swiss houses
surrounded by a pure-white ground, a smooth and bright ground that curved
in a gentle slope toward the sharp line where the intense blue abyss began.
How can the ground be white? I had asked at the age of three or four, and one
of those patient adults who answer children’s questions had explained to me
that it wasn’t grass or earth or sand, the only types of terrain my little feet
recognized. It was snow. What would it be like to walk on the snow? What
would it be like to go toward that line, bright and sharp, where the whiteness
ends and the blue begins? In the world I dreamed about, looking at those
pictures, there was something far more alluring than the houses: a clear
atmosphere and a white slope with a satiny glow, which I wanted to mark
with my footprints, though I would have to wait a few years before doing it.
In fact, that early attraction to the mountains had been an important
factor in my decision to go to Chile with the group.
The Old Christians rugby club was going to play a friendly match in
Santiago. I wasn’t on the team, but most of the players were my friends since
several were former schoolmates of mine at the Stella Maris Christian
Brothers College in Montevideo. The Irish brothers had introduced rugby to
the school. They saw it as a good complement to our training, our
development into cooperative people who are capable of working together
toward a common objective.
Traveling with my friends, accompanying the team to Chile on that long
weekend, would give me the opportunity to practice skiing in El Portillo.
But unforeseen complications in our trip arose from the very beginning.
The first of these was the forced layover, due to bad weather conditions, in
the Argentinean city of Mendoza, which lies to the east of the foothills of the
Andes. We were all quite annoyed by this because it meant we would have
one less day in Chile. And the weather, warm with overcast skies, didn’t
seem so bad to us.
Of course the pilots had information that the conditions in the cordillera
weren’t so mild, and undoubtedly the twin-engine Fairchild F-227 airplane
from the Uruguayan Air Force, which we had chartered for the trip, required
greater guarantees of atmospheric stability in order to cross the mountains.
We found a cheap hotel in Mendoza where we could spend the night,
and we went out in small groups to explore the city, whose pretty pedestrian
streets, plazas, and charming little open-air bars soon drove away our initial
bad mood.
We split up to see all that we could and ended up enjoying ourselves
despite our impatience to get to Chile. I remember that Marcelo, Gastón, and
I did quite a bit of walking and that we went to bed somewhat early, hoping
that we would be able to fly out the next morning.
In the morning, at about eleven o’clock, we were all at El Plumerillo
Airport with the hope of setting off as soon as possible. But the pilots were
still very much in doubt about what to do because, according to the
information available to them, the weather conditions were still questionable.
They also explained to us that the takeoff time was not ideal for crossing the
cordillera; after midday the warmest currents rise up from the valley, and
their encounter with the much colder air coming down from the mountain can
cause dangerous turbulence. But we weren’t interested in hearing technical
explanations of any kind. We wanted only to leave.
This new delay exasperated us greatly, all the more so when we learned
that the plane might not be going on to Santiago at all. It might have to return
to Montevideo because Argentinean law limits the stay of foreign military
planes on their soil to only twenty-four hours.
A little later a cargo plane from Chile landed on the runway. Some of
the guys in our group asked the pilot, who had just stepped off the aircraft,
about the conditions he had seen while crossing the cordillera. He didn’t give
a lot of details, but he seemed confident and carefree, like he had come down
from a pleasant and easy flight. This just rekindled our impatience, and many
from our group reproached our pilots, hoping that they would decide to go
ahead with the trip. Finally, after some consultation among themselves, they
announced that we would leave, which caused great cheers in our group of
enthusiastic young men.
The limitations of the plane forced us to cross the cordillera in an area
where the mountains were lower in elevation, so the first part of the flight
was southbound to get to Planchón Pass, where we would then turn to the
west and cut across the Andes. By the time we crashed, it had already been
several minutes since we had changed course. Where were we? How high
were we? The altimeter of the destroyed airplane read 7,000 feet, but we
weren’t certain that was right, since the device could have frozen in any
position after the crash. Where in the cordillera had we crashed?
 The pilot, fatally injured, had repeated over and over again, “We passed
Curicó” before dying. At first he had said it with a certain lucidity, and he
went on repeating it throughout that first terrible night we spent in the
fuselage.
None of us knew what Curicó was, or where. When we found flight
charts in the airplane, we elected Arturo Nogueira, whose broken legs kept
him from moving, to find Curicó in those complicated maps covered in
crisscross lines and incomprehensible markings. After hours of study he
managed to find it. We were surprised to see that Curicó was located in the
farthest western region of the cordillera, in an area already bordering on the
Chilean valleys. If that were true, then the enormous mountain in front of us
would be concealing those valleys that were the way to our salvation.
But that mountain that blocked our view to the west didn’t seem to be
part of the low foothills of the cordillera. Rather, it looked like a towering
white wall standing with a resolve worthy of the very heart of the Andes. Had
we really passed Curicó?
As the days passed we were getting to know the new environment we
had been thrust into. The mountain had its own language. We knew from the
color and shape of the clouds that there might be a storm; we knew from the
light snowfall that sparkled on the peak which way the wind was blowing; we
came to understand the distant sound of the avalanches and so many other
sounds that were unfamiliar to us, like the brief but severe thunderlike
rumblings coming from some still-active volcano.
That desolate landscape, which could look as motionless as a painting,
nevertheless had its own dynamic that was revealing itself to us over time in
its ever-changing light and color.
There were also things in its movement that we sometimes perceived as
purposeful gestures, seeing in them the mannerisms of living beings. In the
midst of such silence, the crash of one of those rocks against the fuselage,
tumbling down noiselessly from up above, was as if the playful mountain
wanted to get our attention and say: “How are you, boys? I haven’t seen you
come out yet today from that ugly white worm that is defiling the purity of
my glacier.”
But the mountain had a lot more to say, and so it would be necessary to
climb its steep walls and spend sleepless nights enduring the intense cold in
the almost nonexistent shelter of its rocky slopes, slowly breathing the
increasingly thin air, moving slowly, taking one step at a time, keeping your
balance by clutching at the projecting rocks, finding a path to follow in the
middle of a labyrinth of snow and rock, retracing your steps on the erroneous
route that had led to a place with no escape, leaning one foot on a very
narrow edge with the bottomless abyss to your back, where the smallest
mistake would surely mean falling hopelessly off the cliff, just one small slip
or a rock that couldn’t support the weight of a body. Climbing with animal
obstinacy and human determination, clawing up vertical walls, going through
sharp and jagged points only to discover that there was another peak beyond
and that the summit was still a long way off.
On the fifth day after the crash, four boys from the group made the first
attempt to climb, to see if they could find the tail and possible survivors.
They returned a few hours later without even making it halfway to the slope
of the mountain, but they had still learned many things. They told us that
from where we were, we had a deceptive perception of distances and slopes.
The mountain was much steeper than it appeared, and the distances were
considerably greater. They told us there were enormous crevasses hidden
beneath the snow, where you could easily fall to incalculable depths, and that
although it seemed impossible, the cold they felt at the higher altitudes was
much worse than the cold we were experiencing.
We also learned from them that what was left of the Fairchild, our
improvised home, could barely be seen from above as an insignificant spot in
the white expanse where it was resting. This led us to understand that it was
practically impossible for rescuers to see us from the air, which strengthened
our decision to try to get out of there ourselves.
The questions of where to go, which way to take, and when to do it
dominated most of our conversations. Some thought it would be best to go to
the east, the only direction where the distant horizon could be seen beyond
the valley that disappeared, winding among the peaks. But we believed that
the vast and desolate Argentinean plains were to the east, and everything
seemed to indicate that it wasn’t the best option, although others insisted that
by going east we might be lucky enough to find some river valley that flowed
into the Pacific Ocean.
In this game of chance, we could place only one bet, and the result
would be either life or death. The way to the east, although long and
uncertain, seemed to have the unique advantage of avoiding the ferocity of
the mountain.
However, the only thing we knew with any certainty was that Chile was
to the west, and that fact was repeated like an unquestionable axiom that
could help in the difficult decision about the best way of getting out of our
prison of ice.
The mountains surrounded us like an enormous amphitheater and bared
their dark teeth among the peaks. Where should we go? Which mountain
should we climb? How could we manage the limited strength of those who
were the most physically prepared, who would undertake the terrible
challenge of attempting that journey without the equipment necessary to
survive?
Those who were able set off on expeditions with various objectives and
results; I was never able to join them because of my difficulty in breathing at
that altitude.
They were our eyes, seeing those areas that unfolded in the distance,
white and inaccessible. We learned from them that there were smaller pieces
of the airplane in those remote stretches, various objects and intact dead
bodies scattered on the hillside as if a gigantic and impossible wave had
receded, leaving behind the remains of a shipwreck.
The expeditionaries became a special group in the team, and every time
they left on a mission, we felt a renewed hope.
Those of us who stayed in the fuselage could see them advancing with
great difficulty, hour after hour, step-by-step, until they were nothing more
than little black specks in the whiteness, and then almost imperceptible
specks, like minute insects crawling over a heap of white flour.
I would look at those tiny black dots on which all our hopes were riding,
and I would wonder: Is our chance of surviving just as small?
And then I would seek solace in the contemplation of my mountain, and
I would tell her this: I don’t know if I will get out of here alive, but even if I
do, I will never be the same. You have trapped me here forever, and whatever
happens, from now on a part of me will always remain here in your stillness.
 3

THE BODY

“We have this treasure in clay vessels.”

—2 Corinthians 4:7

I didn’t want to look, yet my eyes were drawn to every wound, staring in
shock at every mutilated limb. A steel pipe driven through the stomach of a
boy who passed by unsteadily with a confused and absent expression on his
face; a leg hanging lifelessly from a living body that was just freed from the
tangled mass of metal pieces; a calf with the muscle ripped apart from the
bone, swinging forward in a bloody and viscous mass; blood on an
unrecognizable bluish-black face; flowing blood making its way through the
wreckage like a slow and thick wine being spilled.
Gustavo Zerbino and Roberto Canessa, medical students in the first
years of their study, were luckily uninjured in the crash and were facing the
most difficult task they could ever have imagined. With no tools but their
own hands, they set broken bones, cleaned wounds, and fashioned bandages
out of pieces of torn clothing and used them where they were most needed.
They scurried back and forth throughout the fuselage, organizing a kind of
field hospital that operated on nothing but their own modest skills, the ability
to distinguish between the living and the dead, and the importance of seeing
to the most serious cases first, according to an exam that was necessarily
quick and superficial, often without the option of checking the entire body of
the patient due to its position and the lack of space.
Nando Parrado’s sister, lying next to their dead mother, remained nearly
motionless and had only brief moments of lucidity, despite the fact that she
didn’t have any visible injuries other than a small cut on her head. In her, as
in many others who seemed seriously injured without any obvious signs of
the cause, there was no way to diagnose internal injuries, much less to treat
them.
Roberto and Gustavo, only students themselves, were now forced to
practice the medicine of three centuries prior, with no body scanner, no X-
rays, no antibiotics or disinfectants. They were able only to stop
hemorrhaging, set bones, and look for a pulse in limp and lifeless arms. All
else was accomplished by nature or by chance.
Nando’s head was hideously swollen due to a terrible concussion. He
was in a coma and had little hope of survival, so he was placed in the most
exposed area of the fuselage, and it was that fortuitous contact with the ice
that eased the inflammation in his brain and saved his life.
One boy, quiet and calm in his seat, seemed only dazed from shock, but
a little later Roberto was surprised to find him dead. One of the propellers,
after being ripped from the plane, had cut his leg just below the knee, and his
life ebbed away as he silently bled to death.
When they managed to pull out the metal tube lodged in Enrique
Platero’s abdomen, part of his intestines came out with it. I looked at him,
terrified. Would this be the moment he would die? But no, once bandaged up,
as if they had just patched up a tear in the fabric of his pants or refastened the
detached sole of a shoe, he headed toward the group who was trying to rescue
people from beneath the seats, and he set to work on that task.
We couldn’t see the pilots, but we could hear their cries from the
cockpit, access to which was completely obstructed by the twisted piles of
metal pieces and seats. Our new doctors managed to get into the cockpit from
outside after removing a deep layer of snow.
They came back and told us that the cockpit was so misshapen from the
crash that the instrument panel had been embedded in the men’s chests,
effectively trapping them, and there was no way to get them free. One of the
pilots, still alive, was suffering greatly but retained some degree of
consciousness. After asking the boys for water, he gave them instructions for
how to make the radio work, which were ineffective. He repeated that we had
passed Curicó, and he begged them to bring him his revolver. Our friends had
been able only to give him a mouthful of snow and remove the cushion from
the back of his seat to relieve the pressure on his chest, but they chose not to
grant him that last favor. Death came and went at its own pace, touching
whomever it wanted, so to summon death with a merciful shot perhaps
seemed to them a distortion of the natural order of things.
My first task in that improvised society of survivors was that of
dragging the dead bodies outside in order to make space in the fuselage. I
knew most of them, and it was very strange to see them suddenly changed
into those cold and lifeless remains, simply objects we had difficulty
dragging, not only because of their weight but because of the perpetual
exhaustion we all felt due to the oxygen-deficient air. I kept my mind focused
on the practical side of things, such as how to improve our method of
removing the bodies, how to do it more quickly and with less effort.
Some of the bodies looked alive, but they were too pale, the snow
sprinkled onto their hair and their faces, which I tried not to look at. They
were only bodies, as fragile as our own, but for them a single blow had been
enough to break the clay vessel. They were only bodies, pieces of firm and
slightly pliable matter. The inner value of each one was no longer there, and
in so many of the others still living, the contents of the vessels were slowly
escaping through irreparable cracks.

Throughout my entire life, up until the day of the plane crash, my body had
been an obedient and reasonable friend. I had only barely learned to walk
when I learned how to gallop on horseback in the fields of my grandfather’s
ranch, and my body withstood my most daring childhood escapades without
any consequence except for a broken arm after a foolish fall from my bicycle.
Although I had never stopped to think about it, it was a well-made and
well-maintained body, one that had never lacked for shelter, affection, or
food. This quiet harmony, this implicit response to my needs and wishes, had
made it almost unnoticed by my conscious mind, which didn’t even regard it
as an entity separate from the totality of my being. But now my body became
almost an enemy and began asserting its demands with a previously unknown
and fierce need.
It began with the thirst. It wasn’t the sort of thirst one might feel in a
gym or the kind we used to feel after a rugby match, which we sated with ice
cream sodas and beer mixed with lemon soda. Neither was it the thirst that
hastened our return from the beach, when the stalls selling drinks were scarce
and the walk home on the burning sand felt eternal. This was something else.
It was the thirst of knowing that there simply was nothing to drink and that
even if you had all the money in the world, you would be powerless to attain
a single sip of clean water.
From the first moments after the crash, my body showed itself to be
disobedient and independent. It started shivering violently, and I could do
nothing to stop it; I saw it as if it were something foreign to me—perhaps it
was someone else’s body, or perhaps it was mine but was animated by a
mechanism that had never been activated before during my lifetime.
The cold, too, was different. It wasn’t the kind that is alleviated by
putting on a warm coat, nor was it the cold you feel at coming out of the
ocean on a brisk summer afternoon, or the cold that you almost enjoy in the
middle of winter when you know you will soon be warming yourself near the
fire crackling in the hearth. It was a quiet and cunning cold. I could try to
downplay its significance, even yield to the deceptive calm when the
shivering stopped. I could even cease to feel it, and then there was the very
real danger that loomed in the bluish purple tint of my limbs, the blood frozen
in my veins, the heart that beats too quickly and then calms itself and follows
a slower and slower rhythm, one beat and a moment later, another one, as if
in the interval the heart is judging whether it is worth the struggle, as if the
latest beat were a charity, an act of kindness, the ticktock of an old
grandfather clock.
Freezing to death was no longer just a phrase we had all repeated many
times in life when the heat failed somewhere or when a sudden change of
wind caught us in the middle of a stroll without a warm enough coat. Now
the weather conditions really could kill us quite easily, and that casual and
daily phrase from our past lives seemed to have recovered its true depth, to
the point that we were very cautious of saying it out loud, because cold had
become dangerous, and death was no longer just a word.
Within a few hours of the crash, my body was already showing its
weakness. The fragile, vulnerable organism, capable of functioning in a
relatively narrow range of temperatures and oxygen levels, was sending me
warning signs.
The perfect machine that they had taught me about in school was now
outside its range of use. If only the human body was able to produce its own
energy with the help of the sunlight, as plants do.
Hunger had not been acute in the first hours, when the emotional
upheaval and the constant waiting for rescue took precedence. We had been
living on the sparse provisions Marcelo had managed to gather together,
which he distributed among us in a kind of ritual that left us nominally
satisfied from a psychological standpoint more than anything.
A few little cookies, small jars of jam, dried fruit, chocolates, some
bottles of wine and liquor . . . these were all the edibles we shared in tiny
rations that nevertheless seemed immense in this scenario of striking poverty.
Every crumb, every scrap of food, which under normal circumstances
would have passed unnoticed, now took on unknown depths. It became a gift,
an almost ceremonial moment of satisfaction.
When I received my ration of liquor in an upturned deodorant cap, with
not even a full teaspoon shaking inside like a deep ocean, it glittered before
my eager eyes, seeming to spill over the sides during its brief journey toward
my mouth. In that instant I could anticipate the burning sensation that I would
feel on the tip of my tongue before what I could almost perceive as the liquid
running through my veins.
After the second day on the mountain, the initial period of shock passed
and we began to feel hungry, so we indulged ourselves by talking about food.
In one exercise that was a somewhat absurd and masochistic game, each of us
added a detail, remembered a taste, suggested a way of preparing a meal, or
discussed the secret of its texture or flavor. We discussed which restaurant
prepared a dish best, or who among our families could cook the best. Why
did we take such pleasure in this? Maybe because the drama we were facing
still hadn’t fully unraveled.
I think that despite the horror of the first three or four days, we were
still looking at the affair as a big mishap, a misfortune that was very serious
but not definitive, and so we were comparing the hunger that plagued us to
that of a poorly provisioned camp.
The idea that the long-awaited rescue would not come and that the end
of our provisions would just barely precede the end of our lives came later
and settled gradually into our consciousness, which was slow to accept the
reality.
By the fifth day we had already stopped having those conversations
about food. The lack of nourishment was not only making us weak and tired,
but making us profoundly restless, like any animal desperately hunting for
sustenance, digging frantically in the ground, running back and forth, sniffing
every last corner within its reach, confronting any danger, waiting hours at
the entrance to a cave, overcoming the impossible, developing unforeseen
skills, traveling miles along unfamiliar terrain. But for humans, profound
hunger comes with the additional problem that we are acutely aware of the
consequences of not satisfying that hunger, so that for us, the hunt—as
desperate as any animal’s—is compounded by anxiety. The absent food that
we were so feverishly seeking became the possibility of life itself, trapped as
we were in that lifeless world of rock and snow.
I am starving to death. I had said that phrase many times when I came
home from school, running to the refrigerator to look for ham, cheese, and
yogurt so that I could endure the wait until dinner. But starving to death was
an experience too distant for our imaginations at the time. We were living in
a country where extreme poverty didn’t exist, and we knew the effects of
severe malnutrition only from the news reports from poor and remote
countries. And even so, that malnutrition was always a result of famines,
slow and grand-scale processes in which the shortage of food facilitated the
outbreak of diseases, which were ultimately the cause of death. But what
would it be like to truly starve to death?

In those endless hours of waiting, our thoughts run and explore everything
around us, like a desperate animal that seeks only with its eyes and its sense
of smell.
Stone, snow, metal, plastic, rock, the stuffing of the cushions,
cardboard, paper, glass, leather. Can we eat leather? It comes from a cow, of
animal origin, but it also has chemicals in it so we can’t eat it, nor could we
digest it.
I look at everything around us one more time. Stone, snow, metal,
plastic, rock, cardboard, paper, glass, leather, a finger from the hand of that
body, barely visible over there in its impromptu grave.
The thought horrifies me. I must be crazy. They will come to rescue us,
and even if not, those of us who are strongest will be able to climb the
mountain in front of us and seek help. But after a short time, I go back to
looking at everything that I can see or imagine around us. Maybe I have
missed something, something we could find nourishment in, something that
may be hidden in such a way that we aren’t immediately able to recognize it.
Rock, snow, metal, plastic, glass, cloth, wool. Can we eat wool? It’s
dyed, it might poison us, and on top of that we don’t even have much of it.
Rock, snow, metal, plastic, cloth, glass, a little strip of translucent,
transparent skin visible under the thin layer of snow covering it. Once again, I
must be crazy. They will come to rescue us, and even if not, we know that on
the other side of that mountain is Chile, the green valleys of Chile. This will
all be just a memory. We will tell the story for years to come of the extreme
experience we had when we were young, and how they came to save us just
as we had finished the last of our meager rations. We aren’t moving very
much, we don’t use up much energy, we will be able to make it.
But the thought, like a stubborn little animal, does not take long to cross
my mind again. Metal, snow, wood, rock, cloth, leather . . . And I call my
mind back to order. Don’t worry, don’t look, they are going to come soon to
rescue us.

My friend Marcelo, who was the leader of the group, loudly repeated his
certainty of rescue. He had said it from the first day, and, despite the passage
of time, he was adapting his optimistic message to the new circumstances. At
first it was a question of the simple calculation of the hours it might take for
authorities to notice that the airplane had gone missing and to organize the
rescue. Days later he proposed the possibility that a land rescue was on its
way. Although these conjectures seemed less and less believable to me, it
wasn’t until the fifth day that I became fully aware of the reality, when three
of us from the group tried to climb the mountain facing us, the mountain we
believed was our only obstacle to reaching the valleys of Chile.
My cousin Adolfo was one of the participants on that first exploration,
which tried to reach the summit but returned shortly before nightfall without
having made it even halfway to the slope. He had seen with his own eyes
how insignificant the white fuselage was, how from a few hundred yards
above, it became almost invisible in the immensity of the valley. When he
returned, he took the first opportunity he had to tell me:
“They’ll never be able to see us. It’s basically impossible for them to
find us. We’re going to have to eat the bodies.”
Hearing it said out loud gave me a kind of relief. The crazy and
persistent idea that I had stubbornly been pushing away was now out there,
neatly expressed by someone much closer to me than a friend or even a
brother.
Adolfo and I were cousins on both our mothers’ and fathers’ sides, and
we had shared much of our lives together. We were closer than brothers, and
we knew each other so well that to hear him say that was like hearing my
own voice. It was also the confirmation that my idea wasn’t so preposterous,
that, on the contrary, it signified a faint glimmer of light along our path.
Although unimaginably difficult and terrible, perhaps it opened a possibility
of survival.
Without either of us influencing the other, each of us had thought of the
idea in our own inner silence, and the moment had arrived to discuss it
together so that it was no longer just a suspicious and solitary thought,
desperate and obsessive; it was something we could communicate, something
we were obliged to share with the others.
It didn’t take us long to realize that others had already thought of the
same thing. From then on, the idea was one more element in that scene of
desolation and abandonment. We gathered together to discuss it, huddled
close. We expressed the idea and then kept quiet, seeking in their eyes the
thoughts of those who had still not spoken up.
Some were convinced that we had to do it, that there was no other way.
It was either that or die; it was that simple. Others did not share that
conviction, perhaps because they were keeping their hope of rescue alive, the
likelihood of which seemed increasingly more remote, or perhaps because
they preferred death to having to eat human flesh, out of sheer disgust, out of
fear of a divine or human punishment for breaking that universal taboo.
Marcelo was one of those who most vehemently resisted considering
the idea, but I, with a huge effort on my part, managed to convince him,
although I don’t give myself any credit for that. Reality, already convincing
enough, was the best argument. Everything else was merely words.
It’s difficult to know what lay behind each refusal. Often the things we
say are not the true motives that drive our actions. We had an extreme choice
in front of us, which we never thought we would face, a choice not easy to
process under any conditions, let alone at such an urgent time.
Most of us were too young and had barely taken any steps in making
our own decisions beyond the safety of our homes and the somewhat rigid
system of values that we had learned from our families. But that world had
been smashed to pieces along with the airplane, and we fell into another
place, where we had to become adults in the space of four or five days. We
had to become people capable of facing decisions of such magnitude that
there were no models, no resources, and no cases we knew of in the history of
humanity that could influence us or that we could use as a guideline.
Up to that point, most of us had never faced a decision more difficult
than what subject to study at school, whether to start or end a relationship,
whether to accept or reject a job offer. But up there in the snow, with our
bodies exhausted and on the brink of starvation, laboring to breathe the
oxygen-deprived air, we had to decide whether or not to eat the flesh of the
dead who surrounded us, and that decision was nothing short of the choice
between life and death itself.
A choice that could have filled months of analysis and debate had to be
decided within hours, days at the most. We had no more time than that to
overcome a taboo thousands of years old, and we couldn’t even consult
anyone other than our own consciences, discussing it as we did for a long
time that afternoon inside the fuselage, in twilight that deepened until we
found ourselves talking in almost complete darkness. Our voices with no
faces attached kept arguing in increasingly lower tones, with phrases that
were interspersed with spaces of prolonged and heavy silence, when each of
us, even those who had already decided to do it, was still asking himself how
it would be done. Will I be able to do it? Who will bring himself to do it first?
Who will we start with?
Roberto Canessa explained to us the science of how we were wasting
away when the subject was broached for the first time in the presence of the
entire group. He, as a medical student, understood better than all of us the
basic principles of metabolism: the proteins that are converted into sugar, the
fat that’s transformed into proteins.
The explanation was simple, but all of our thoughts went far beyond the
scientific process. The free proteins were inside our dead friends, who could
no longer grant us permission to use their flesh.
 Those of us who were alive could express our consent, yes, and so we
mutually offered each other our bodies, which, being Catholic, many of us
compared to communion. Jesus, too, had offered his flesh and his blood to
give us life.
In that first long and painful debate, many had actively expressed their
opposition, while others kept a resigned or doubtful silence, or perhaps a
silence of quiet acceptance. Some spoke in favor of it and some spoke against
it, but even those who were most firmly for our resolution were not
indifferent to the voices of dissent, because the exchange of ideas that we
were maintaining aloud was only amplifying the personal dialogue that to a
greater or lesser extent existed inside each one of us, however unconsciously.
In those hours of interior and exterior deliberation, with clumsy phrases
and simple words spoken weakly, we seemed to focus on the questions that
had haunted humanity for millennia, about philosophy, ethics, the concepts of
matter and of spirit and the relationships between them, the duty toward our
fellow human beings, the sense of respect for the dead, and the blurred limits
of our right to life.
We didn’t all see things in the same light, but despite that, there was a
tacit feeling that using the bodies to survive was not an individual choice but
a decision that must be made by the whole group. This communal group
sentiment never left us, and in it we were growing into a single body, which
helped us to feel that we were not alone in our decisions.
It was as if each of us were an integral part of a higher and collective
consciousness, which sheltered us without lessening our individual freedom.
I believe that this group feeling of belonging, of support, helped many
in their decision and made the whole process less painful.
The reciprocal offering of our bodies came to be the greatest expression
of that community spirit. Those of us who were alive could do so, and there
were neither exceptions nor dissent with regard to this fact, somehow
confirming that nobody was desperately clinging to their own flesh.
The desire to be useful, to help create life, prevailed over the idea that
after death we would be sacrosanct, and we all understood that there was a
value higher than the innate respect for the inanimate flesh that somehow,
sooner or later, is destined to disappear anyway because it is part of the
material and corruptible world.
The eighth day was when Gustavo, Roberto, and Adolfo decided to act.
There was no more time to think about it. We had only another day or two at
most before we would be too weak to even drag ourselves to where the
bodies were lying.
The deed itself was not easy either, because they didn’t have adequate
tools for it. A shard of glass from a broken bottle was the improvised knife
they used to make the first cut. Despite that hindrance they managed to cut
small slivers of meat, which they put on a piece of metal to dry in the sun.
I was inside the fuselage when they brought me one of those tiny
slivers. My cousins Daniel Fernández and Adolfo supported me, like nurses
who were preparing to administer medicine and wait for their patient to take
it.
I swallowed it with disgust but with unwavering resolve. Some others,
in order to manage it, had swallowed the piece of meat packed in a handful of
snow. That wasn’t necessary for me. I felt my entire body rejecting that tiny
bite, but nevertheless I felt the satisfaction of having overcome an enormous
obstacle—a taboo thousands of years old had been chewed and crushed in my
mouth, and a sense of a duty fulfilled gave me a certain peace of mind.
Carlitos had joked about the taste to cheer up the others. But that little
piece of frozen meat did not have any flavor. It was tough, odorless, and very
small, completely neutral to the senses but with huge significance to our
minds. It was, moreover, the first dose of a chance at life.
Not everybody ate on that first day. The facts had calmed the spoken
debate, but it continued for most of us inside our souls. Perhaps some were
still wondering whether it was right to do it; others were already convinced
but were waiting for the right moment, like one gathering his strength for a
task he knows will be irreversible.
There was no longer any room for disagreement, but the hunger
continued. Those tiny little pieces of flesh gave us nourishment but they
didn’t soothe our appetites.
By the tenth day everybody was eating, even those who had the hardest
time deciding. Everyone had a motive for doing it that had helped him in the
deep recesses of his soul, such as returning to see his parents or children, to
not fail his loved ones, to fulfill his established destiny, to carry out this
dream or that project, or simply to live.
The subject was no longer a cause for debate, and the bodies of our
friends had become our only food. We had managed to transform an abyss of
incomprehension and doubt into survival, but we were all full of sorrow.
From that point on, the feeling that we were one single body became
almost palpable. We had become blood brothers: those of us who miserably
shared that chalice and the others, those who were no longer with us but who
had left us their flesh as a gift of life.
 4

DEATH

The nights were interminable, and we could never fall into a deep sleep,
could never temporarily escape that cramped dwelling in which we were
sleeping all packed together, some lying on the inclined metal of the plane
that had once been the floor, others curled up on the curved side of the
fuselage. All of us shivering from the cold, arranging our bodies as best we
could, trying with the slightest changes of position to relieve the strain in our
necks and backs, to avoid the stabbing pain of the sharp metal on our thin
flesh, searching by instinct alone for a comfort that we knew in advance was
not to be found.
By now we were no longer constantly hoping for rescue, no longer in an
almost perpetual state of expectation. Moreover, we knew that they weren’t
even searching for us. We had heard that on the small radio we used for
listening to the news, and even that shocking, terrible blow had settled into
serene awareness.
We were abandoned, left to our own fate in the middle of the cordillera
of the Andes, with no tools but our own minds and our quickly weakening
bodies.
Even though our uncertainty about our fate was even more extreme than
it had been in the first days, there was a kind of peace among us, either
because of the tremendous weariness caused by making such heavy
decisions, or because we were now preparing for something even more
difficult and dangerous.
Within that calm, routines were developing little by little, and in what
had initially been a solid block of pain and horror, there began to emerge
nuances and small pleasures that we were careful to distribute fairly.
 One of the advantages that we could enjoy was that of sleeping in a
more protected place inside the fuselage, so every night, we rotated positions
in that jumbled and tangled human wheel so that the privilege wasn’t always
awarded to the same people.
The wounded slept in hammocks, which we built with steel tubes and
the netting from the luggage racks so they would be spared from accidental
blows and from other bodies pressing against their injured limbs.
Our ability to organize ourselves to survive and the routines that we
created were reassuring aspects, but where were we heading? We were alone
in the most inhospitable of environments, and we had found a solution to the
problem of food, but if we didn’t manage to get out of there, death was only a
question of time.
My friend Marcelo was no longer acting as the leader of the group, and
we were beginning to feel that void. The news that the search had been called
off seemed to affect him very deeply. His optimism about the rescue had
sustained us from the start, but the possibility that it wouldn’t come had never
even entered his mind.
Despite how well I knew Marcelo, I’m still not altogether clear on what
caused the change we all noticed in him. Perhaps he thought he had
inadvertently deceived us with his overstated optimism, or he felt
disconcerted with the world that was turning its back on us, destroying his
vision of society as a coherent and orderly whole. Perhaps, too, he could no
longer believe in God, whom he had trusted with all his heart and who had
left us utterly and completely abandoned.
In the first hours after the crash, Marcelo’s constant encouragement and
his role as captain of the team had been essential for rebuilding our spirits. He
took measures so we wouldn’t freeze to death, organized the collective work,
and oversaw the distribution of the provisions. But even during the long and
painful debate about whether or not to use the dead bodies, Marcelo, at first
entirely opposed to the idea, was little by little abandoning his role as leader.
He often expressed feelings of guilt, blaming himself for the trip.
“If I die, you can eat my body,” I had told him in my efforts to convince
him to eat the flesh of the dead. “I’m not going to need it and it might mean
life for you.”
He had made me the same offer, and perhaps that mutual exchange
helped him understand that a dead body is only flesh, an empty shell.
 If I die . . . If you die . . . We had once said these same words in our
childhood games when we were pretending to be cowboys from our comic
books about the Old West, shouting: “No fair! You’re dead, you’re dead!”
And I would drop to the floor with my eyes closed. One, two, three,
four . . . How long do you have to stay dead after the other one points at you
and says, “Bang, bang”? “Don’t move, I killed you, you’re dead!”
Actual death was truly very distant to us then; it touched only adults or
old people. To be dead was to be still, like the little fish I had had as a child,
which I sometimes discovered floating unmoving in my fish tank.
“One of the fish died!” I screamed, more with indignation than grief,
when I had found that one of them had stopped following its zigzagging path
behind the glass and floated, motionless.
During one intensely cold night inside the fuselage, I heard something
disturbing that kept me alert.
“What was that?” I asked the person next to me in a whisper. He didn’t
answer. Perhaps he was asleep.
There had been a noise like a clap of thunder but deeper, a sound more
powerful, with a resonance different from anything I had ever heard before.
The silence returned. I closed my eyes.
Shortly afterward I heard it again, like a distant intermittent and muffled
gunfire. That time I didn’t ask what it was, not even when it sounded again,
like deep drums vibrating at a distance.
The night seemed to be alive, and the tomblike silence of the mountain
was full of incomprehensible voices.
Why did those distant sounds disturb me so much? The night, although
mysterious and profound, was foreign to us. Our pressing concern was being
able to escape, to go home. Nevertheless, every distant sound startled me,
perhaps because it awakened my fears of the night, the eternal night, the one
that would separate me forever from my family, from my home, from my
loved ones. Forever, because I no longer believed in the joyful heavenly
reunions I used to imagine when one of my grandparents died.
Perhaps we would all die in our time, as I had seen in my childhood
with the horses on my grandfather’s cattle ranch, dying gently with no
promise of heaven.
Adults always had an explanation for their deaths: He was sick, He was
old, or He was wounded. But those reasons had never consoled me. I had
only the sorrow of seeing them stretched out as the cold remains of what I
could remember: shiny coats, manes blowing in the wind, with a vitality that
was one with mine when we galloped swiftly together across the field.
When we are children, we feel immortal. Death touches you now and
then but does not sink in its claws. It’s something sad, something unpleasant,
like the slaughtering at the ranch, which affected me deeply, especially the
last moan of the soon-to-be-slaughtered cow that contained a fear that seemed
more human than animal.
I was thirteen years old when I first experienced a loss in my family.
The death of Antonio, one of my uncles, made me understand that death was
possible, that it caused a lot of pain to those who remained alive. He was
someone we would never see again, as if he had traveled to an unknown
reality that people around me tried to describe as a happy place.
Years later I thought very little about death, and I lost the certainty that
it was a move to a better existence. I considered it a great unknown, a
disturbing and eternal night, not very different from what we had all around
us up there, when we were only one small step away from the unfathomable
void of no longer existing.
Now death was right there, so close to us that its frequency had already
stripped the solemnity from its isolated apparitions. We saw our friends die,
and we couldn’t even cry for them. I couldn’t cry for my cousin Daniel Shaw
when the expeditionaries later found him up on the mountain, still strapped
into his seat, with his skin blackened by the sun and cold. The pain that you
cannot express is terrible when it stays within, burning you up inside.
One night blended into the next, enveloping us in its monotony as we
were shut up in the fuselage by a feeble wall made out of bags, suitcases, and
pieces of screen.
We had managed to make some blankets out of the seat covers, and we
spread the cushions out to soften the hardness of the metal a bit. We had a
good supply of cigarettes and nearly everybody smoked. The praying of the
rosary and any conversation among us was somehow comforting, in the midst
of so much anguish.
But there were also unusual nights, depending on what was happening
outside of our wretched dwelling, which sometimes seemed to shake from a
furious wind or became a much-appreciated refuge during a storm, when we
would hear the soft drumming of the snow against the metal.
 When it was calm outside, we could better hear the distant sounds.
Many times in the morning we would comment to each other about
those nocturnal sounds and couldn’t make out any change in the landscape
that we could attribute them to.
Perhaps there are active volcanoes nearby, we told ourselves, trying to
find an explanation. Or maybe it was related to the sound that the huge
masses of snow made when they detached from the peaks and fell down the
mountain.
Inside, the twenty-seven of us always crowded together in that cramped
and inhospitable fuselage, which we had been getting used to with ingenuity
and perseverance as best we could, and which we already recognized as our
own, the nearest thing we had to a home, the only thing that was ours in this
cruel, vast solitude.
On Sunday, October 29, it had snowed heavily, as it had for many days,
so we retired early that day to our refuge.
That night it was my turn to have a good sleeping place, far away from
the makeshift wall that closed up the hole in the fuselage. Adolfo was on my
right and Marcelo was on my left. Coche Inciarte and Daniel Fernández were
across from me.
We began our nightly routine, which, in spite of the merciless cold,
allowed us to enjoy a certain warmth and feeling of home.
Some chatted in low voices, and even though we were all very close
together, I couldn’t hear what they were saying. We had become accustomed
to hearing only the person speaking directly to us.
Time passed very slowly, but several hours after having lain down to
rest, the silence was absolute. The wounded, suspended in hammocks, must
have been suffering immensely from the cold since they were no longer
protected by the other bodies.
In my drowsiness I could hear some of those nocturnal sounds that
seemed closer this time, and I even felt a slight vibration.
I thought again about the volcano, about the many earthquakes that
might happen there in the middle of the cordillera without anybody detecting
them. After all, an earthquake, however big it may be, wasn’t something to be
afraid of in our situation.
Suddenly the vibration became much stronger, and a thundering, like a
thousand horses at full gallop, grew around us.
 There was no time to say a word. Something suddenly knocked down
the wall at the entrance, and before I knew what had happened, I found
myself buried under a mass so compact and heavy that I couldn’t move at all.
I realized that an avalanche had covered us completely, filling the
fuselage with snow.
I couldn’t breathe, and I had very little air in my lungs. Death, which we
had spoken of so often, was now present with total certainty, and not because
of starvation or even injury. It came as it usually does, in the most
unexpected and ruthless way.
Fear, terror, nostalgia at leaving life washed over me in what couldn’t
have been more than seconds. The next moments, despite being negligible,
were long enough for images of my entire life to pass before me from past to
present.
In those perfectly clear images, in full color but with no sound, I could
see my grandparents, my parents, and my siblings in a dizzying span of
different ages. Scenes of my life that I had thought were lost forever in my
memory flashed by swiftly, as if they were building a sign of identity that
was accompanying me to an unknown dimension that was slowly revealing
itself to me, until I stopped feeling sorrow at departing life and I became
conscious of an indescribable pleasure.
The images disappeared, and all that remained was the perception of
something wonderful, which attracted the whole of my being with irresistible
force.
I had arrived at the end. I was dead.
Reality was nothing other than that: the intense happiness along that
unknown road that I did not perceive with visual images. There were no
lights or tunnels or angelic beings that accompanied me. There was only a
feeling of peace, impossible to express with words, and I was sure in that
moment that that was the only real truth, not the distant voices that drifted to
me from another world, voices among which I could recognize that of my
cousin Adolfo.
That voice called out to me in anguish, with urgency. It seemed
meaningless. Why was he calling me? Why that tremor of fear or anger?
Why the screams of desperation that were becoming louder? All expression
of alarm or pain seemed absurd and was diminished before the extreme peace
that I was experiencing.
 That voice calling for me and the air that suddenly reached me, giving
me the chance to breathe, were as subtle as a dream, a pale shadow of the
powerful reality that I was so irresistibly drawn to.
In that moment I could have chosen death. It was the easier thing, the
more attractive choice. The more painful thing would be to return to the
world of the living, to the people moving around like mad, trying to save
those still buried under the snow.
But I breathed again, and I instinctively got out as one returns to an
unfinished task, crawling through the tunnel that Adolfo had just finished
digging next to me.
I joined those who were digging desperately to find those who were still
buried. I dug feverishly in the spot where Marcelo had been. I found his face
beneath a thin layer of ice. I broke it near his mouth, but he didn’t breathe.
Marcelo had died. That fact hit me like a blow. All the pain of what we
had been experiencing those sixteen days was extreme, and all the deaths
were terrible, but the death of Marcelo was like a physical rift in the heart, as
had been the death of my cousin. A part of my life was gone with them.
Even so, there was no time to cry for anybody, nor was there time to
think. We kept digging to save any others, although in almost every case it
was too late.
My silent pain, muffled by the circumstances, was not the only pain.
Javier Methol had lost his Liliana in the avalanche, the mother of his
children, the only woman left in the group of survivors. Seven other friends
had also died.
The nineteen of us that remained alive barely fit in that tiny space
between the roof and the thick mattress of snow that filled the fuselage,
forcing us to move around by practically crawling. Just like in the first
moments after the crash, we were badly shaken, and the first action we
organized was to drag the bodies to one side of the minimized space.
Death had shown me both its sweetest and its most bitter faces, first
when I was buried under the snow and then when I discovered Marcelo, who
seemed to be sleeping peacefully. I want to think that he didn’t stop on the
road to that state of indescribable happiness that I had only glimpsed from
that mysterious and vague threshold that separates life from death.
In those few minutes, I had gone through two of the most powerful
experiences of my life. Although I don’t know if I can call the first an
experience of my life, because I think instead it was an advance glimpse of
my own experience of death.
 5

THE MIND

I’m going to get out of here, and I’m going to tell my father how it all
happened. Nando had said that phrase a few days after the crash with such
intensity and conviction that I was sure he would manage to accomplish it.
His sister, Susy, had just died in his arms after several days in agony,
and his mother had died in the crash.
Out of all of us, Nando was without a doubt the one who had the most
reason to feel broken by a fatal destiny, yet his resolve to get out of there
alive gave me an overwhelming sense of security. He is going to make it out
of here, I thought, and if he could get out, it was natural to suppose that
others would be able to make it as well.
I held that conviction, that positive thought, however harsh the
circumstances were and however uncertain the steps seemed, to bring into
reality what sometimes seemed a remote chance.
You might wonder how in all that time we managed to avoid losing our
minds. We were living in the most acutely stressful situation—in increasingly
wretched physical conditions, in a continual state of alertness before existing
and impending dangers—and enduring renewed waves of misfortune in a
sustained crescendo of horror.
At first we thought that we only had to survive one night on the
mountain without freezing to death, and we prayed for rescue to arrive in
time to save the most seriously injured among us. But that painful expectation
was drawn out for over a week, until the last of our minimal provisions were
exhausted, and we had to consider eating the bodies of the dead as our only
means of survival.
On the tenth day we heard the news that the search had been called off.
 To the rest of the world, we were dead, yet we remained living,
increasingly more cohesive and organized in what we called “the Society of
the Snow,” where each of us had a role to perform, and we were all
responsible for each other.
We invented ways to make water and shelter for ourselves, and we
managed to turn the remains of the fuselage into a refuge that, although
miserable, was our only possession on the mountain and even began to feel a
little like a home.
Then the avalanche destroyed everything and killed eight members of
what was already much more than a group of friends, showing us that death
could arrive at any moment in the most unexpected way, whether we ate or
not, whether we were unhurt or badly wounded.
If anyone had thought in those first days that things couldn’t get any
worse, after the avalanche, we discovered that was not the case. Now we
were nineteen people shivering in soaking wet clothes, nearly buried alive in
the tiny space that was left between the top of the fuselage and the bed of
snow carried in by the avalanche.
In this tiny stronghold, where we couldn’t even stand up straight, we
had to start all over again, as all the poor technology we had managed to
create so far had been buried. We no longer had blankets, cushions, or the
small radio we had used to listen to the news. We didn’t even have a way to
make water as we had been doing, melting snow on metal sheets laid out in
the sun. Once again we tried to quench our thirst by sucking on handfuls of
dirty snow. Again, as in the beginning, we had to drag aside corpses to make
space for ourselves, but all these were without exception our close friends.
Among them was the body of Liliana, the wife of Javier, whose
heartbreaking sobbing we shared in our own silence.
How did we avoid losing our minds? It’s difficult to explain how we
managed to maintain our lucidity, to constantly devise solutions in the
harshest of conditions, how we were rebuilding, in the face of each adversity,
a kind of equilibrium not at all resembling resignation, because another idea
arose from that, another proposal, another hope.
Of course there were moments when we were completely shattered, and
I don’t think any of us made it through the whole time without experiencing
periods when he thought he was losing his sanity. We all occasionally fell
into bouts of deep depression, but then the group would notice it and act in
support of that person, like a living organism trying to rebuild its own weak
cells.
Certainly we didn’t all have the same degree of psychological stability.
There were those of us who were stronger, and there were those of us who
were more vulnerable, but without the others, no individual could have
sustained an emotional state that would allow him to deal with the situation.
That successful dynamic of support present in the group has been
analyzed from many different angles. Some people attribute perhaps too
much merit to the fact that most of us had been on a team that played rugby, a
cooperative game that favors effort and sacrifice in pursuit of a common
objective.
The truth is that we functioned as an integrated system whose individual
parts gave support to each other, with each individual change that could
affect the group being compensated for by the rest, as a way of maintaining
the whole in an equilibrium. It’s difficult to understand at first glance because
everything moves, and everything loses its balance at one time or another, as
happened to each of us individually. But as a group we were able by our very
interaction to restabilize the center, which kept us active and sane.
Of course that behavior of the group, while being a great support for
everyone, in no way overshadowed the unavoidable individual efforts we
each had to make.
From the very beginning it was clear to me that I couldn’t escape that
individual effort, and I always actively tried to stay positive because
everything depended on that positivity, and the direction of my thoughts
depended solely on me.
For example, since I was convinced there was no alternative to eating
the flesh of the dead bodies, I tried to approach it in the most rational way
possible. I thought that the various levels of disgust we felt facing the food
were not intrinsic qualities of the food itself, but attributes that our own mind
gives them, and as such we could conquer them.
I struggled to make small achievements one step at a time, first being
able to eat what others brought me, then going myself to get food, and later,
along with my two cousins, cutting the pieces that we distributed among the
rest.
From that point on, that role of cutting the meat fell to the three of us,
and they all called us “the Triumvirate.” That sustained role of the cousins
within the desolate society of the mountain has led to us being classified as
unfeeling in later analyses of the story. From my point of view, the assumed
responsibility was due not at all to a lack of sensitivity but to the fact that we
were the eldest in the group, and we had a good understanding and
relationship among ourselves because of the strong bonds of kinship and a
shared life together.
During the night, after the avalanche, after hours spent practically
immobile in grief and uncertainty, a weak glow through the windows made
us aware of the arrival of dawn. We could hear the muffled howling of the
wind, and our own voices had a strange echo because of the smallness of the
space and the way we were so isolated from the outside.
To our accumulation of uncertainties, one more was added: How much
snow was there on top of the fuselage? Would we be able to get out
eventually or would this become our tomb?
I forced myself to conquer my fears. Perhaps the layer covering us
wasn’t so deep, and the snow would all melt away. I concentrated on what
was positive about the situation: we were very well protected inside. For the
first time we didn’t feel cold, and the kind of igloo we inhabited shielded us
from the hostilities of the outside world.
Just as after the initial crash, we began to feel hunger after the first
hours of shock and confusion.
The bodies, that nourishment that we had found to be our only recourse
after long hours of rumination, were outside, surely buried under a deep layer
of soft white snow impossible to walk on.
There were also bodies right next to us, but at first it seemed
unthinkable to use them. We had barely managed to eat pieces of the frozen
meat at all a week earlier. Only those of us who were working outside,
cutting the pieces, really knew where the food came from. The others
received their ration of frozen meat, usually left to dry in the sun, and that
facilitated the ability to forget where the meat came from, although it still
required a large effort.
Since I was one of the ones cutting the meat, after the avalanche I was
one of the best prepared to confront the experience of eating the dead that
were right by our sides. Even so, seeing Roberto tearing out the first pieces
from a slightly warm body that was releasing steam from the torn area made
me retch violently.
 Eating meat that was still wet and bloody was a very difficult challenge
that not everyone could overcome. Dominance over one’s thoughts is arduous
and constant work, which requires rigorous discipline.
Throughout that long and painful experience in the Andes, my cousins
and I managed, only with formidable effort, to convince each other that our
actions were necessary and practical, and to forcefully release ourselves from
the beliefs previously acquired in what we might have once called our normal
lives.
To do so, it was essential to strip away the deep associations of the past
from our actions and maintain that strict separation to be able to act.
We often talked about it during our long hours of isolation and
reflection, and we wondered if we were becoming wild, savage animals.
During those talks, we came to the conclusion that the actions we were taking
simply could not be assessed or judged through the eyes of our previous
lives.
The mind, initially responsible for the rejection of the idea, later—when
it became a matter of survival—had the power to become the instrument
capable of separating the actions themselves from the cultural weight they
carry with them. It was up to us to control our minds in the interest of sanity
and hope, as these things were as essential for survival as food.

We are here, we are here . . .

Amid those long hours of waiting, by the time the initial certainty of
rescue was beginning to dissolve, it cost us nothing to try to transmit
messages with our minds, and so we tried to do it.
The efforts were individual, and we had no definitive method for
implementing it.
I used to choose a time when I was especially calm, and I tried to
concentrate on airplanes, helicopters, people gathered around maps
discussing our probable location. It was to those people that I tried to send
my message.
We are here, we are here, we are alive, we are here . . .
When I did it sitting outside, my gaze traveled across the peaks
surrounding us, like a device combing a territory, capable of transmitting
exact coordinates.
When doing it during the nights, in the darkness of the fuselage, I
imagined my mind sending clear and powerful signals, able to indicate where
we were like a transmitter.
When we learned that the search had been called off, our desperation to
communicate became even greater.
From that point on we appealed to our most profound emotional
connections, and our telepathic efforts were focused on our mothers or our
girlfriends, with the conviction that women are usually more sensitive to that
type of phenomenon.
I am alive, I am alive, we repeated tirelessly in our transmissions. I am
alive, Mom, I am alive, I repeated, thinking of my mother.
In the nighttime the moon helped us concentrate our thoughts and the
messages we were sending. That gleaming object in the sky, the same moon
our mothers might be looking at in that very moment, was an element that
brought us closer, despite the uncertainty and the distance.
With my gaze locked on the moon, which shone in the sky just as she
might be seeing it, I said again, I am alive, Mom, I am alive.
Some people say that the luxuries that civilization offers us might
somehow limit the practice of certain mental abilities and that these develop
better in primitive societies, in which contact with nature and the lack of
other means allow the use of such resources.
We were living outside of civilization but with the knowledge we
carried from it, so the conditions in which we exercised those attempts at
transmission were, from that point of view, very favorable.
Some time later we learned that precisely those mothers and girlfriends
being addressed in our rudimentary telepathic messages were the ones who,
throughout our entire absence, never doubted for a single moment that we
were alive.

On the third day after the avalanche, when we were still confined in our
shelter, someone tried to light a cigarette with the lighter and couldn’t get it
lit. He tried with another cigarette and the same thing happened. The initial
tiny flames wavered and then suddenly went out.
 “Oxygen! We’re low on oxygen!”
In an instant we all joined together and broke through a thin area of the
fuselage to let air in. We all felt better, and we also realized that the layer of
snow covering us wasn’t as deep as we had feared.
Some of us immediately tried to get out of our prison, making our way
through a narrow tunnel we were digging in the snow toward the cockpit,
where we knew there was a way to the outside.
We couldn’t hear the wind yet, so I dug and dug, wanting to get out into
the fresh air. That was one of the few things we had always had in
abundance, the value of which we were only just beginning to appreciate in
the moment we found ourselves without it.
The weather might be bad, but even so I would prefer to be outside,
breathing deeply in the cold air and seeing once again my friends the
mountains.
Some of us got out, like moles emerging from underground tunnels, and
we were met with a magnificent day.
The deep-blue sky and the white mantle of shining snow seemed to wait
in majestic silence for us to arrive and roll about on the ground in happiness,
celebrating our freedom. The snow had purified everything, as if it had put
our home in order. The area surrounding the fuselage was no longer filthy
and covered with waste, debris, and gruesome remains.
A white and unpolluted surface extended all around us, and not even a
single footprint marred it, nor was there a single cloud in that immense blue
vault that shone in all its brilliance.
I breathed deeply in that pure air, and I felt myself one with nature with
an intensity I had never known before. I had always considered myself to be a
part of nature, but in that moment I experienced it in all its power and
infinity.
My spirit expanded into a reality without limits and came back to me,
enriched with a knowledge that was not intellectual. Not only did I feel part
of the universe, but I seemed able to embrace it and live its fullness in every
breath.
I didn’t seek God as an entity separate from myself. God was there, in
my own self, in that limitless mind that contained everything.
I heard the voices of my friends calling to me. With some effort I
returned to the limits of my body, but I carried with me that profound peace
and the joy of grand revelations.
“Come on, Eduardo, come help. We have to make the tunnel wider so
the others can get out.”
Smiling, I joined them in the task. Like one who has lived something
indescribable and extraordinary, I guarded it closely in my heart. Nothing had
really changed, but everything felt suddenly easier for me.
Without knowing it, I had spontaneously experienced something called
a state of meditation. Those states, which can be reached at times through
elaborate techniques and gradual training, have several beneficial effects, like
slowing the metabolism and the consumption of oxygen, and they are deeply
helpful for handling the inevitable tensions that come from everyday life. The
act of surviving up on the mountain forced me to achieve this state, and after
that first experience, it was easy for me to repeat it.
So that was my method for surviving—a complete break or detachment
from what might otherwise have been completely intolerable for me. It was a
defense mechanism, but—perhaps because of the natural majesty in which it
was forged—instead of building up a wall, which would later be difficult for
me to break down, it did the opposite: it united me with the universe and with
other living beings in a profound way.
That capacity of the mind to embrace infinity, that path toward an
authentic spirituality, is one of the most beautiful lessons that my life on the
mountain left me with.
 6

HOPE

In our first days of survival on the mountain, we lived in the constant hope of
rescue, but our thoughts were also focused on the people who had been
missing since the crash. It seemed like at any moment we would see them
coming from the south, as we had seen Carlos Valeta before he was lost to us
forever.
We imagined that there might be survivors taking refuge in the tail of
the plane, which had perhaps fallen into the snow somewhere, not too far
away, and that the others were wondering what had become of us. We were
also conscious of the likelihood that they were dead, and we remained in that
duality of optimism and resignation, making the same conjectures about them
that the world as a whole was no doubt making about us.
Almost immediately after the crash, Marcelo, in his immutable desire to
reassure us, had shared his utterly logical conclusions with us. The plane had
crashed at three thirty in the afternoon, so it made sense to think that our
disappearance wouldn’t have been noticed until about four, and the soonest
the rescue party would have been able to leave would be around five, a time
when a flight into the cordillera was unthinkable because there were so few
hours of daylight left.
So from the dawn of our first full day on the mountain, we were
expecting them to come get us at any moment.
At midmorning, Marcelo asked us to spell the letters SOS in the snow
and to form a cross by stomping heavily in the snow. We managed to do it,
but only with great effort because of the fatigue we felt from the altitude.
We searched the sky, listening for the slightest sounds, and only at the
end of the afternoon did we hear an airplane, although we couldn’t see it
because it flew above the clouds.
We prepared for a second night in the cordillera, with more space inside
the fuselage since three more people had died and we had had time to take all
the other bodies outside. We were also better protected from the elements
because we had been able to build more, adding some other materials to the
precarious wall that covered the opening at the back of the plane.
Nevertheless, the first shadows of doubt were beginning to haunt us.
Why, in that long day, had they not come for us?
We still didn’t really understand how difficult that task was; we thought
it would be fairly easy to find us just by following the flight path of the
Fairchild, which, according to the standard routine, would have been reported
to the control towers.
Marcelo, just as he took it upon himself to ensure that we stayed active,
continued to encourage us, telling us that rescue would come soon. But for
our peace of mind, we wanted some further evidence to substantiate his
conviction.
On the third day there was still not the slightest sign that they were
searching for us.
On the fourth day our hope had already turned into an agonizing tension
and became even worse in the afternoon, when we realized that night would
soon be falling and that we hadn’t had even the slightest bit of news.
Then suddenly two airplanes appeared from behind the mountain facing
us, and they crossed the sky from west to east, gently tipping their wings.
The relief and the joy that consumed me showed how much, until that
point, I had actually been suffering. My mind—in an effort to protect me—
had not allowed me to fully acknowledge it until I saw those planes. We
jumped up and down, with our arms in the air, hugging each other, laughing.
Here they are, they found us! At last they’ve come!
Then, silence once again.
That exceedingly quick flight, without any definite sign that they’d seen
us, had passed by like a flash of misleading happiness, which, upon fading
away, made me feel the anguish with even greater intensity.
Carlos Roque, the flight mechanic and the only surviving member of the
flight crew, assured us that the tipping of the wings was a signal used to
indicate that they had seen us. But the time passed without anything
happening, and our doubt turned into a quiet disappointment.
 Marcelo’s reasoning continued, giving us arguments so we wouldn’t
lose hope.
“The helicopters probably can’t fly at this altitude, so they’ll have to
send a land rescue to save us.”
We pressed him: “Then why haven’t the airplanes circled over us? Why
haven’t they dropped supplies for us?”
Marcelo had all the answers. He had made it entirely his mission to
reassure us and give us confidence.
“Pilots know perfectly well that anything dropped here from an airplane
would be completely buried in the snow.”
So great was our uncertainty that every answer seemed to make sense.
Just as those of us who were completely healthy cared devotedly for the
wounded, there was also an impeccable logic that came to the aid of our hope
every time it was seen to falter.
Marcelo still said: “God saved us from the crash. Why would He let us
die here?”
Even though the majority of the group shared that faith-based feeling of
protection, I was among those who doubted that divine will guaranteed
salvation for those of us who survived.
Why some and not others? What was that strange distribution of life and
death based on, that distribution that seemed completely random?
But Marcelo insisted that we couldn’t understand the enigmatic ways of
God with minds that are only human.

Those almost-imperceptible black dots just below the crest of the peaks, or
the heaps of very distant rocks that emerged from the snow like small, dark
protrusions, sometimes looked to me like groups of people slowly making
their way toward us.
On the second day after the crash, I thought I saw the search parties. It
looked to me like they were moving, and I was sure that if I had binoculars, I
would be able to see them walking steadily toward the remains of the
Fairchild, wearing thick coats and lugging heavy packs, in which they were
surely carrying supplies and warm coats. Some time later, when we could no
longer count on the rescue, I imagined they were mountain climbers, and I
thought that we should pay attention to their route in case they started to
move away and we had to climb to them and ask for help.
I would call over some of my friends to show them what I was seeing.
“There, there! Don’t you see them? They’re moving! Look, don’t you
see them? Don’t you see them coming for us?”
And for a while other eyes joined mine in scrutinizing the distant peaks.
The others watched only briefly, and they disagreed unconvincingly, as
if despite their skepticism it would sadden them to take from me that little
flicker of hope that comforted me.
But, inevitably, even I came to the conclusion that the supposed group
of people was always in the same spot and that I had been wrong, just as I
had been the day before, and just as I surely would be again the next day.
It’s difficult to understand how my eyes, even in my eagerness to see a
possibility of help, contrary to all sense of proportion, could interpret those
small, pointed, and certainly immobile rock projections that stuck out of the
snow as people.
The fact is that those unmoving rocks gave me flashes of hope, and they
filled my hours of quiet expectation.

There comes a moment when you get used to the environmental conditions,
no matter how harsh they are. The food, the cold, and the miserable refuge
that we shared began to be part of our normal life, while the previous life—
my family, my house, my room, my studies in architecture, the places I
usually went—seemed like a remote dream. However much I missed them,
they existed only as vague and surreal memories.
I slept very little during the nights, and in those hours of sleeplessness,
which felt eternal, I had a strange perception of the space surrounding me. I
felt like the fuselage was enormous, with distant and expanded walls, and
when someone lit a lighter, the small flame at once gave me back awareness
of the true dimensions of the enclosure.
During those long nights it was not only the space that seemed to take
on a different dimension in the darkness, but also my thoughts, which
sometimes became obsessive and repetitive or ran free in the hazy boundary
between sleep and wakefulness.
 After the initial shock, the news that the search had been canceled
plunged me into a strange state of calm. The end of the agonizing suspense
and of the discussions about when and how the rescuers would come to find
us, and the certainty that if we were going to get out of there, it would be
through our own efforts, helped to generate that sense of calm.
“Are we ever going to get out of this?” we sometimes asked each other
in our daily conversations seated outside the fuselage, and someone always
lifted the spirits of the others, even though the next day the roles may have
been reversed.
At nighttime during my sleepless hours, suspended in the middle of that
dark space that could seem limitless to me, the “EXIT” sign glowed with a
greenish light, that sign that remained there despite the damage to the
airplane, undaunted in its absurd message indicating the emergency exit.
Exit. An exit, a departure. A departure from this situation. Returning
home.
One night I understood its significance, and from then on, every night,
that little sign helped me focus on the thought that it was possible to get out
of there.
Just as we might hang a picture on the walls of our rooms or our offices,
a religious image, an emblem, a flag, a photograph of someone or something
we respect and want to remember, as a way to inspire us and keep us from
losing direction, in those nights I had the word exit hanging in the air, shining
in the darkness, to remind me that it was possible to find a way out. We just
had to figure out how.

As soon as we learned that the search had been called off, the idea of
escaping through our own efforts, which some of us had been considering for
several days already, was established as our only possibility.
The huge mountain in front of us was surely hiding an intermediate land
between us and the civilized world. Chile is toward the west, we repeated as a
mantra, which gave us hope.
The mountain, although imposing and very steep, was only one
mountain. We imagined that behind it lay the green valleys of Chile, rural
roads, fields scattered with vineyards, isolated houses we could make our
way to, however rough and fraught with difficulties the journey might be.
Nando had wanted to leave since the first moment he heard the news
that the rescue efforts had been abandoned, and it took a great deal of
persuasion to convince him that trying to walk out at that time of year
without proper clothing, shelter, or preparation was to go to a certain death.
Gustavo suggested that the next day some of us should go on an
exploratory expedition as a way to learn more about our surroundings, which
would also enable them to get some training. Perhaps they might even find
the tail of the plane.
Equipped with makeshift snowshoes and sunglasses, which I had made
myself with pieces of the cockpit windshield and copper wire, Gustavo,
Numa Turcatti, and Daniel Maspons set off on the morning of October 24. It
was the eleventh day of our ordeal in the Andes.
They were wearing thin sweaters over summer shirts since they thought
they would return before nightfall, and it was a sunny day with very little
wind. We watched them move away until their figures became imperceptible
black dots climbing up to an area where we could no longer see them.
When darkness began to fall, we waited for them in vain until the
weather forced us to take shelter in the fuselage. The wind howled furiously
that night, and we prayed for them, as Gustavo had asked us to do before he
left.
We assumed that because of the way they were dressed, they couldn’t
have lasted long out there, and we comforted ourselves by trusting in their
strength and exchanging feeble arguments, like supposing that they may have
found some shelter.
The next day dawned clear and still. We went outside, and for the whole
morning our eyes never left the mountain, scanning it inch by inch.
Near midday we thought we could see tiny shapes moving on top of a
peak. Was it once again only our desire to see them come back alive that
made us see movement among the rocks?
We concentrated on a reference point to gauge whether they were really
moving, and after a while we were convinced.
It was them! With intense joy, we celebrated what seemed to us a
resurrection.
Two hours later they approached the fuselage in a deplorable state.
They looked like they had aged decades. They were leaning against each
other for support, and Gustavo was stumbling like he was blind.
Roberto immediately ran to help them. Their feet were nearly frozen,
and Gustavo, who had lost his sunglasses, had suffered damage to his eyes
from the reflection of the sun on the snow.
After they ate and rested a little, we were able, through their words, to
find out more about the immensity surrounding us. The mountain was so
steep that in some places it was almost a vertical wall. The air up there was so
thin that every step required tremendous effort.
“Why didn’t you come back before dark like you planned?” we kept
asking them.
“By afternoon we weren’t even halfway up the slope, and we didn’t
want to come back without being able to bring you news of what we had
seen.”
That attempt had cost them a night of indescribable cold in which they
had believed they would die, a night they spent punching each other to keep
the blood flowing, holding little hope that they would live to see the day.
When the sunrise illuminated their faces, they couldn’t believe they
were alive. They couldn’t even speak a word until the frost melted a little and
allowed them to part their lips.
We were overjoyed to have them back again. We had started to think
that we would never see them again, but at the same time there seemed to be
nothing but bleak prospects for our future.
Every hope had potential frustration as a counterweight. We had seen
them leave and dreamt that they would return with news that they had seen a
road, a slope with less snow, a potential path that could lead to some
inhabited place. But now, we felt the loss of those hopes almost like another
death.
They had found more scattered bodies, some still buckled into their
seats, and a piece of the wing, which they had used as a sled in their return
down the mountain. But what had they seen? What did they see in the
distance when they were at the highest point?
They hadn’t seen anything. They hadn’t reached the summit, but there
was no indication that there was anything but snow, rock, and more rock.
They saw only that the Fairchild from up above was a nearly invisible
dot, an insignificant little stain on the white expanse of the glacier.
On the fifth of November, another expedition set out, made up of
Carlitos, Roy Harley, and Antonio Vizintín, whom we all called Tintín.
They headed east, a decision that we had discussed extensively. Some
thought that if we followed the sloping eastern valley, we could find a
channel carved from the waters heading west, creating a pass between the
mountains. Others argued that the supposed turn in the valley channel toward
the Pacific didn’t exist, that going to the east was only penetrating deeper into
the desolate lands of the Argentinean Pampas, where we would find nothing
but vast stretches of empty lands.
When the three of them came back from the expedition, Roy and
Carlitos were in very bad shape. Those short test runs also determined which
of us were in the best physical condition to be part of future expeditions.
I was never in any expeditionary group because of the respiratory
problems I had from the altitude. Others, at first strong candidates, had fallen
out of consideration due to their generous but excessive sacrifices, which had
completely depleted them since they hadn’t managed their strength well,
which is just what happened to Numa Turcatti.
Those who were shaping up as expeditionaries came to have special
privileges, like getting the best spots to sleep and unlimited quantities of
meat.
On November 15, Roberto, Nando, and Tintín set off toward the east.
Numa insisted on going with them despite the fact that his legs were terribly
injured and he was incredibly weak because he could hardly eat.
We watched them leave the valley below. The sky was gray and it was a
little windy. As time passed it began to snow, and then suddenly a fierce
blizzard arose.
At times like those we no longer hoped for happy discoveries, we hoped
only to see them return.
We were lucky; they arrived back just in time to take shelter in the
fuselage before the worst of the storm hit.
The snowfall lasted for two days straight, and they couldn’t leave again
until November 17. This time Numa didn’t go with them. He was bitterly
disappointed, but the wounds on his legs had become infected, and we
couldn’t allow him to take part in the expedition.
They left at eight o’clock in the morning, when the snow was still firm.
Roberto was dragging a sled we had made out of part of a suitcase, which
was carrying blankets, snowshoes for walking on soft snow, and several
socks filled with meat. Behind him went Nando and Tintín, each carrying a
backpack.
Five days later they came back to the fuselage and learned the sad news
of the death of the Basque Echavarren, who had never stopped encouraging
us from his makeshift hammock, despite the fact that he couldn’t even walk,
with his gangrenous legs.
Roberto, Nando, and Tintín told us they had found the tail of the plane
unexpectedly and that it had some supplies in it, more warm clothes, and the
battery for the radio in the cockpit.
They had confirmed that the downhill valley didn’t seem to turn to the
west, and so we rejected the expeditions to the east as a means of getting to
Chile.
Our hopes were now focused on making the radio work with the battery
they had found in the tail. They couldn’t carry it because it was too heavy and
sank in the snow, so we thought of bringing the radio to the tail. The first step
was to remove it from the cockpit.
Roy and Roberto dedicated themselves to that task, despite not having
the advanced technical knowledge that was required. They had to figure out
which, among all the complicated instruments of the plane, were the wires of
the radio and which belonged to other systems. They worked tirelessly, using
every last bit of their intuition and basic knowledge of electronics. They
removed the headphones, the microphone, and a plastic panel that was in the
baggage compartment. Each plug they disconnected had a huge bundle of
tiny wires behind it.
Those desperate and bewildered boys, facing the complexity of the
mangled machine, moved feverishly beside the impassivity of the frozen
bodies still stiff in their seats, the two pilots who may have been able to tell
them how to do the task.
At last they removed the shark fin antenna that was fastened to the
outside of the fuselage, and they loaded it all on the sled to bring to where the
tail rested.
Roy was already very weak by that time, but we still asked him to go
with the expeditionaries on the journey to the tail to try to connect the radio.
He insisted that he didn’t have the least experience with that type of radio,
that he wouldn’t be able to do it, and that he didn’t even have the strength to
make the trek.
 All this was definitely true, but this time our hope, like a faint and
elusive ray of sunshine, was pinned on him.
Roy obeyed the mandate of the group, and on the twenty-fourth of
November, they went marching down the valley, dragging the sled with all
the disassembled equipment.
Two days later Nando and Tintín arrived back at the fuselage to get
more meat. The task of connecting the radio was taking longer than they had
expected.
The situation they found back at the fuselage was worrisome. We were
running out of food, and we didn’t have the strength to dig for the other
bodies buried under the snow.
They told us that they had managed to connect over a hundred wires
with the correct connection marked on them, but there were still dozens of
wires that remained unconnected because they had no reference or code that
could shed light on how they should be hooked up. On the tests they had
performed so far, they could hear only static and other random noises.
They stayed another two days in the fuselage to help us dig up more
bodies, and then they set off once again for the tail to rejoin Roberto and Roy.
On the twenty-ninth of November, they all returned to the fuselage in
the middle of a bad storm.
Nando collapsed inside, exhausted from the tremendous effort. His
ascent had been excruciating, struggling against the whiteout blizzard, which
destroyed all visibility, and carrying Roy on his shoulders to keep him from
dying in the snow.
We all comforted Roy, who was nearly lifeless and couldn’t even speak.
They hadn’t been able to repair the radio, so that hope was also
extinguished. Yet something always surfaced, like a constant challenge to
believe once more, to bet again, however weak the chances were. This time it
revolved around the news the boys had heard in the tail when they connected
the small portable radio, which had been recovered after the avalanche, to the
shark fin antenna.
They had heard that the Uruguayan Air Force was preparing a Douglas
C-47 to search for the Fairchild, lost in the cordillera. But that wasn’t all: in
the tail, in the inner part of the plane, they had found an insulating material
that they thought could be used to make sleeping bags, making it possible to
spend nights outside in the elements during a much longer expedition.
 Hope shone again in another area, like a restless butterfly that may leave
for a time but is never gone forever.
Several days passed, which felt like centuries, as we waited for what
would be the final expedition to leave toward the west.
Nando was waiting impatiently for Roberto to decide to leave, and
Roberto was questioning the prudence of going on the expedition at all, now
that the search efforts for the Fairchild had been resumed.
There was no doubt that the proposed search no longer expected to find
survivors, and we also knew all too well how invisible the fuselage was in the
middle of the immensity of the mountain. With those arguments, Nando tried
to convince Roberto that we had few reasons to expect rescue.
Tintín, always willing, also waited for the moment of departure.
Then, on December 11, Numa died. I think this sad event precipitated
the decision to leave.
So the following day, at seven o’clock in the morning, Roberto, Tintín,
and Nando, loaded with their equipment and heavily layered, left to climb the
imposing mountain whose summit hadn’t been reached by any of the
previous expeditions.
I gave each of them a fierce hug with an inner trembling that
accompanies the goodbyes you know may be final.
In general, the destiny of another person, however important it may be
to us, is still someone else’s fate. In this case, the fate of those three boys was
our fate too. Their fate was mine, and that of everyone who was still alive
there, as though our existence was mirrored in theirs in an extraordinary
extension of ourselves.
Their failure or their success would be ours as well, not just because of
solidarity but because their outcome was united with ours in an indissoluble
way.
Nando, Roberto, and Tintín were our last hope. Those of us who
remained in the fuselage could do nothing but wait.
“You are going to get back and hug your father again,” I told Nando
when we were saying our goodbyes, remembering the unwavering
determination he had had from the beginning.
Even if I wasn’t entirely convinced that he was going to make it, I never
stopped hoping that it could be possible. It wasn’t impossible for them to
reach the peak of that mountain, which looked unconquerable, if they were
able to persevere, to avoid the dangers, to keep from succumbing to the fury
of storms. But even if they could do all this, there was still more to it. They
had to do it quickly enough to save those of us who stayed below and to
defeat the clutches of death, which was once again hovering beside us.
For three days we watched them scale the slope like tiny insects
laboriously climbing up a white wall.
When they were nearly out of sight, we saw one of those black dots
returning rapidly down the valley. Who was it? What had happened? Where
were the other two?
When he was near enough, we were able to see that it was Tintín.
As he approached us, we calmed down when we saw that his expression
didn’t indicate that anything serious had happened.
He told us that the other boys had made it to the summit but had not
seen the green valleys of Chile, those valleys that we had dreamt of for over
two months. In a vast 180-degree semicircle, they saw only more and more
mountains, huge snowy peaks that filled the horizon.
That desolate panorama had driven the decision for Tintín to return so
that the other two would have more food for the journey.
What Tintín told us made the small amount of hope we had left
diminish to the point where at times it seemed we were totally doomed.
Nevertheless, he tried to make sure his news didn’t entirely dishearten
us, and he insisted that the expeditionaries were prepared to continue on their
trek, and that forty or fifty miles in the distance, across the huge peaks, far
beyond our human scale, there seemed to be a spot on the horizon where two
slightly smaller peaks stood, which were not covered with snow.
And that was where they were heading.

We knew they had enough food for ten days, and we had a sense of how little
ground they could cover in that time, in the severe conditions of high altitude,
climbing steep and rugged peaks and descending into great chasms.
As for us, growing weaker and weaker, some already on the brink of
death, we remained mostly silent, talking very little and in hushed tones.
Many of us no longer left the fuselage at all, and others, those of us who did
go outside, moved extremely slowly.
 Still we kept watching the sky, kept listening to that small radio day
after day, hoping to hear news.
Rational thought no longer helped us hold on to hope. On the contrary,
it told us that there wasn’t much left to hope for.
But that little bit of lonely hope was still living, stubbornly, and it was
the only thing that quietly waited with us in those painful hours of suspense.
 7

FEAR

It was in the cordillera of the Andes where I learned to understand the true
face of fear and pain.
As a boy I had never been fearful. Like any boy who lives in a happy
and secure home, my only fear had been the vague one that my parents might
die.
My possible orphanhood, however, had not been a strong or frequent
thought. It was just part of that cosmic universal fear that is latent, as any
threat posed to earthly happiness.
The concrete and everyday world in which my childhood passed had
seemed secure to me. I wasn’t afraid of darkness, dogs, or snakes. I wasn’t
frightened by loud thunderclaps or by risky walks in the solitude of the
wilderness.
That gilded feeling of invulnerability persisted throughout my
adolescence even though I had some isolated scares, like when I crashed and
flipped the new car my family had just bought, which I had been driving with
my cousin Magda, Adolfo’s sister, in the passenger seat.
In the seconds while the car was rolling, I experienced a dizzying
sequence of fears, from the possibility of our dying or being seriously injured
to the less serious fear that the newly bought car would be totaled and
unusable.
During extreme moments, like those when the Fairchild crashed, fear
surfaces with legitimate intensity before a present and immediate danger.
At three thirty in the afternoon of that Friday, the thirteenth of October,
while the plane struggled and lurched, with my eyes closed, clinging to my
seat, I was afraid of a death that seemed inevitable.
 I feared the unknown of that transition and also the guaranteed suffering
of my parents. But the fear vanished when I opened my eyes, giving way to
bewilderment and pain.
I also felt fear when I was completely covered by snow in the
avalanche, and death was once again only seconds away, but terror was
followed by the sweet nostalgia for life and the pleasure of slipping away
toward a mysterious and magnetic unknown.
This momentary and absolute fear, the fear you feel when someone is
pointing a gun at you or coming to attack, in addition to being a normal
response of any human being or animal in such circumstances, is a brief and
intense feeling that goes away along with the external situation that causes it.
It’s closest to panic or to the startle reflex, and although powerful, it’s
instantaneous and fleeting. This is also the terror of nightmares that shake us
and wake us in the night.
But in the cordillera we had to face another kind of fear. The fear that
perhaps only humans can experience because it is inextricably linked with
imagination and thought. This type of fear, almost always futile, circled us
like a starving dog, hungrily watching our moments of despondency and
weakness.
It made hope, its enemy, fade away from us or disappear altogether,
until hope persistently emerged once again, and that quiet but continual battle
between fear and hope was exhausting for us.
Fear was inescapable on the mountain, although it did give us long and
refreshing respites. How many times did I feel it, did I have it within me, did
I let myself be dominated by it, did I myself call it up for various reasons,
hand in hand with images, thoughts, or assumptions?
In those first days of horror, I was afraid that rescue would not come.
When at last an airplane flew over us, after the brief commotion when
we celebrated its passing, I was afraid that they hadn’t seen us.
And in both cases my fear was justified, but even so, it was useless.
I was afraid my friends would never return from that first expedition
that kept them away all night, but nevertheless they returned, however
miserably, the next day.
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.
There were also other fears in the cordillera without a tangible cause.
The sounds from the mountain, the supposed eruptions of the volcanoes,
startled us because of the element of the unknown. We had learned to
recognize the sound of avalanches, although we hadn’t yet been victims of
their sinister power.
After the night the avalanche buried us, those distant thunderings were
now a real and substantial threat that frightened us a great deal.
I was just as stressed as the others, but something had changed inside
me: I no longer feared death in the same way. Perhaps I had developed a
tolerance for it.
A few days after the final expedition set off, we already knew the
difficulty they were having because of Tintín’s story on his return. We
became aware of their serious chances of failure.
The weather was good during those days, and I used to lie out in the
sun, letting my mind fly off to those states of indescribable fullness that the
mountain gave me.
I felt calm and hopeful.
Cold was no longer a problem, but its absence had caused others. Our
impoverished but dear home had been elevated above ground level, resting
on a pedestal of ice that stayed frozen because of its own shadow. How long
could it stay like this before it melted? We were afraid that at any moment it
would become destabilized and the fuselage would roll to the slopes below.
Heat also hindered the preservation of the meat, which we tried to keep
constantly surrounded by ice.
My meditative states filled me with strength and hope, but days were
passing, and it was impossible not to catch ourselves counting them and
thinking about our expeditionaries, wondering whether they were still alive,
whether they were reaching the end of their provisions and their strength. So,
despite my frequent states of elevated consciousness, which fortified my
spirit, fear was furtively sneaking in.
It wasn’t so much death that I feared, but the thought of never making it
home, not seeing my parents and other loved ones again.
Hand in hand with the passing of time, fear returned again and again
like an indestructible creature, and then it was only a matter of controlling it,
of not allowing it to dominate us completely.
With less and less conviction, we thought about forming another group
of expeditionaries that could set off on an excursion to the east, but the whole
plan already had the slow rhythm of things that are coming to an end.
Some of us no longer left the fuselage, even when the weather was
good. Others no longer wanted to eat and weren’t even strong enough to
stand up.
Those of us in better shape tried to help them, and we kept ourselves
active, although we were increasingly weak and listless.
I myself moved very slowly and walked only when it was absolutely
necessary, as part of that growing economy of effort that we all shared. But
my mind flew far away, returning enriched with that energy it picked up in
unfathomable places.
Nevertheless, in the least expected moments, fear would always
reappear. Its assaults were less powerful each time because we could feel the
heaviness of the end closing around us. All of us were being gently
extinguished in a slow process that was making us resemble more and more
the majestic and inert reality that was around us, as if we were slowly turning
into part of the landscape itself.
 8

REBIRTH

The proximity of summer was evident in the scenery, transformed by

thawing, and in the splendor of the days of sunshine and blue skies.
Life was stirring quietly, although we didn’t see a single living creature
around us. But that revival of nature did not include us. On the contrary,
every day we were a little closer to death.
The cold had stopped torturing us, but the higher temperatures created a
dangerous and secret life, swarming with the multiplication of bacteria.
We had to be careful to replace the snow that melted easily away over
the bodies. The meat that we were eating was often slightly decomposed,
which caused many of us to suffer from diarrhea or constipation.
Those invisible bacteria were infecting our wounds and making the
weakest among us sick. Some of them, like Coche, with his gangrenous legs,
couldn’t even stand up anymore.
We talked to each other only when it was essential, and each of us spent
more time with his own thoughts.
We saw ourselves in the others as though we were looking in a mirror.
Our emaciated faces looked more and more like empty skulls, but they were
much more shocking because in the depth of their sunken eyes there yet
remained a human gaze, dulled with sadness and defeat.
In the first days of December, three condors appeared, flying in circles
above us. We stared at them in admiration, like children seeing for the first
time an animal they don’t recognize.
It was thrilling and very emotional for us to see living creatures. They
were flying. They had enormous wings and curved beaks. They were free,
and they seemed to bask in the warmth of the air. We, on the other hand,
were trapped there, unable to escape from our curious confinement of abysses
and distances.
They were the owners of that place. We were the intruders on that stage
of giants.
Every day, shortly before dawn, I went outside with Daniel to listen to
the little radio. That faithful little gadget had been recovered from underneath
the snow several days after the avalanche, dried by the sun, beaten around,
well worn, and yet it kept working with its original batteries. It was our only
link with the world we had all belonged to once, in a time that seemed more
and more remote to us.
On the twenty-second of December, the sun was just barely emerging
from behind the volcano Mount Sosneado when Daniel and I made ourselves
go out to listen to the news. Álvaro Mangino was also nearby. Getting good
reception was never easy because of the limitations of the receiver and the
atmospheric interference.
Amid the static, we suddenly heard the names Parrado and Canessa in a
muffled news report.
Stunned to the extreme, we couldn’t hear anything more than the
constant sound of the static. We spun the dial desperately, searching for
another station, for more news.
Then, suddenly, with extraordinary clarity, music arose from the small
radio. It was Gounod’s “Ave Maria” that reverberated in the space with an
intense sound, as pure as the whiteness of the mountain.
In that moment I had the profound conviction that this was a sign that
Roberto and Nando had made it.
Álvaro and Daniel insisted that we keep searching for spoken
confirmation. But I already knew with certainty.
That sublime music that sounded with absolute clarity, untouched by
static, in the magnificence of the mountain illuminated by the sun of a new
day, signaled the end of our prolonged suffering.
A short while later, Álvaro and Daniel heard the words that confirmed
the news we had been awaiting so long: we were saved.
We ran to our refuge, where our friends were lying together, nearly
dead. It seemed to us that, beyond bringing good news, we were bringing life
itself in our hands.
“Nando and Roberto did it! They made it!” shouted Daniel, steadying
himself on the edge of the fuselage, which, higher than ground level, was
balancing on its pedestal of ice.
Then life flooded back into everyone like a beam of light that suddenly
lit up all eyes. They all got to their feet and began to hug each other.
It was the resurrection of the dead.
The fuselage, in its unstable position, moved dangerously at the base,
and after a few moments of suspense, everyone crawled outside to roll about
in the snow.
The tube of toothpaste was passed from hand to hand, and it was no
longer necessary to take only the minimum amount that we had eaten every
day as dessert.
We happily cleaned our blackened teeth, loosened by scurvy. Little by
little we were preparing for our reintegration into the civilized world.
We didn’t yet realize the impact our survival was going to have on the
media and on society as a whole. Instead, my cousins and I were talking
about the best way to arrive at our houses. We couldn’t just ring the doorbell
and have our families see us there all of a sudden, as if we had just returned
from another world. We thought it would be better to go to the house of some
relatives who lived across the street and call our families on the phone from
there so the shock wouldn’t be so great.
For the first time in those seventy-two days on the mountain, we began
to distinguish and exchange our own personal belongings, and each one was
grouping his things together like packing a personal suitcase.
It may seem strange that we all had the impulse to save old rags and
objects that were surely in the last stages of deterioration, but I always saw
this seemingly absurd gesture as a desire to bring with us something from that
home in which we had shared so much suffering.
Those miserable, trifling objects, whatever they were, had the value of
connecting us to a world that in a way we didn’t want to lose, a world that
had changed our destiny forever.
I brought with me the little “EXIT” sign, which had kept me company
in the long nights when any exit seemed so doubtful. Now that we were a
single step away from that exit, I didn’t want to forget about that little sign
that had helped me focus my thoughts on getting out when everything
seemed so black around me.
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.
We sat together next to the fuselage to await the arrival of the
helicopters, like eager children.
As time passed we couldn’t help feeling some concern. We were so
accustomed to the constant frustration of our hopes that after one or two
hours some asked if we were really sure we had heard the news correctly.
On the radio, which we had left on, we heard more details of the long-
awaited rescue. The helicopters were already preparing to leave in search of
us, and Nando was going to act as their guide.
Around one o’clock in the afternoon, we heard the sound of engines
from the other side of the mountains to the west, but then we lost track of it.
We searched the sky eagerly to try to see something, but everything had
returned to its previous stillness.
“There they come!” someone shouted.
Above the valley to the east, little black dots were moving in complete
silence. Almost immediately we lost sight of them, but then the unmistakable
sound of helicopters could be heard. Suddenly they appeared, as if emerging
from out of the hillside, and in an instant they were flying over us, like three
gigantic and noisy birds.
Overwhelmed and euphoric, we ran to the spot where it looked like they
were going to land, but it was a complicated process, as the helicopters had a
difficult time maintaining stability on the sloping area where we were
situated.
Carlitos went running to where it seemed one of the helicopters was
going to land. I did the same, and one of the crew members stretched out an
arm to me, which I grasped as tightly as I could, and they pulled me up. They
also lifted Carlitos and Pedro Algorta into the same helicopter. Almost
immediately one of the rescuers who had leapt out onto the ground picked up
Coche and threw him inside the helicopter like he was a piece of luggage.
The helicopter lifted, and I could see below me the broken piece of the
Fairchild that had been our home for seventy-two days.
 The area where we had been living, which we later found out is called
the Valley of Tears, was gradually blending in with the landscape that we
were leaving behind.
I was immensely happy at having been rescued, but at the same time I
felt that they were tearing me away from a world that, despite the horror and
suffering, had pushed me to grow in some formerly unfathomable way—to
reassert my principles and values and to break with classic paradigms, all of
which would be with me forever.
In that tiny spot in the vast cordillera that we were leaving behind, I had
learned the most important lessons of my life.
I was no longer the same person who had boarded the plane to travel to
Chile. I wasn’t yet fully conscious of the depth of that change, nor of the
importance of my tutelage on the mountain, but I did feel that I was being
violently separated from something that was, in some way, very hard for me
to leave.
Getting out of the valley was extremely difficult. The helicopter was
like a toy in the currents that were tossing it from one side of a narrow pass
between mountains to the other. It soon seemed that we were going to crash
against one of those rocky walls, and after a moment of breathing easier
when we managed to avoid hitting it, we came dangerously close to the wall
on the opposite side. The pilots were sweating, and their expressions didn’t
conceal the gravity of the situation.
I looked at my friends and we laughed. We had done everything
possible to survive, but by some tremendous irony of fate, it seemed
inevitable that now we would die in the final moments of our ordeal. But we
were already beyond fear and hardened against terror. So we just exchanged a
smile, and we experienced the adventure almost unconcerned, as if we were
at an amusement park.
Life seemed to be reminding us yet again that we are never completely
safe and that risk is an integral part of life itself.
We finally managed to get past that difficult section, and the helicopter
began to descend over a valley as green as those I had dreamt about during
our long nights on the ice.
As soon as it touched ground, we saw Nando getting out of the other
helicopter, which Daniel and Álvaro were also in. Carlitos and I ran toward
Nando, and the three of us rolled around on the ground in an embrace I will
never forget.
The ground was covered in green grass and yellow wildflowers. I could
see them with new eyes, and they looked marvelous to me. I picked one of
the flowers and held it out to Carlitos so he could smell its fragrance, and he
ate it.
I picked a handful of clovers, and I, too, brought them to my mouth in
an unconscious act of communion with the life that emerged in the sap of the
plants.
We were in a place called Los Maitenes, but that green meadow we
took our trembling steps in was the same as any field, one that grows at the
edge of all roads, which sometimes we don’t look at or notice, but which we
could now see in all its glory because we knew the heavy toll of its absence.

The weather conditions were so bad on the day of the rescue that the
helicopters weren’t able to return to the Valley of Tears right away, and so
the rest of the group, along with four rescuers, had to stay on the mountain
until the next day. It happened to be the birthday of one of the rescuers,
whose name was Sergio Díaz, and our friends told us emotionally about how
he stayed with them inside the fuselage while the other three stayed outside in
a tent.
The smell of urine didn’t bother Sergio, nor did the filth, or the macabre
scene that surrounded him. In the distance the sound of avalanches thundered,
but he remained cheerful and lively, telling the survivors of the great public
anticipation regarding the Andes Survivors, but none of them seemed too
interested in the outside world, which surely still felt very far away. So
Sergio didn’t press the subject, and perhaps it was his intuition that brought
him to distract them with something appealing directly to the universal sense
of beauty and love. In Pablo Vierci’s book La sociedad de la nieve, Moncho
Sabella—one of the survivors who stayed that final night—talks about a
poem by José Martí, which he has always remembered, and which Sergio
taught them that night in the fuselage, repeating it over and over, as if it was
the key to their reentry into the world:

I plant a white rose,

In June as in January,
For the true friend
Who gives me his hand openly.
And for the cruel one who tears
Out the heart with which I live,
I plant neither thorns nor nettles;
I plant a white rose.

Friendship had been a constant in our story, such a crucial part of our
survival from the beginning that it was difficult to separate one from the
other. What we suffered together only deepened the friendship that had
existed among the majority of us before embarking on the trip, turning it into
an unbreakable brotherhood.
Almost all of us were in our adolescence or early adulthood, a time
when the bonds of friendship can be especially strong. In the Valley of Tears,
saving each other from death or being with a dear friend in his last moments
was no longer anything exceptional. Whether in those extreme situations or
in the most trivial of daily interactions, the dynamic of affection among us
was present, the white rose blossoming in all its beauty upon the snow in that
inhospitable glacier.

It’s difficult to explain how I could, in the days following the rescue,
maintain a happiness so intense that it didn’t fade even for an instant.
They brought me to the San Juan de Dios hospital in San Fernando.
Aside from emaciation, my state of health was not too bad, so there really
was little to be done for me at the hospital in a medical sense.
Every simple act of daily life had increased in value for me in an
extraordinary way. I enjoyed as never before the feeling of soap and water
running over my body, scarcely hurt by the two large wounds on my leg—the
wounds that had bothered me in the first nights after the crash, which I only
now noticed had already healed and scarred over. I enjoyed the clean sheets
and that almost-forgotten feeling of safety from avalanches and other sudden
deaths.
At last free from the agonizing suspense of rescue. 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. At last,
a night like the nights from my previous life, and an awaking into what
seemed a dream come true.
A nurse told me that my mother had arrived. She had traveled to Chile
as soon as she heard there were survivors, without even waiting to confirm
that I was one of them. Driven by the deep conviction she had had during the
seventy-two days of my absence that I was alive, she had arrived in San
Fernando and in a few moments would be there to complete my happiness.
She entered the room cautiously, looking at me expectantly, as if
restraining her natural effusiveness. She approached me, we embraced, and
she showered me with loving, affectionate words. Then she asked me one of
those questions that suggested an answer on its own. She didn’t throw herself
into the abyss of the unknown, or the barely suspected, by asking me what we
had eaten during all that time in the mountains.
“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.”
She nodded and said nothing, as if hearing it said in my own voice had
closed the subject, which was no doubt already cause for speculation outside
the room of that hospital where we had given each other that long-awaited
hug.
A few hours later, just after being released from the hospital, I met my
father, who had arrived in Chile on a later flight. With few words, we
expressed our deep joy at being reunited.
Some reporters offered to drive the three of us to Santiago. I remember
that I talked a lot during that ride and that we stopped halfway to Santiago to
get something to drink at a bar. My mother had regained her characteristic
loquacity, and we were all very happy.
 In the Sheraton San Cristóbal in Santiago, I was reunited with the rest of
my friends from the ordeal. This was where the other eight survivors had
arrived, those who had stayed the final night on the mountain.
The ambience in the Sheraton was one of great celebration. We ate with
a kind of pathological hunger, eager to taste everything. The reporters
pestered us constantly, so we couldn’t go everywhere we wanted, and we
were forced to stay within a kind of subtle but effective shield that our own
parents had built with the help of the authorities who were hosting us.
Newspapers across the world talked about the “Miracle of the Andes” or
the “Christmas Miracle” that had restored us to our families two days before
Christmas Eve.
On December 28, we returned to Montevideo on a special flight, where
a huge crowd was waiting for us in the Carrasco airport.
There was a press conference held in the Stella Maris School that could
barely accommodate the hundreds of reporters who had traveled from many
different countries to cover the story. Right there, in that small auditorium
next to the gym, I got to reunite with and embrace my brothers and sister—
Gustavo, Ricardo, Jaime, and Sarita—who, in spite of being so happy,
complained a lot that they hadn’t gotten to go to Chile to spend Christmas
Eve with us.
The president of the Old Christians Club began the conference, asking
us some questions in a deliberately lighthearted and enthusiastic tone, as if
trying to curtail any drama. He surprised me by asking me, “Why do they call
you the German?”
“I don’t know, maybe because of my last name,” I answered, somewhat
disconcerted.
The delicate matters of our ordeal we left to Pancho Delgado, the most
eloquent among us, to explain. He revealed everything that had happened,
with simple and straightforward words, including the way we had sustained
ourselves.
He put it in a religious light, referencing the Holy Communion, where
Christ gave us his body and his blood as spiritual nourishment.
“And it was that intimate communion between all of us that allowed us
to survive,” said Pancho, before loud applause interrupted his speech.
After those days of euphoria, I began to feel a strange sensation of not
belonging in the world around me.
 Even though nothing seemed to have changed on the outside, I felt
dissatisfied and bothered by trivial issues, like the volume of the
conversations around me, which always sounded too loud. I felt completely
comfortable only with my brothers of the cordillera, and we saw each other
only once in a while because our return to society had unavoidably scattered
us.
The first year of my reintroduction to my previous life was difficult.
Part of me was left on the mountain, and in some ways I felt disjointed.
The grief for Daniel and Marcelo and our other friends, which I hadn’t
been able to process fully at the time of their deaths, now began to surface in
full force. In her pain, Marcelo’s mother didn’t want to see us, didn’t want to
see me; the pain of that isolation has always stayed with me, the weight of
words not expressed.
It seemed that all the knowledge I had carried down from the mountain,
instead of helping me, was hindering me in ordinary life. I had to reconcile
both worlds, and that was not an easy task.
My near-death experience and those elevated states of consciousness I
had achieved in the cordillera had expanded my perspective, but that didn’t
seem to serve me in everyday life. Instead of asking myself if there was life
after death, I asked myself what life was before death. It took me many years
to achieve a balance between my daily world and the part of me that had
remained up there in the cordillera.
October 13, 1972: The last photo taken of the passengers at the airport in Mendoza, Argentina, before
boarding the Fairchild, flight 571. The plane would never make it to its destination of Santiago, Chile.
Eduardo is standing in the back row, fourth from the left.
Early December 1972: Eduardo is sitting in the middle, wearing a protective nose shield made out of a
piece of a shirt. Photo © Antonio Vizintín, “Andes Survivors.” Gustavo Zerbino, Eduardo Strauch,
Adolfo Strauch, Fernando Parrado, Pedro Algorta, Javier Methol, Roberto Canessa and Ramón
Sabella.
Early afternoon, December 22, 1972: The helicopter rescue. Used with permission of El País.
December 24, 1972: Eduardo (second from the right) with his mother, Graciela, and Nando Parrado,
Daniel Fernández Strauch, and Carlitos Páez, celebrating at the Sheraton San Cristóbal hotel in
Santiago, Chile, two days after the rescue.
December 23, 1972: Some of the survivors and their families celebrating mass in San Fernando, Chile,
the day after the rescue. Eduardo is seated in the first row, second from the left.
March 1995: The first trip back to the Valley of Tears. Most of the survivors were there. Photo ©
Eduardo Strauch.
February 10, 2005: Ricardo Peña at an altitude of 14,200 feet, in the area where the airplane first hit
the mountain, discovering Eduardo’s coat and other belongings. Photo © Ricardo Peña.
December 2005: The cross surrounded by parts of the airplane that have been emerging from the
glacier. Photo © Dimitri Alexander.
January 2016: The cross on the gravesite, next to the glacier that slowly swallowed up the fuselage
over the years. Photo © Ricardo Peña.
February 2006: Eduardo looking at the many plaques that honor those who did not survive the crash
and avalanche. Photo © Dimitri Alexander.
 9

LOVE

Throughout our entire odyssey in the Andes, Roberto wore the thick wool
sweater that his girlfriend, Lauri, had knit for him the year before. Coche also
had a girlfriend, and marrying her was the first thing on the list he made of
the goals he had for the rest of his life—if, that is, he managed to survive.
Daniel Fernández was dating Amalia, who, despite the discouraging news
reports, never gave up waiting for him with the deep conviction that he was
alive.
During those days in the cordillera, I wasn’t in love with anybody. So in
my long hours of inactivity, I used to fantasize about those budding
relationships I’d had, girls with whom I had kept up a certain romantic
friendship.
I knew they must be remembering me now, and they were surely talking
about me a lot, and this in some way made me feel important. I felt a sense of
superiority being far away, on a different plane of existence, in a world of
uncertainty or death.
I had gone away, and although that had happened entirely against my
will, I was the one that was absent, the one thought about with nostalgia,
perhaps even with grief. I was in the realm of the lost or the unreachable,
covered in that merciful breath of goodness with which the dead are often
remembered, their flaws forgotten and only their virtues exalted. So they
would remember me in that way, my admirers, some of whom, believing me
to be lost forever, would come to think that their feelings for me were
stronger than they had imagined, and perhaps they bragged about how sad
they were or about the fact that they used to be my girlfriend.
In a way I took pleasure in imagining them mourning my death, and I
wondered whom I could have had a relationship with, to experience a deep
love like the one Javier and Liliana demonstrated. I remembered in particular
one female friend from my adolescence, and sometimes I let myself think that
that distant and somewhat tenuous sentiment (we had never actually dated)
could become a deep and mutual love on my return home.
The girls I remembered were no more than names, fantasies that came
and went during all those hours in which our own thoughts were our only
possible distraction. I didn’t find myself thinking about them sexually. In
those seventy-two days on the mountain, all sexual feeling vanished
completely.
And yet it cannot be said that love, in its most vivid and raw sense, was
not present on the mountain. Since the first day we fell into the Valley of
Tears, we had maintained the attitude of keeping each other alive, and our life
in those extreme conditions was full of acts of quiet heroism.
We saw it in Enrique Platero when he helped with all the tasks around
the plane without complaint, despite the terrible wound in his stomach. We
saw it in Numa Turcatti, who, having been one of the strongest and healthiest
among us, wore himself out until his death, in unconditional sacrifice to the
rest.
I remember other small gestures of great meaning. There was Nando,
melting snow in his mouth so he could give it as water to his dying sister.
There was Daniel, who massaged Bobby François’s feet so that they
wouldn’t become gangrenous.
Nobody thought that they were doing anything extraordinary. Helping
others was a natural act, one that wasn’t weighed or analyzed and one that
arose spontaneously.
We all felt Javier’s heartbreaking pain when Liliana died in the
avalanche. Days later we became accustomed to seeing him next to the frozen
body of his wife, lying in the snow a short distance from the fuselage, totally
lost in thought, praying or talking to her as though she could still hear him.
Sometimes it worried us a little to see him like that, but somehow we felt that
everything would be all right and that the love that united them would live on
beyond death, albeit traveling a different path, where Javier was going to find
the strength to survive in order to carry that love to their children in all its
abundance.
Throughout the time we spent in the Valley of Tears, I can’t remember
a single day when there was not a display of love toward the weaker ones or
those who were injured, whom Gustavo took care of with incredible
tenderness and self-sacrifice until the moment of their death.
There were those like Arturo Nogueira and Gustavo Nicolich, who
wrote letters of farewell to their parents and their girlfriends before they died,
in which they gave expression to all the love that they doubtless recognized
as the most important thing in their lives.
In the early days after the crash, confusion prevailed, along with hope,
and the formidable effort of adapting to the harshest conditions that could
ever be imagined; but as the days passed and we became adapted, even
accustomed, to that strange and difficult form of survival, many at the limit of
their strength and nearly everybody more focused on ourselves than on the
outside world, love was beginning to appear as the most real and valuable
possession that we could claim.
The love for our parents, our siblings, and our grandparents. Love for
girlfriends, friends, and life itself. Love like a flame inside us that made us
truly human. In the end, I believe it was love that saved us in a very real
sense. It was only love—this life force—that was fueling the expeditionaries
as they continued on their uncharted journey.
Roberto, Nando, and Tintín didn’t have the slightest knowledge of
mountaineering, and so the way they chose to climb the enormous mountain
that blocked the way to the west was probably not the best way. Any
climbing expert could have found the easiest way to the summit by following
its ridges or the broken lines through the slopes, along routes that would
avoid encounters with vertical walls.
But those three, dressed in street clothes, without equipment or adequate
tools, faced the steepest and roughest slopes, and they had to climb them inch
by inch, breathing with greater difficulty with each step they took in the
oxygen-deprived air. They didn’t have pitons or harnesses or anchors, no
shoes with crampons, no camping stoves to turn the snow into water. They
weren’t familiar with the pacing appropriate for the mountain, the necessary
balance between exertion and rest so that the body doesn’t become exhausted
and ill with the effects of high altitude.
Each one of those steps that, no matter how great his fatigue, a hiker
takes almost without noticing, was a chore in itself on that hard climb
because the climbers had to lift their knees to their chests and clean the snow
off their boots before stepping down again.
They told us that often they took the wrong path and that after hours of
laborious walking, they would come to dead ends, like narrow ledges next to
smooth walls, which stood as insurmountable obstacles forcing them to turn
around. They had to search for places to rest, always much farther away than
they appeared, and they couldn’t find a single flat area nearby to stretch out
the sleeping bag and sleep.
The void was all around, embracing them as though with a persistent
desire to trap them. Every yard they climbed meant less air reaching their
lungs, less rock where they could position their feet, which seemed too big
and heavy, with flimsy shoes that were inadequate for the slippery surfaces
on which they had to shakily steady themselves.
As they moved forward, new challenges were arising for them, a reality
that was completely foreign, presenting them with ever-greater difficulties.
Deep canyons, precipices that cut through the slope, false summits,
waterfalls, and walls covered in hard snow so steep that they had to dig steps
one at a time so they could ascend them.
What was going through their minds? They say that their thoughts were
restricted to what was closest at hand, avoiding every thought of the
difficulties that might still be in store for them further ahead. Their minds
were focused on addressing the immediate situation, evaluating the stability
of each and every possible foothold and handhold, trying to reach the next
rock, progressing toward each goal, although it seemed trivial in the total
scope of the journey, always continuing a little further without thinking yet
about the final summit from which they were hoping to see the plains of our
salvation, some indication of life, the green valleys of Chile we had been
dreaming of.
That spirit of facing anything that came their way and continuing to
push forward showed a will superior in some ways to the survival instinct
that should already have been exhausted after such a long ordeal. Then the
question arises: What inner strength was driving them in that brutal effort,
which any animal would have perished from?
I believe that the force that drove them was nothing other than love.
Only love for their loved ones, the desire to return home to see them, could
have made them capable of that feat that contradicted all laws of logic. And
maybe also love for those of us waiting for them in the plane, knowing they
were our last chance.
Those of us who didn’t participate in the expeditions also experienced
situations that demanded everything of us. Each one of us had a rough road to
travel, without letting ourselves fall into the abyss of despair and doubt.
Out of love for her children, Liliana overcame what seemed impossible
to her and accepted food when she was at the brink of starving to death.
Everyone, at some point in our life in the Valley of Tears, felt that it
would be much easier to just let himself die, yet because of love, we fought
for life.
When Tintín returned he tried to reassure us as much as possible, but
what the three of them had seen from atop the summit couldn’t have been
more discouraging. Roberto and Nando were going to keep walking, but what
had gone through their minds for them to make that decision? They chose to
keep walking, when that seemed to be nothing but a way to die.
Nando remembers his arrival at the summit of what he named Mount
Seler, the mountain that he had just climbed without the slightest knowledge
of mountaineering. Seler was the name of his father, to whom he had
dedicated all his efforts. The love that he felt for his father, the profound
desire to see him and tell him all that had happened (as he had expressed a
few days after waking up from the coma he had been in since the crash), had
been the driving force of his unstoppable progress, and Roberto joined him in
this, also driven by love for his family and his girlfriend.
Nando’s reflections in his book, Miracle in the Andes, agree fully with
this point of view, even in the dedication, where he writes of his wife,
Veronique, and his daughters: “I would do it all again for them.” Once again
love appears here as the driving force behind the action, because when they
were crossing the Andes, those two boys were also walking toward their
futures, futures where they would have families, which are today their most
precious treasures.
On the day of our rescue, we got the confirmation of something we had
already guessed during those seventy-two days: our fathers, mothers,
siblings, and other loved ones had been praying endlessly for us and
exhausting all possible resources to find us, organizing search parties, turning
to psychics, insisting on a desperate search that never seemed to yield any
results, but even so they persisted in it without rest.
Their love for us was the strength behind that community of families,
girlfriends, and friends united in hope, spirit, and action.
That feeling of brotherhood among all those who searched for us
remained, no matter how the search turned out, and a beautiful example of
this unconditional love was seen clearly in Gustavo Nicolich’s parents and
siblings, who arrived in San Fernando believing that Gustavo was one of the
survivors. They never stopped showing us all their deep affection, treating us
like their own family, despite the terrible blow the misunderstanding had
caused them.
When we returned to Montevideo, some receptions were especially
touching, like that of my uncle Andrés Shaw, who, on seeing Adolfo and me
home again like two resurrected beings, was able to show us his great joy at
our reunion despite his pain at the absence of his son, our cousin Daniel.
There were unforgettable gestures, like the letter that Carlos Valeta’s
father wrote, in which he celebrated the miracle of our survival and was
thankful that the death of his son had been able to help us return to the safety
of our homes.
The attitude I saw in the mother of my friend Gastón Costemalle is an
example of how the greatest pain can be transformed into love. In a very
short time, she had suffered the loss of her husband and another son, who had
died just three years before Gastón. Yet she welcomed me with immense
affection, expressing the deep joy that, nourished by faith and the most
abundant generosity, transcends events, however painful they may be.

Nando and Roberto had walked for days and days through that vast panorama
of mountains they had spotted from up above, until they began to come
across small clues that indicated a human presence.
They were close, but how close? One more day of walking was not the
same as two or three days. The meat was beginning to decompose in the
backpacks, the sole of Nando’s shoe was coming off and flapped with each
step he took, they were walking over icy rocks, and Roberto could barely
move, crippled by dysentery.
They had made it to the headwaters of a river, and the ground, at first
covered in rocks, showed traces of a brownish-green color.
Then, when they were resting for the night, Roberto suddenly shouted:
“A man on a horse!”
Nando ran like a madman and came as close as he could to the edge of
the river, where he saw a man on horseback in a wide-brimmed hat, moving
slowly down the hillside on the opposite bank of the river.
Both boys shouted and screamed at him, begging him for help, but the
man on horseback merely watched them and showed no signs that he
understood what they were saying.
The roar of the rushing water completely drowned out their voices so
they gesticulated to him in a wordless pantomime, trying to describe the
accident. They ran in circles with their arms outstretched like wings, they
pointed to the sky, they prostrated themselves on the ground. The man
watched them without moving until finally he, too, shouted some words, of
which all they could make out was “tomorrow.”
They spent that night feeling very restless. Salvation was near at hand,
but at that moment it depended on a stranger. A man who might not heed the
gestures of appeal he had seen in those two strange figures running along the
opposite shore.
But the man returned the next day, and he threw a stone to them across
the river, to which he had attached a note and a pencil.
On 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?”
The man was named Sergio Catalán. He was a cattle driver who was
following his usual routine of bringing the livestock to graze in the area
where, during summer, the softest pasture grows among the ice. There the
cows have their calves, and they have to be monitored so they’re not attacked
by pumas.
Sergio Catalán didn’t know us, but he saw us as human beings in
danger, and that was enough for him to leave his cattle, ride for eight hours
on horseback, and continue in a bus before arriving at the nearest police
outpost.
Sergio acted as a friend. We have stayed in touch, and he is now a true
friend to us all. But he didn’t need to know us to come to our aid, because
there was a feeling of brotherhood that united him to all men, wherever they
came from, and to the majestic solitude of his land.

In June of 1977, almost five years after having been rescued from the Valley
of Tears, I met Laura Braga Aguerre, a beautiful young woman who
captivated me immediately. We met at the home of a mutual friend who had
invited us over to show some slides of the trip she had been on. It was love at
first sight, and from that moment on, my life was directed toward a kind of
happiness I had never known.
It is a common symptom of a person in love to think that the object of
his love is someone truly extraordinary and unique, but Laura’s originality
has been something recognized by everyone who meets her. In the first year
of our relationship, she bewildered me at every step. She had a way of
keeping her distance without showing indifference. She seemed enigmatic
and unattainable to me, impeccable in appearance, with a hint of
extravagance.
She was living with her parents, but it was a long time before she let me
come to her house, and when we went out I had to wait for her in the car
instead of going up to the door. At first we existed in a “battle of the Titans,”
as she called it, where neither of us had decided to surrender our weapons.
My past, my friends, and my family didn’t seem to interest her, as she
never asked me questions about them, which deepened my confusion. I was
accustomed to being the center of attention because of the ordeal I had gone
through, and she, with delicacy and balance, somehow made me grow
beyond this.
It seemed odd that such an attractive woman wasn’t already married,
and one day I asked her about it. She told me that she hadn’t been married
because she had never found a man she was sure she wouldn’t divorce, and
she considered marriage a lifelong commitment. It was clear to me that Laura
was a person with high expectations and strong principles, passionate about
her work, and sure of herself: a combination that might have frightened away
any man more conventional or chauvinistic than me.
We were married on the seventh of April 1979. For our honeymoon we
went to Polynesia with a deliberate layover in Santiago, Chile, where we
spent a night in the Sheraton San Cristóbal hotel, so linked to our story of the
cordillera.
The adventure has not gone badly, as proved by the forty years of happy
marriage we have had, and five wonderful children: Olivia Magdalena,
Eduardo Federico, Sofía Bárbara, Camila Blanca, and Pedro Marcelo. Even
so, Laura identifies herself only as my lover, saying with all seriousness that I
am married to the mountain, a condition that she respects as an inevitable
fact.
Laura understands what the mountain means to me to such an extent
that it was she, in the Valley of Tears, next to the iron cross that marks the
tomb of our friends, who suggested that my ashes should also rest there one
day. For her and for my children, I can say, like Nando, that all the
vicissitudes I experienced in the Andes have without a doubt been worth the
pain.
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.
 10

TIME

When I try to pinpoint what it was that allowed me to commune with the
mountain in the way that I did that first day, and have been able to do ever
since, I think it has to do with my learning to think of time in a very profound
and personal way.
Throughout history, time has fascinated philosophers and, later,
physicists, many of whom have devoted decades of research to the topic. Yet
nobody can totally explain it; it eludes all definition, it partly contradicts all
the theories, and even people who may never have thought about time in an
abstract way can clearly perceive its subjective nature.
Interestingly, in those seventy-two days, despite our isolation, we were
never unaware of the date. Nonetheless, we experienced chronological time
in a very different way. We all agree that time in the Valley of Tears seemed
to pass much more slowly.
At first the passage of time had been a relief. While the hours passed,
we believed that any of those eternal minutes that ticked past on our watches
would suddenly erupt into the euphoria of rescue. But that hopeful passage of
time was slowly turning into a never-ending wait.
The same period of time, which we thought at first was bringing us to
the end of the horror we were immersed in, was actually bringing us
relentlessly closer to the end of our provisions and to the certainty that the
search operations had been unsuccessful.
On the tenth day, when we found out that the search had been called off,
time suddenly lost all meaning for us. We no longer counted the days or the
hours; the passing of what our watches measured had slowed down until it no
longer seemed to be moving at all. It was a static time, a useless time, a dead
time; one day was just the same as two or three. We knew they weren’t
coming for us.
The anxiety we felt about events changed our perspective of time,
making the period before the resolution of an issue feel eternal. I think that
this, as well as the fact that we were far away from everything, were engaged
in minimal activities that didn’t require a precise schedule, and were living in
an environment of mountains capable of transmitting to us the millennia they
had endured, was the reason that time stretched out for us until it felt like
centuries. Pancho says the same thing, expressing that sensation we all
shared:
“Our time on the mountain, if we compare it with other tragedies, was
very long. That’s why I feel that in just seventy-two days, we traveled
through thousands of years.”
Bobby François, one of the youngest boys in the group, put it another
way:
“Do you know how hard a single day was up there, not knowing if you
were going to live or die?”
Many of our watches stopped due to the cold, and that made us lose a
general awareness of the time. Nevertheless, we had established a daily
routine, and the fact that we were practically living outside meant that the
light of the sun marked the alternation between activity and rest, as it does in
the natural world. This, which may seem trivial, was crucial for us in
maintaining our biological rhythm and our mental equilibrium.
In the Valley of Tears, I got the feeling that our human conception of
time, to which we were so enslaved in our previous life, had adjusted itself to
the time frame of the cordillera, which lives in the stillness of geological eras,
altered only by the unexpected fury of some volcanic eruption.
Since we never lost track of the date during that long and stagnant time,
we could observe our birthdays or those of our loved ones, which we usually
celebrated briefly.
A few hours after the avalanche, although half-buried alive, we
celebrated Numa’s last birthday with nothing more than our love, and the
next day Carlitos’s nineteenth birthday.
Then, at 12:45 p.m. on the twenty-second of December, when we saw
the helicopters appear as if emerging from out of the white slopes, time went
back to what it had been before. In that unforgettable moment we
rediscovered the sense of time that had been frozen in the unmoving hands of
our watches, stopped forever at 3:30 p.m. on the afternoon of October 13.
And so, now free of the meanings we had been giving it for seventy-two
days through our anxiety or our hope, time regained the calm pace of life,
which could now beat once again in our hearts.

Time’s reversibility shows clearly in the equations of quantum mechanics,

and physicists believe that at the most fundamental level of matter, time has
no direction.
In a letter addressed to the widow of his friend, the physicist Michele
Besso, Einstein writes:
“Michele has left this strange world a little ahead of me. This signifies
nothing. For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past,
present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
Einstein’s discovery that clocks in motion measure time differently
caused radical revisions of our view of the world. We know that there is no
one valid time throughout the universe and that our thought processes project
illusory restrictions on reality.
Nevertheless, the scope in which our current life plays out is the captive
of an irreversible time. We couldn’t wait for the plane, once shattered to
pieces, to put itself back together again. All our bodies, even those of
Einstein’s friend Michele and of Einstein himself, have been destined for
destruction since birth. Nature presents itself to us as always moving in a
forward direction, governed by the principle of increasing entropy.
However, the conceptual framework of modern physics makes us
cautious about this reality that we see and feel, acknowledging it as part of
the space-time continuum, which we cannot conceive of in its entirety.
These concepts, impossible to be fully understood by thought, might
nevertheless be observed and sensed in situations like the one we found
ourselves in, surrounded by mountains, beneath the clear and infinite sky of
the Andes.
The perception of this illusory and ambiguous time didn’t make us lose
the sense of opportunity, and so I also agree with Pancho when he says that in
the Valley of Tears we made all our decisions as a group and at precisely the
right times.
We didn’t wait until it was too late to prevent our starvation before we
finally decided how to nourish ourselves (although we came close to it); the
final expedition set off when the weather conditions allowed it, not too soon
and not too late, when we would inevitably have been killed from the
infections that became more frequent as it grew warmer.
That’s why I think that, in the course of what Einstein calls a “persistent
illusion,” my brothers of the mountain and I are still today acting in our own
precise moment, each one of us in his own personal story, without losing the
connection with that other story that we began when we shared those
seventy-two days, or centuries or millennia, in a remote spot in the Andean
cordillera.

Pancho says in his memoir:

“It is unimaginable that a process like that could end so abruptly after
seventy-two days, as if simply turning the page of a calendar.”
And he remembers his sudden reinsertion into the civilized world,
where at first he felt as though he were a living block of ice lost in time.
How did he overcome this freezing of emotions, that necessary
insensitivity that all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, had shielded ourselves
with to be able to endure what we did?
We didn’t all experience the return to society in the same way, but as
Álvaro Mangino says: “Each of us took his own time to process what
happened to us.”
And we can verify that with the perspective of nearly fifty years of life
after the crash.
Our lives have been as different as our ways of absorbing our pain and
reintegrating into normal life, but these were not separate and unconnected
experiences; they allow us to keep a deep connection between us, which
unites us and makes us all get together every December 22 to celebrate our
birthday as brothers.
Some have not wanted even to go back to the mountain, and some of us
have done so several times.
There are some of us who spent years in silence before sharing the
experience with wider audiences, even though the subject has never been
taboo in our families or among those closest to us. But the important thing is
that, having gone through that catharsis in our own time and with varying
degrees of severity, none of us have renounced our history, even those who
suffered the most difficult processes of adapting, and even the family
members of the ones who didn’t return, who had a harder time accepting that
they are still present in us.
Time, that inexplicable entity, ambiguous and relative, has had the
indisputable power of restoring relationships, giving us back our words,
breaking our silences, and allowing us to let go of the tears, look each other
in the eye, and recover the profound joy of being together.
 11

TRANSCENDENCE

When we found out that they were coming to rescue us, each of us (in a
gesture that was strange even to us) gathered together a small bag with a few
belongings to bring home. We had little knowledge then of the real baggage
that we would bring back with us, but we may have had a sense of it. It’s hard
to explain why, having lived through so much pain and suffering in the
Valley of Tears, many of us felt a strange melancholy when we were flying
away in the helicopters toward our salvation. It wasn’t nostalgia for the cold,
the hunger, the thirst, or the suffering. Nor for seeing our friends die, or fear,
or the uncertainty of not knowing how much longer we would live. I think
that what we mourned was that society we had been building so laboriously,
where we had managed to experience many of the fundamental values of
humanity in an intense way.
We returned to a society where we had much more than we needed
within our reach. But we arrived there with something that was not in the
small bag that each of us packed on the morning of the rescue, something that
was part of the intangible luggage that we would carry with us forever.

That society we had been building in an unspoken and instinctive way, where
each of us contributed what he felt he could do best, was shattered abruptly
on the day of our rescue.
Only seventy-two days had passed for the rest of the world, but up there
and inside each of us, the time that had passed was impossible to measure.
We returned to civilization experiencing an indescribable happiness, but we
were no longer the same.
Just like us, those we returned to had also suffered anguish and
uncertainty, and they had also lived through the ongoing struggle to try to
find us, but their world and their roles in it remained unchanged after we
came home.
We, although weak and at the edge of death, had grown much more than
a person normally does in decades, and yet we had to go back to being the
son, the student, the boy that everyone expected to see again, the one who
needed protection and even needed to face an unexpected celebrity. Each of
us endured it as best we could, but it was certainly not easy for any of us. Our
processes of adapting back into the lives we had before were as different as
our families, circumstances, and personalities. Nevertheless, however diverse
our experiences were, there were common elements for all of us that we
gradually came to see as constants, almost revelations. Among these, the
feeling of brotherhood that unites us and our unanimous perception of what
we consider the true values of life.
In my case, I remember that once the euphoria of the reunions had
passed, I started to think that I would never be able to reintegrate myself into
the life I had had before.
The first two years were without doubt the hardest, and, at first, it took
great effort for me to start anything I wanted to do. I managed to take up my
work again in the architecture studio that Marcelo and I had had together.
Despite how much I missed him, I understood that I had to move on with the
project we had started, and that purpose also felt to me like a commitment to
the memory of my friend.
I didn’t resume my studies at the university, not so much because of
discouragement or lack of time, though these were also true, but because of a
lack of conviction. In some way the extreme experience I had lived through
had taught me that you should put in effort only where it really matters, in
areas that help bring you closer to your fundamental values.
I had the good fortune of finding love and building a family, and these
new experiences filled my life while the lessons the mountain had taught me
continued to ripen in my soul. Then, almost thirty years after seeing the
Valley of Tears from up in the helicopter, seeing it become a tiny dot, nearly
invisible in the landscape, I began to share much of what I had learned there
in informal lectures to the public. And I have continued to share it,
discovering that it helps me to delve deeper within myself. It helps me to
process my most profound memories and my most intense experiences, as if
it were a kind of therapy, which I have never otherwise turned to.
Everything in my life since has happened at its own pace, without haste
or forced deadlines, as it happens in the solitude of the mountains. And there
came a day later in life when I confronted a blank canvas, and—altering it to
reflect the shapes and colors that most clearly expressed my feelings and
memories—I found great satisfaction in painting, which I now continue to do
professionally.

Up there we had lived as primitive people, lacking everything, even a cultural

tradition or handed-down knowledge of how to survive under those
conditions. The place in which we found ourselves simply did not support
life, so we were sort of like the first men to arrive on a deserted planet. But in
our minds we had a great deal of knowledge acquired from a lifetime in
civilization. We knew what a radio was, and we tried to repair it even though
we didn’t know how; we were able to understand the flight chart, although it
took us hours of meticulous study; we knew geography, and the points of the
compass. We were, in fact, enlightened primitives.
From the very beginning, we sought to create a habitable environment
by skillfully using the very few items we had at our disposal. Little by little
we invented things to take care of our most basic needs: water from the snow,
sunglasses made from the plane materials so our eyes wouldn’t be injured
from the sun, and a sleeping bag so the expeditionaries could survive nights
out in the elements.
The making of big decisions, such as knowing where to go on each
expedition, and the almost spontaneous development of a cohesive and
supportive group of people able to function on the edge between life and
death, demanded a huge amount of creativity from all of us. As Javier has
said: “We had to become alchemists, transforming the tragedy into a miracle,
turning depression into hope.” That’s why, if we understand creativity as the
ability to transform whatever is available in order to create new things,
whether tangible or intangible, I believe we were extremely creative in the
Valley of Tears, and our inventiveness, like so many other skills, was
enhanced in that desolate situation.
And indeed as a group we have continued to create, no longer those
crude gadgets that helped us to survive on the mountain, but organizations
that try to better the lives of others, like Fundación Viven, which we founded
in 2006.
The foundation was created in memory of the events and the people
involved with the crash in the Andes, and its mission is to encourage the
essential values of the human spirit, to work toward creating change that will
have a positive impact on society.
The individual experiences of the survivors are very diverse, and each
one of us is on his own path, but in his own way has contributed to raising
awareness of what happens to people when they are forced to face extreme
moments, and what the true values are that we sometimes lose sight of in the
clamor of everyday life.

After that initial period of disorientation, when I questioned the meaning of

life, I enthusiastically resumed my work in the studio I had with Marcelo. I
feel with certainty that my capacity for creation in architecture matured as a
result of my ordeal, and in my work I emphasize the desire I have for people
to live in the closest possible contact with nature, in what I consider to be the
ideal space for a human being to inhabit. I always use large fixed windows to
bring the world outside into the living space as much as possible, and I use a
lot of skylights to get light from above and to be closer to the sky, the sun,
and the stars. In that sense, I agree with the great linguist Mario Pei, who
said: “Good architecture lets nature in.”
Since I learned that the important things in life are small things, each
with a significant meaning, I try to translate that same concept into my
projects, which are designed simply—scaled to humans without exaggerating
surface sizes, celebrating simplicity in shapes and colors.
In this same vein, it was just a few years ago that I began to paint,
something I had in some way wanted to do for over three decades.
The power of art to convey truth in images, to those who can see it,
always astonishes me. The artist and teacher Sergio Viera, commenting on
my work, described the workings of my soul when he said:
In his recent paintings you can see an attempt to reconcile opposites. His
architectural aspiration to a serene composite structure plays dialectically
with diagonal lines that cross the entire surface of the painting. In this way he
creates a foreign atmosphere, mysterious, unsettling, which one can imagine
as a result of his unique personal experience, where out there in the cold,
trying to escape uncertainty, cold, and fear, he began to contemplate, at once
as changeable as it was imposing, the enormity of the mountain and its
beauty.

Sharing my experience in lectures, and in this book, has inspired deep

and eternal reflections within me, but I think that only the language of art can
truly transmit the sublime.
 12

NATURE

The condors returned the day after we saw them for the first time. That next
morning there were two of them, and they soared above us slowly and
majestically, like they owned the sky.
Someone asked if they might attack us, and Pedro immediately
reassured us, saying that as far as he knew they were scavenging birds, which
fed only on carrion.
We watched them with the same admiration as we had the day before,
when they had surprised us by appearing in our landscape of unfailing
solitude. We could see them as they really are: perfect machines fully adapted
to the environment in which they move and live. Our situation in that place
was quite different, although in the two months we had been there, we had
achieved a certain degree of adaptation to the harsh conditions of the altitude.
The flight of those enormous birds was a magnificent display. City life
sometimes dulls our ability to marvel at things in nature, but in the cordillera
there was not much to distract us, and everything appeared to us with its true
significance.
It wasn’t hard to guess the intentions of the condors. There were still
several bodies stored next to the fuselage, and because of the approach of
summer, it was getting more difficult for us to preserve them. We had to
make sure that they were always covered with a layer of snow, which melted
after a short time. That was our way of fighting bacteria; but now that we
knew rivals could fly above us, whoever went out to cut the meat now gave a
quick glance at the sky with the instinctive gesture of an animal seeking to
defend what belongs to it.
Stripped of the trappings of civilization, we were connecting deeply
with nature, capable of reclaiming our place in it.
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.
In the Valley of Tears, except for the remains of the airplane, our
clothes, shoes, and some sparse belongings, there was nothing manmade.
We were in the middle of the most barren natural environment. But it
wasn’t a kind and tame nature that we went outside to enjoy when the
weather was good. It wasn’t a nature that delighted us with butterflies,
flowers, and those rolling green meadows that we normally associate it with.
It was a nature that roared with storms, that made us shiver with cold at night,
and that could seem murderous to us because of the constant threat of
avalanches that thundered all around us.
I remember the compositions about nature they made us write in school
when we were children, when the spring arrived with the perfumed scent of
roses and the chirping of birds. In our valley, without a single blade of grass,
there were no flowers or birds, no persistent buzzing of insects; yet nature
was still there, inert and majestic.
We were able to recognize and even to interpret it. We knew that if
Sosneado to the east was covered with clouds, then we would have a storm
that night. We knew that if clouds appeared over the peak to the west, then
the wind would carry thin layers of snow, like white veils, to the tops of the
peaks, and in a few hours the whole sky would be full of clouds, and the cold
would be much more intense.
In our relationship with nature, love alternated with hate from one day
to the next. Even in the early days, when we were still a long way from the
start of summer, it was pleasant to sit outside in the sunny afternoons next to
the fuselage, warmed by the sun, to talk among ourselves, gazing out at the
crest of the mountains that cut across the sky. Then we loved nature, just as
we also hated it in the middle of storms that forced us to stay imprisoned
within the fuselage, or when the frigid wind seeped through the cracks of our
refuge.
In my life before the crash, nature had never been my enemy. I
delighted in the beach and the countryside; I admired the force and the
vastness of the ocean and the shady solitude of the indigenous forest that
grows on the banks of the streams, and also that docile and orderly nature that
lavishes its beauty in gardens.
I loved nature even in its most intense outbursts, like the forest fires
with their wild crackling, which filled the air with sparks rising quickly,
zigzagging across the sky as if possessed of a will of their own.
This love for nature, and for mountains in particular, was ultimately
what had convinced me to travel to Chile.
Of course, after the disaster I began to go through a stage where I
rebelled against the nature that would make me shiver with cold, that would
hide my only water source in snow that made my mouth and my throat swell
up; the nature that would take away the oxygen, which had always been an
inherent right for me; the nature that was partly responsible for our
predicament because of those inopportune clouds that had covered the peaks
right before we crashed.
But it didn’t take long for me to reconcile myself with it forever.
One day, basking in a few hours of good weather, I came to recognize
that I was part of everything that unfolded in the blue sky and the peaks that
surrounded us. Then I felt a strange consolation that was beyond reasoning.
The situation was not going to improve, and in fact could get even worse, but
feeling myself as part of something bigger than me eased a little of the
tremendous weight of wanting to control the events around me.
Nature could be violent or contrary, but it was never illogical.
Long ago, people used to call it Mother Nature, and in the myths, they
represented it as a young woman covered with fruit, flowers, and tree
branches. They expressed it as a lovely and kind woman, doubtless forgetting
the hurricanes, earthquakes, and storms, forgiving the shipwrecks, the
droughts and hail that ruined the crops, and the wild flooding of the rivers.
But nature is neither good nor bad, it simply is. So perhaps its only
indisputable quality is its magnificence.
On occasions its beauty captures and seduces, as during those first frigid
and peaceful nights when I went out of the fuselage, very briefly so as not to
freeze to death, and yet I stayed out there a little longer than was prudent, in
contemplation of the universe, the twinkling of the stars above the vast and
mysterious mountain, wrapped in a strange luminosity.
We were intelligent beings in the midst of an inanimate world, and
because of that it made us more aware of the human condition of being the
conscious part of nature, the only one that permits a look at itself.
Roberto has compared our situation as humans in the ice, isolated from
the world, with that of guinea pigs subjected to the cruel experiment of a mad
scientist studying their behavior with tests, each one progressively crueler.
In that situation, so extraordinary and so difficult, were we acting in
accordance with nature?
Much emphasis has been placed on competition in the natural world as
perhaps its most striking aspect. However, if we look in depth at the behavior
of animals, examples of cooperation predominate.
We see it in herds that are fleeing at full speed from the pursuit of a
wild animal, grouping themselves around the young and the weakest
members to defend them from the attack. We see it even in solitary hunters,
species as individualistic and independent as the cheetahs, who under
extremely adverse conditions join together in alliances that allow them to
hunt larger prey by working as a team.
The examples are innumerable, but the most surprising is that the spirit
of cooperation is also present at the microscopic level.
In the scientific world there is growing support for the theory that the
new class of cell that appeared over two billion years ago to become the basis
for all existing multicellular plants and animals was the result not of a genetic
mutation but rather of symbiosis—a product of cooperation, not competition.
Also well known is the fact that symbiotic cooperation forms the basis
of every ecosystem.
The way in which bacteria relate to plants and animals (including
humans) is another example of mutual cooperation, the behavior that we most
commonly find when we deepen our knowledge of living beings.
So I believe that in the cordillera the team attitude that prevailed among
us—supporting the weakest among us, each one offering his own special
skills and abilities for the good of the group, his own knowledge and
strengths, in sum, the best of himself—was not only driven by a superior
feeling of human solidarity but was a matter of behaving in accordance with
the nature that we ourselves were part of.
When, on the seventh day of the final expedition, Roberto was walking
on ground without snow right next to a river, he saw a small lizard a few
yards away from his feet that was observing him intently. The little animal,
keenly watching all their movements, must have had its alarm mechanism
triggered. Roberto was equally alarmed. For him, the encounter was an
interaction with a living thing in nature, which for two months had existed
only in his memory.
Moss, reeds, trees, and grass were not far behind as they continued on
their way out of the ice. They were crossing the border back into the nature
we are accustomed to, the one we share a large part of our DNA with; in
short, the one that allows us to live.
But what about that other nature, that of astral space, eternal ice, the
burning solitude of the deserts, the brilliance of the most inhospitable planets,
the stern majesty of the mountains?
A differentiation between the two would not occur in a holistic view of
nature. As knowledge advances, the natural world is recognized more and
more as a creative and dynamic entity, a complex network of relationships
very different from the vision of a mechanical and hierarchical nature, whose
conception in the past was reduced to the vegetable, animal, and mineral
kingdoms, with categorical divisions that are no longer interpreted as such
today.
Some scientists go even further and declare that the difference between
organic and inorganic matter is a conceptual prejudice increasingly less
supported as we learn more about quantum mechanics.
The behavior of subatomic particles can raise meaningful questions on
the subject. We define as organic that which is capable of responding to the
information that it processes, but the manner in which these particles respond
to certain stimuli demonstrates that there is an instant relationship between
them, in a way until now inexplicable, a way that can trigger decision-making
processes incompatible with the traditional concept of inorganic matter.
These discoveries, made relatively recently in the history of physics,
have given rise in some circles to the more daring conjecture that plants
respond to various stimuli in a timescale far longer than the same reaction in
animals. With this in mind, we cannot know with certainty if what we call the
inanimate world doesn’t also have the ability to react, although perhaps in a
much slower way that can be perceived only over the course of centuries.
This assumption, which seems to verge on total fantasy, has been debated in
very renowned scientific circles, though it is probably almost impossible to
prove either its falsehood or its truth.
It remains left to the imagination of each person whether the mountains
hear us, but whether they do or do not, those properties of matter remind us
that in nature, of which we are part, all its components are unexpectedly
related, just like in organic models.
If we silence the daily commotion that surrounds us and train ourselves
to listen to nature, it will know to tell us its message, even if it does not do so
with words.
Many times amid the silence, I have felt as though the mountain were
speaking to me, answering my call.
 13

FAMILY

In the first days after the crash, the thought of what might be going on at
home was a frequent topic of conversation among us. We kept track of the
time, and so it was easy for us to mentally reconstruct the daily life that was
continuing in our absence.
We shared aloud those scenes from the everyday routines that we could
all imagine, our siblings’ activities, our parents’ jobs, the little arguments, the
food that would be served on the table, the things they might say at dinner,
and what they might be thinking about our disappearance.
We didn’t yet fully realize what was happening to us, and we were even
less aware of what we still had ahead of us. So, despite the fact that we were
very upset by the events, those memories of home were not charged with
pain; it was merely the simple desire to go home that made us return to that
subject again and again.
Everything that was normal in our usual lives, everything that had
sometimes seemed tedious or boring to us, had now become an unreachable
dream.
I imagined my father trying to comfort my mother and my siblings
going about their business, although of course very worried about the fate of
their son and older brother. I thought about what each of them might be doing
on those days when the family had seemingly been touched by misfortune.
Gustavo, the next eldest after me, would be working on my parents’ ranch in
Florida (a central province of Uruguay); I imagined Ricardo in the agrarian
school where he was studying and where he stayed during the week; Jaime in
his economic science classes; and Sarita, the youngest, in her psychology
studies.
 I believed that my father, despite his justified concern, would be able to
reassure them all somewhat.
My father was a calm and pragmatic man. A big reader, fond of
photography and music, he also liked working with his hands. My first
introduction to welding and carpentry was when he taught me at a very young
age. I remember that my eyes were fixed for hours on his fine hands, capable
of handling tools with ease to fix things that seemed far beyond repair. He
had even built, with me working alongside him, a rowboat, which we took
out to the beach and which I still have today.
In the cordillera I missed the father I had had as a child, that wise and
protective presence who always had a solution for everything. Of course his
skilled hands that I had admired so much as a child wouldn’t have been able
to repair the plane, but even if not it would have been enough for me to enjoy
conversations with him during those idle hours, like so many discussions we
had had in the past that were so interesting and educational for me.
I imagined that my mother would be in a volatile state. She wasn’t
exactly a person who took things calmly. The youngest of eight children, she
had been spoiled as a child by my grandparents and later in social circles,
where she marked her presence with her own strong light. She was used to
being in control of everything, and a son lost in the mountains, a situation
that would cause despair in any mother, is an event surely outside one’s
control.
During those hours of suffering and uncertainty, I pictured her as very
active, encouraging the search, speaking with influential people all over the
place, orchestrating everything, insisting on her own earthly connections,
although without neglecting divine ones, to whom—I was sure—she was
constantly appealing in prayer.
We all came from stable homes, with close family relationships based
on similar values. Even Carlitos, who has said that the divorce of his parents
some years before the crash was a more painful trial than the one we had
lived in the cordillera, was not left without affections, as demonstrated by the
heroic way his family devoted themselves to searching for him.
“My father moved heaven and earth in the mountains, and my mother
moved heaven and earth in the ethereal realm of prayer.”
With the same intensity that we were thinking about our parents, Javier
and Liliana were thinking about their children, whom they had left in the care
of their grandparents.
Nando was the only one who didn’t have, as we did, a distant but intact
family that he could dream of having a happy reunion with. This only
deepened his desire to get out and his intention to get back to his father no
matter what.
Shortly before the avalanche hit, on the twenty-ninth of October, Liliana
and Javier were talking quietly about their children. Nando was listening to
them and thinking that he might never get to experience the happiness of
building a family with a woman, one he didn’t know yet and would probably
never get the chance to know. He expressed these fears to Liliana, perhaps as
a way of giving her a small bit of comfort, making her see that she had lived
something that others, like him, might die without ever having experienced at
all.
Liliana comforted him in turn, telling him that he would be able to make
that dream a reality. And those were her last words, spoken with the love and
gentleness that she had never lost throughout the whole time we lived up
there. Without having intended it, she had become somewhat like a mother to
us all. We, the defenseless children of the snow, deeply needed that loving
and feminine presence, which the avalanche finally stole away from us.
Those conversations where we spoke of our familiar world were slowly
disappearing over time, not because we were forgetting but as a result of the
gradual withdrawal from our old world that we had begun to experience.
Although most of us were no longer adolescents, we had lived our lives
up to that point in an environment as loving and protective as that of our
childhood. Each of our realities was slightly different, but almost everyone
saw himself as having been living in a bubble that suddenly burst on October
13, 1972.
Roberto has said in reference to our life prior to the crash:
“We were like young colts playing in a lush green meadow who believe
that that green meadow is the world.”
I was one of those privileged and pampered youths, the firstborn child
of a happy family.
My parents, Eduardo Strauch Wick and Sarah Urioste Piñeyro, were
very close. They, along with my grandparents, uncles, and aunts, had built
that gilded world that the younger generation grew up in. We were happy and
carefree children who enjoyed everything we had at our fingertips and, as we
grew older, life didn’t seem to present us with too many problems.
I lived with my parents and siblings on the first floor of a three-story
building specially designed for my family in Aliados Park, an elegant and
tree-lined neighborhood in Montevideo, which was home to several
diplomatic residences.
On the second floor, which had a stairway to the yard, lived my
godparents, Adolfo (my father’s brother) and Rosina (my mother’s sister),
and my “double cousins,” Adolfo (Fito), Rosina, and Magdalena.
On the third floor lived my Urioste grandparents, whom we saw nearly
every day.
That physical closeness and affection from all branches of the family
increased our opportunities for being together, as in our childhood it had
increased the joy of the games and the feeling of being protected and
surrounded by love.
The Uriostes are a large and close family; even today the almost fifty
first cousins continue to get together on a regular basis. The happy crowd
also used to get together in the rural village of my maternal grandfather, Tatá
(José Pedro Urioste Lema), a distinguished doctor who was also a successful
businessman. The dairy he had at the Florida ranch was a model of his time
and had the first equipment for mechanized milking.
Urioste is a Basque surname that means “those who live on the outskirts
of town”—from uri (village or town) and oste (back), although it’s also
related to the sea, because the other meaning of uri is “water,” which is
consistent with our family crest, which includes two anchors and wavy lines
suggesting waves.
Our grandfather was the descendent of Sir Pablo Domingo de Urioste y
Urioste, born in Santurzi, Vizcaya, in 1780, who came to these South
American lands at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We know that he
was married in the year 1808 to Manuela Tuero Labandera in the San Juan
Bautista de Canelones church. One of their seven children, my great-great-
grandfather Don Santos Urioste Tuero, received his inheritance, the same as
his siblings: six thousand acres of land in the Florida region. Don Santos had
six children with María Eusebia Montaño Lorente, and one of those, my
great-grandfather, also named Santos, managed with great entrepreneurial
spirit to significantly increase the wealth he inherited, eventually coming to
possess seventy-four thousand acres in an area highly valued for the quality
of its soil.
My grandfather Tatá, in addition to being a prominent doctor, proved to
be a person of great initiative. He also had a role in politics, and in the year
1904, he was a member of the army of Aparicio Saravia, leader of the Blanco
Party, which led important movements in support of civil liberties and against
the hegemony of the civilian political class.
Our grandfather used to tell us tales of the revolution, and he taught us
many things about agriculture. He also talked a lot about medicine, his other
big passion, which his grandchildren benefited from, when his sharp clinical
eye could diagnose whatever illness we may have had just by looking at us.
He was married to María Angélica Piñeyro Carve, the daughter of the
well-known Uruguayan philanthropist Luis Piñeyro del Campo.
Grandmother, whom we always called Mamita, was sweet and gentle. She
never learned of our story in the cordillera because she, just like Tatá, died
years before the accident occurred.
For Easter, more than eighty family members reunited at my
grandfather’s ranch, and even with so many people we did group activities.
Nobody slept past eight in the morning, when we would all go for
enthusiastic horseback rides.
That shared life continued in the summers in El Pinar, where each
family group had built a house in the same area, very close to the sea. From
January to March, we deeply enjoyed those unforgettable vacations, long
enough to allow us an easy and relaxing life.
Once or twice a week, Tatá would come to El Pinar from his farm or
from Montevideo.
“Watermelon! Watermelon!” he shouted from his car, honking the horn.
The enormous glistening green fruit, almost immediately divided into
red crescents, was handed out to about ten of us grandchildren, who quickly
swarmed around him to eat the watermelon and listen to what he had to tell
us. It was never boring.
This clan spirit and mutual support, this way of acting as a collective,
without a doubt played a large part in the Valley of Tears in how “the
cousins,” as they called Fito, Daniel, and me, worked together in such a
united and collaborative way, and how we came to fill a paternal role in the
group of the youngest boys.
All three Strauch cousins had German blood running through our veins
from one of our ancestors, who gave us our last name. It was this that the
reporter had alluded to, confusing me, right after our rescue.
Our great-grandfather, Wilhelm Strauch, was born in Zellerfeld, Lower
Saxony, in 1844, and had come to Uruguay around 1870, hired by a German
company to advise in the assembly and operation of a slaughterhouse.
He married Matilde Shmied, who was born in Bern, and they had six
children. The second of these children was our grandfather Strauch, who
devoted himself to his jewelry shop, which came to be one of the most
popular in the country.
By the time we were children, he was already very old and quite deaf,
which prevented us from having much interaction with him, but I remember
his affable manner and his fondness for the garden, which he passed on to
me.
My Strauch grandparents had six children. Three were sons, who were
my father, Eduardo, Adolfo (Fito’s father), and Carlos. The three daughters
were Hilda, Olga, and Anita, who was Daniel’s mother.
Grandmother Anna was a woman who was always impeccable in all
aspects, from the way she dressed to her perfume. Affectionate but with that
German way, which could seem a bit distant to our Latin sensibilities, she
never let a birthday pass without coming to visit us and bringing us a great
present, and the same when any of us were sick.
The house of my Strauch grandparents, where Daniel’s family lived,
too, was in the neighborhood of Carrasco, and as a child I believed that place
was absolute perfection. We used to go there every Sunday. The wonderful
garden, the shiny black-and-white checkerboard floors, the smell of jasmine,
the delicious food that was always waiting for us—all this created an
atmosphere where, full of great affections, everything good in life seemed to
gather.
In the horror of the Valley of Tears, some days I remembered, as if from
a distant dream, those Christmases at the house of my paternal grandparents,
when Papá Noel waited for us with incredible gifts.
My aunt Rosina Urioste and my uncle Adolfo Strauch had met at a party
shortly after he returned from his overseas studies in Germany. By that time,
my father had also gone to Germany for a long period of professional
training. In those tense prewar years, family and friends in Uruguay were
waiting uneasily for my father to decide to come back, as alarming news was
arriving from Germany every day.
But my father, with his characteristic calm and great sense of
responsibility, didn’t take the boat back to Montevideo until he had finished
assembling the clock he was working on. A clock that marked the minute
when Sarah Urioste saw him again, after a year of thinking about him, in his
white dinner jacket, his skin bronzed from the sea crossing, his wide smile,
coming up to greet her with more effusiveness than a sister-in-law usually
inspires.
Could it be that in that magical moment my own existence and that of
my siblings was marked somewhere in the universe?

Most of the survivors have had the gift of a large family, and many of them
are already grandfathers. Our children, most of whom are already older than
we were in 1972, are one more result of that long and painful struggle for life.
They know the story of what happened to us, and several of them have
wanted to come with us to the Valley of Tears, not just as one who visits a
significant place from a parent’s past, but more with the attitude of a pilgrim
who goes looking for something within himself, perhaps finding it in the
roots of the large family that unites those of us who returned, as well as those
who allowed us to return.
Our children know that in some way they, too, are a part of it.
 14

MYSTERY

It was one of those many nights in the darkest period of our despair, when the
knowledge that we had been abandoned was more painful than the cold, the
hunger, and the anxiety. We were dozing fitfully, packed in that steel tube in
total silence. Then suddenly Nando’s voice rang out in the darkness.
“Listen, boys! Everything will be all right. I’ll have you home before
Christmas.”
Nobody responded, and perhaps I was one of the few who heard that
strange promise, spoken with a voice so clear and sure that it ruled out the
possibility that he was dreaming, even though it was the middle of the night.
There had been something lighthearted and enthusiastic in his tone, like
he had recovered the voice he had had when we were all joking around
before the crash.
In the days that followed, we didn’t talk about what he had said.
Although I wasn’t completely conscious of it, I believed that we would
be home before Christmas, as if in that inexplicable moment I had connected
deeply with Nando’s prediction, in accordance with my own hope.
I think that seemingly illogical prophecy was part of what my cousin
Adolfo calls “the third perspective” regarding our story, something that
deserves attention, just as we can relate the objective facts as they happened,
or even how these things were felt and interpreted inside each of us.
Adolfo describes this third perspective as that which goes beyond the
five senses. He’s speaking of the sixth sense as “another form of
consciousness that we gained access to in a time and place where ordinary,
rational education couldn’t offer us many solutions.”
This special ability is also linked to the “gray area” that my cousin
Daniel talks about in the same book, when he relates a very emotional
moment in his life, when his son was in a coma in the intensive care unit as
the result of an accident.
The doctors firmly assured Daniel that there was no hope of his son’s
recovery. Nonetheless, Daniel was sure that his son would manage to
recover, which in fact he did, and Daniel explains it in this way:
“I was already acquainted with that gray area that lurks between logic
and the most tenacious hope.”
So how big is this gray area? Is it only a matter of faith, or does it also
include premonitions, coincidences, and everything that seems inexplicable
or suggestive to us?
The mind, educated in logic, searches for answers even to questions that
might not have any answers and discovers connections between things that in
principle do not have a reason to be linked and that appear to us as pieces of a
jigsaw puzzle that will always be incomplete.
We are perplexed before the power of fate, and we try to find meaning
somewhere, anywhere. We think, for example, about where each of us was
sitting in the plane right before the crash and how that was the determining
factor of who lived and who died. We think about how those fates could have
been so different with one simple decision, whether from our own initiative
or at the request of another.
Moments before the tail would fall into the void, some that had been
sitting there were asked to move up to the front to make room for a crew
member to unfold the flight charts.
Nando gave up his window seat to his friend Panchito Abal, who had
asked him to switch so he could look out the window at the landscape.
“Are we supposed to be so close to the mountains?” were Panchito’s
last words.
Shortly before the crash, I myself moved to an empty seat on the right
side of the plane to get a better view of the cordillera.
This sinister roulette of fate was repeated on the night of the avalanche,
when each spot taken in the sloping part of the plane, where we were all piled
up to sleep, also had its own definitive consequence. Every night we rotated
our positions because some spots were more uncomfortable than others and
we wanted to be fair, but we usually made deals to trade with one another.
On the twenty-ninth of October, we had gone inside the fuselage early
due to bad weather. Roy was in the highest part of the fuselage because he
had given his spot to Diego Storm, and Marcelo was in the spot that had
originally been Coche’s. The two Gustavos, Zerbino and Nicolich, had also
switched places.
Hours later, when we were entombed beneath the snow, three of the
traded places had become deadly traps, from which Diego, Marcelo, and
Gustavo Nicolich had not been able to escape.
Tito Regules, who was supposed to have gone on the trip with us, had
missed the plane.
I had nearly missed the flight myself because on the morning of October
12, shortly before takeoff, I realized that I’d forgotten my travel papers. My
cousin Daniel ran to catch up with my brother Ricardo, who had driven us to
the airport, and told him that he had less than a half hour to go home and get
my passport and bring it back to me. The difficult task was accomplished,
and Ricardo got back to the airport eight minutes before the departure of the
Fairchild, just in time.
Meanwhile, Pancho Delgado had just climbed the little stair ramp up to
the airplane when he was suddenly struck with the certainty that a tragedy
would take place. He kept moving forward, he said, led more by inertia than
by the conviction.
Gustavo Zerbino also claims to have had a strong premonition before
the flight, which he spoke of in Mendoza to Esther, the wife of Dr. Francisco
Nicola, who was the doctor of the rugby team. He confessed his fears to her
in the hope of being comforted but, far from it, Esther, who died with her
husband instantly in the final crash against the snowbank, told him that she,
too, had felt a bad premonition.
We know that it is difficult to respect those inner voices, precisely
because they belong in that ambiguous gray area that can’t be entirely trusted.
That sixth sense, confusing and vague, also seems to be capable of
transmitting positive messages, but these, just like the forebodings, are easily
dismissed and displaced by daily thoughts.
But this is just what happened to Nando that night, when the intensity of
his vision made him wake us up. He, without a doubt one of the most
pragmatic members of the group, says that amid the cold and the darkness of
the fuselage, he had suddenly felt an inexplicable rush of pure joy. He no
longer felt cold; it seemed to him that he was bathed in a warm, golden light,
and right then he was completely positive that he was going to survive. That
was when he felt utterly compelled to share his certainty.
On hearing that announcement, which at that hour of the night seemed
an outburst of exaggerated optimism, some of the boys grunted softly in
response, but everyone kept sleeping.
Nando says that right after he told us of his strange premonition, the
uncontainable joy that had filled him disappeared, suffocated by the same
doubts and fears as before. The episode was no more than a momentary
revelation, as if there had been a little window opened for him into another
dimension, showing him what our fate would be.
Everything that happened after the crash is also full of big coincidences
that are worth noting. For example, the fact that several of the survivors came
from each graduating year at school: Daniel graduated in ’62, I graduated in
’63, Adolfo in ’64, Nando in ’65, Pedro in ’66, Bobby in ’67, Roberto in
’68 . . .
Among other curious things, Tintín remembers the night in Mendoza
before the crash and is still astonished that a girl they had just met wrote over
the names of several members of our group, freshly written on the wall of a
restaurant, the words “Friends for Eternity.” It is curious, too, that of the nine
friends who shared three rooms in the same hotel in Mendoza, only one
person from each room lived.
“Stay in Mendoza, the airplane is going to crash because it’s Friday the
thirteenth!” shouted the laughing girls from Mendoza, who had come to say
goodbye to Coche and Fito at El Plumerillo Airport. But the prophecy wasn’t
meant seriously. It was one of the many jokes that were told in reference to
the date, as must happen on many other completely uneventful trips taking
place on Friday the thirteenth.
Numbers would also have a big role in this story. The plane crashed on
the thirteenth, a number that is the sum of the three numbers painted on the
fuselage of the airplane: 571. There were sixteen of us who survived, which
added to thirteen makes twenty-nine, the number of people left alive after the
crash, and also the date of the avalanche. Marcelo died on the same date and
at the same time as his father had exactly four years earlier.
We don’t know if all this has any meaning, because it completely
escapes our ability to interpret it. So we prefer to focus on the mysteries that
are within our grasp, and we seek to understand, for example, what the secret
was that drove the Society of the Snow and why, as Fito says, despite being
in such a painful situation, we were capable of experiencing a different kind
of happiness. This happened to us in certain moments, when the beauty and
transcendence of the very inhospitable environment that threatened us also
allowed us to connect with a spiritual dimension that we never knew existed.
Maybe that is the miracle.

Seler Parrado was a practical man and a skilled businessman. He had risen to
be the owner of a chain of hardware stores, owing to his intelligence and
effort as well as his dedication to achieving his goals. That Friday the
thirteenth in October was a normal working day for him. On the morning of
the previous day, he had said goodbye to his wife, Eugenia, and his children,
Nando and Susy, whom he imagined were now in Chile enjoying their long
weekend.
Seler was just about to go into the bank when something stopped him.
He was seized by a sudden uneasiness that made him lose all thought of what
he had to do, and he had only a powerful desire to go home.
That evening, alone in his home, he thought about the strange
uneasiness that had suddenly come over him for no good reason. On the
news, they were reporting a Uruguayan airplane lost in the Andes. Seler
listened with some concern, but immediately brushed it off when he
remembered that the plane carrying his family had left the day before. An
hour later there was a knock at the door. It was an Air Force officer, a friend
of his. He brought very bad news: the plane that his wife and two of his three
children were on had disappeared in the cordillera at the very time that the
inexplicable anxiety had struck him like a bolt of lightning on his way into
the bank.
Seler Parrado was not the only parent who experienced a bad feeling at
the same time the crash occurred. Madelón Rodríguez, Carlitos Páez’s
mother, also felt a deep nervousness at that time that she couldn’t explain.
My uncle Andrés Shaw, who was in his office at probably the very
instant his son Daniel fell into the frozen mountains from the destroyed tail
section of the plane, had a very strong sensation that he himself was dying.
It is worth emphasizing that none of these sudden bad feelings could
have been caused by apprehension about our trip, given that everyone
assumed the flight had arrived in Chile the day before.
Some messages came in other forms. Inés, Carlos Valeta’s mother, saw
her son in her mind at the very moment the plane crashed, as she learned
later. He was covered in blood, and then she saw him instantly fall asleep,
which worried her a great deal. When she found out about the disappearance
of the airplane, she had no doubt that the sudden mental image that had
washed over her, accompanied by a sensation of anguish, meant that Carlos
had died, a certainty she kept through the entire ordeal. Nevertheless, along
with her husband, she participated in every aspect of the search, comforting
and encouraging the other parents. That complete certainty of her son’s death
was inexplicable in a woman like Inés, naturally optimistic and driven by a
deep faith.
Bimba, Diego Storm’s mother, saw him in her dreams with only a
bruise on his face. Diego had survived the crash and was just as she had seen
him. Bimba took an active role in the group of parents and close friends who
kept the search going, investigating, asking questions, obtaining information
and evidence, and desperately clinging to any sign, which meant frequent
trips to Chile. During one of those visits, she was with Madelón in a hotel
room in Santiago, when suddenly she became pensive, sitting motionless for
a long time next to the window, staring off into the landscape, which was lost
in a leaden sky full of clouds.
“The search is over for me. I won’t be coming back to Chile,” said
Bimba.
Madelón, in her book The Rosary of the Andes, relates how astonished
she was at her friend’s sudden despair. That day, which she remembers as
being very sad, was October 30. Diego had died only hours before in the
avalanche, and his mother had in some way been able to feel it.
These powerful moments, when timely messages seem to reveal
themselves spontaneously, also occurred in the Valley of Tears.
On December 21, Carlitos had been asking an aunt who was already
dead and whom he had loved very much for her help in making Roberto and
Nando’s mission a success. When he awoke, after having slept for a bit, he
had the conviction that the two had managed to arrive somewhere where they
could get help. He told my cousin:
“Fito, don’t mention this to the others, but I have a feeling that today the
boys made it to a town, to some safe place . . .”
Carlitos says that that night he went to sleep thanking God because
Nando and Roberto had made it. The next day we heard on the news that they
would be coming to rescue us in a few hours.
During our period of isolation on the mountain, not only were there
sudden and pointed insights capable of connecting both distant worlds in one
direction or another, but we were also able to recognize the effects of our
permanent will to connect, manifested in the telepathic messages we tried to
send to our mothers and girlfriends, in which we repeated over and over that
we were alive.
My mother and the mothers of Daniel and Fito never accepted
condolences, however much their attitude provoked quiet criticism in those
who believed only in the power of reason.
While we were trying so hard to communicate that we were alive, our
families were continuing the search, using every means they had at their
disposal. And there were many others who didn’t even know us but who
nevertheless joined that movement of love and hope against all reason.
There were people all over who prayed for us, and there were those who
were involved in a direct way, organizing reconnaissance flights, searching
desolate places on foot, on horseback, or by helicopter, asking questions, and
seeking help from baqueanos and other locals. Others supported the search
with resources to finance the expeditions or to perform technical tasks, like
the cartographer Luis Surraco, the father of Roberto’s girlfriend, or the
photographer Caruso, who spent hours with a magnifying glass, analyzing
hundreds of large-scale aerial photographs, trying to find the slightest detail
that might indicate a foreign element on the natural floor of snow and rock.
Rafael Ponce de León, a ham radio operator, never stopped monitoring
the search and the news until we were found. In a time when telephone
communications were slow and difficult, especially between remote places,
Rafael’s house became the center of operations, where our parents and
friends gathered at all hours.
The search and rescue (SAR) teams had promised to resume the search
at the beginning of December, when the weather conditions improved, since
before that date it seemed foolish to put lives at risk by flying in turbulent
areas for the sole purpose of recovering bodies.
Nevertheless, there were some mothers and girlfriends who kept saying
“They are alive,” not with the insane obstinacy of one who doesn’t want to
see reality, but with a serene conviction rooted in that indefinable realm.
Following the crash, SAR had initiated the search in the area near the
last reported position of the Fairchild. Later, taking into account the time at
which the airplane had left Mendoza, the speed it was going, and the wind
direction, they came to the conclusion that the last position of the plane
reported from the air was completely wrong.
We later learned that the pilot, believing we were over Curicó, which
lay to the west of the cordillera, turned north to begin our descent toward
Santiago. In reality the plane was still in the middle of Planchón Pass, which
lets you cross the cordillera over much smaller mountains, and the turn to the
north meant that we went deep into the heart of the Andes.
The detection of this error by the search teams completely changed the
area of the search, and it was then, on the second day, that they flew over the
area where the plane had actually crashed. In any event, the search was
unsuccessful because, as we knew well from our first expeditions away from
the Valley of Tears, it was impossible to see the remains of the white fuselage
on the snow from a distance.
SAR was obligated to keep searching for ten days, which they did;
however, on the second day, when they flew over areas where the nighttime
temperatures reached forty degrees below zero, they knew that they were
merely carrying out a formality. They believed it was already too late to find
anyone still alive.
But two months later some mothers, defying all reason, were still saying
“They are alive,” believing firmly in a miracle.
The search was not just blind and monotonous activity. There were
periods of great hope, in which it was on a rather promising course, and there
was great disappointment when there were no results. No source of
information was unexplored, and so they also turned to Gérard Croiset, a
renowned psychic who had helped shed light on many cases for the police in
Holland.
Based on a flight chart they sent him, Croiset said that he had been able
to visualize the crash. He said that the plane, which had been under the
command of the copilot during the crash, had lost one of its engines.
Regarding the location where the plane had fallen in the mountains, he
mentioned that it was near a lake with turquoise water. Croiset saw death, but
he also saw life, which raised many hopes.
Communications with him were not simple, as long-distance calls were
difficult in those days, which added to the vagueness of an extrasensory
connection, with its necessarily erratic and incomplete information.
To specify the location of the remains of the airplane, Croiset said:
“Between the Tinguiririca and Termas del Flaco. Fly in a circle that is forty
miles across.”
A dowser by the name of Frigerio was also consulted. His wand bowed
over the area of the map marking the Tinguiririca volcano.
Other parents in Uruguay had turned to a humble resident of the west
coast named Miguel Comparada, who also used the art of water divining to
point to an area between the Tinguiririca volcano, Sosneado, and the San
Hilario mountain range, which was exactly where we were. In any event, this
information was dismissed because the search and rescue planes had already
passed over that area on the second day after the crash and had seen nothing.
Croiset was consulted several times, and he always insisted on the truth
of his answers, which later surprised many with their accuracy. He said that
the airplane had lost its wings and that it had slid over the snow like a worm.
Then he added, “And I can’t say any more,” because his visions were brief,
and through every one he kept insisting, “I see life, but I also see death.”
The last telephone consultation with him was on December 10. On that
occasion he told them: “As a man, I don’t have the right to keep giving you
hope, but as a psychic, I still think there is life. This is what I feel. Don’t call
me anymore. I wish you all the luck in the world.”

Hail, holy Queen, Mother of mercy,

Hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve,
To thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of
tears.

By chance in a place called the Valley of Tears, although we didn’t

know its name then, we prayed the rosary night after night. Some saw it as a
way to talk to God or the Virgin; others, myself included, saw it as a way of
feeling our closeness as a group.
The rosary we used belonged to Carlitos’s mother. Madelón, without
knowing why, had put it in her son’s pocket when they were saying goodbye
right before the trip.
To Catholic and non-Catholic, believer and nonbeliever, the rosary
symbolized something important to us in our situation of abandonment and
helplessness.
“Carlitos, I want to kiss the cross on your rosary,” said Nando before
leaving on the final expedition, and he did so.
Since we were certain that many of our parents were also reciting the
same prayers, the rosary in some way brought us closer to them.
In the evening of that Friday, October 13, my brother Ricardo heard the
news of the disappearance of our flight on the radio. They were talking about
flight 571 of the Uruguayan Air Force, and he could clearly remember having
seen that number painted on the fuselage when he had taken us to the airport.
He was in the countryside with my parents, and at first he had tried to hide
the news from them, wanting to confirm it at our cousins’ house nearby. He
came home with the sad certainty that the lost plane was really ours, and so
he told the rest of the family.
My parents immediately went back to Montevideo. A friend was
waiting for them at home to reassure them, saying that the airplane had made
a stop due to bad weather and that we were all staying at a hotel in Mendoza.
It didn’t take them long to find out that this wasn’t true. That situation, which
had taken place the previous day, along with the unavoidable shortcomings in
communications, had caused the confusion.
Prayer began to play a significant role at home, where my family
erected an altar with images, photos, and burning candles. There was also
another altar, a bigger one, in the house of my aunt and uncle, Adolfo’s
parents, who lived on the floor above ours.
I imagine that my mother from the first moment began to pray to Jesus,
her intimate friend. She was not very inclined to pray to Mary, but several
coincidences came together to persuade her to do so, in particular to the
Virgin of Garabandal, who had supposedly appeared several times in the little
autonomous mountain town of Cantabria, a region of northern Spain.
There was a constant flow of people in our houses. Parents, friends, and
more distant relations were there to give their support, but this also meant a
permanent disturbance in the privacy of their homes. So my mother and her
sister Rosina, at the suggestion of my aunt Cora, decided to go to El Pinar.
There, in more peaceful surroundings, they continued with their fervent
prayers, begging for us to come home alive.
My mother tells how, as they prayed the rosary at home in El Pinar,
something extraordinary happened. They were on the fifth joyful mystery, the
one that recalls the child Jesus, lost and found again in the Temple on the
third day.
“Why have you done this to us? Your father and I were so worried
searching for you!” These were the words of the Virgin upon finding him,
according to the Gospel.
Never before had my mother been able to understand so well what those
parents had felt, searching for the twelve-year-old Jesus. In those moments
both she and her sister could fully identify with Mary’s despair, asking here
and there, looking at every face, going back and forth in the crowd. She
imagined Mary exhausted with fatigue at night, scarcely sleeping and startled
awake by alarm at his absence, full of fear for what might have happened to
her child.
My mother thought about how there had been only three of those
anguished days for the Virgin, and she, how many had she suffered? She
could no longer even count them. So in the middle of her prayer, she
communicated this to Mary as if in protest, and she tells about how, still to
this day emotional at remembering it, she felt almost at once a voice at her
side saying, “I know that you have suffered a great deal. Soon you will have
your child back.”
Neither my mother nor my aunt Rosina have ever doubted that their
constant prayer was answered with the miracle that we came home alive.

On December 11, a Douglas C-47 from the Uruguayan Air Force, specially
equipped to renew the search for the remains of the crash in the cordillera,
took off from Montevideo en route to Santiago.
Traveling on that flight was Carlos Páez Vilaró (Carlitos’s father), an
experienced pilot friend of his, and the fathers of Roy Harley, Roberto
Canessa, and Gustavo Nicolich. Shortly after takeoff they had to make an
emergency landing in Buenos Aires due to the failure of one of the engines.
From there the five passengers continued their journey on a commercial flight
to Chile, where they split up into three groups. One of them went by land to
the area of Tinguiririca, guided by baqueanos; another remained in Santiago,
waiting for the arrival of the repaired Douglas C-47 so they could fly over the
area of Planchón Pass; and the third group searched in Curicó, where a miner
thought he had seen something from a distance that could be related to the
crash.
A few days later they were informed that two pilots from separate
flights reported having seen a cross at the top of a mountain. In the same C-
47, the fathers of Carlitos, Roberto, and Gustavo flew to that spot to
investigate, but another engine failure prevented them from reaching it.
Before the second emergency landing, this time at Los Cerrillos Airport
in Santiago, they had seen what looked like human footprints at the top of the
San Hilario mountain range. They guessed it was just an illusion brought
about by their own hope, because the snowy surface where they saw the
footprints was at an altitude of 16,000 feet. However, these could well have
been the footprints of Nando and Roberto, who in the course of those same
days were on their final expedition.
As for the cross they had been trying to see, they found out shortly
afterward that it was formed by cones placed by Argentinean geophysicists as
part of a study of thaw patterns.
Once again, with no sign that would allow them to keep searching,
everything seemed to be starting over. Nevertheless, Carlos Páez Vilaró
interpreted the presence of the cross as a sign, though not of the boys, who
had certainly not built it. For him, although he couldn’t explain why, it was a
divine sign. It was like in children’s stories about treasure hunts, where a
mark on a tree or a rock indicates that the treasure is nearby. Of course, the
cross had been made by the geophysicists or whomever it was, but in the
time-space continuum, this act had allowed this desperate father to interpret it
later as a sign of encouragement in his risky and tireless search.
Many people may think that his feelings had little basis in reality, but
the recognition of a sign is something very personal and almost impossible to
share, because it transcends the specific element that produces it and is
fulfilled in the heart of each individual.
That was how I felt on the morning of December 22, when the crystal-
clear and powerful sound of Gounod’s “Ave Maria” began to pour out of the
small portable radio in the middle of the Andes, where the reception was
always weak and poor, and I knew instantly that the boys they were talking
about ambiguously on the news were Roberto and Nando, that they had made
it to get help.
Moments later, we heard the confirmation that it really was our friends
who had finally reached civilization. But for me, the news had arrived before
and in a very different way. These types of events can be inexplicable, but
they can be personal messages that appeal to the deepest part of oneself. In
this case, the message was conveyed by the beauty of the music and the
emotion it evoked in me just as the sun was peeking out from behind
Sosneado, as well as the unusual clarity of the reception. All this converged
so that I would recognize in “Ave Maria” an unmistakable sign that we would
live, because our friends had achieved their objective.
Sometimes chance repetitions made us perceive certain events as signs.
My mother, in those agonizing days when society believed us to be dead, had
received brochures about the Virgin of Garabandal, to which she hadn’t paid
much attention. One day, as she was praying in church, she felt someone
touch her on the shoulder. Someone was leaning toward her, trying to show
her a book. She immediately recognized her friend Mrs. China Herrán
Bordaberry, then the first lady of Uruguay, who told her that in the Spanish
town of San Sebastián of Garabandal, there had been several miracles
connected with appearances of the Virgin. So my mother saw this series of
coincidences as a sign that she should dedicate her prayers to the name of
Mary. Incidentally, I later found out that some people in Spain happen to call
this invocation of Mary “the Virgin that went up the mountain” because the
place where she appeared was at the top of the Cantabrian mountain chain.
A little more than a month later, Mom’s brother Pepe called to tell her
that two survivors from our flight had appeared, saying that there were others
still alive in the plane. Without even knowing whether I was one of them, she
took the first flight to Santiago, along with many of the other parents. By
another strange coincidence, there was a priest traveling on that same flight
who had just come from witnessing some miracles in Garabandal. When my
mother arrived in San Fernando, another happy mother (that of Carlitos) told
her that I was one of the living.
And then, more recently, another event occurred that I interpreted as a
sign meant just for me. In 2005, Ricardo Peña made the discovery of my
jacket with my documents and wallet in the pocket, and my sunglasses as
well, without the lenses, a few yards away. It was so unexpected and so
unusual, which I saw as a suggestion that the moment had come for me to
share my experience beyond the scope of my family and friends, to which it
had always been restricted.
The fact that my belongings—which in some way represented my very
identity, lying for decades exposed to the harsh weather of the mountain, as
likely to be covered by snow as punished by the rain, the sun, and the wind—
had surfaced in such an extraordinary way seemed to be an invitation to bring
to light something that deserved to be shared, telling me that it had spent
enough time in the silent permanence of the mountain.
Ricardo, who at that time didn’t know me personally, though he was
familiar with our story, carried down my wallet and the other documents to
send to me. When I received his call, I was very grateful, but I couldn’t hide
my disappointment that he hadn’t brought down my jacket as well but had
left it at the spot in accordance with the mountaineering ethic to leave found
objects in their place. He responded that if that was my wish, he would go
back on a future trip and try to find my jacket again, which at first didn’t
seem an easy task.
In 2006 and 2007, Ricardo, who was by that time a good friend of mine,
went back to search the area, but on both occasions the spot where he had
found my belongings was covered in a thick layer of snow. On our expedition
to the valley in 2008, he went back up the mountain to try again while I
stayed down at the base camp.
I will never forget the joy I felt on hearing his news over the walkie-
talkie:
“Eduardo, I found your coat!”
When he returned to camp with my coat, which I still recognized
despite how threadbare and faded it was, I put it on with deep emotion, and
that simple act was like starting a new beginning. The mountain had given
me back my coat, as if to challenge my promise to it thirty-five years earlier
that a part of me would always remain buried beneath its snows. It’s time, it
seemed to say, to become unburied—time to share the many things I had
learned from the silence of my mountain.
 15

MEMORY

“Where there is nothing, I found everything.”

—Eduardo Strauch

Everything that felt endless is now a part of the past—the clean, deeply
empty hours; the heavy minutes when only the imperceptible movement of
the minute hand proved that the watch hadn’t stopped; the nights when
between dreams we had the feeling that the shelter we were sleeping in was
enormous, even though our bodies were piled up tightly against each other in
the tiny space.
I find myself again in the magnificent backdrop of those powerful
moments, which even then we knew we would never forget, and the little
routines that I remember just as well: the daily work, efficient and organized;
the ideas discussed quietly between us; the plans and backup plans, thinking
about them over and over; the sudden attacks of fear and doubt; the praying
of the rosary; the tears that were always one blink away but that I never
allowed myself; the periods of surrender in the middle of despair; the
laughter that followed a joke; renewed hope; the intense and unexpected
states of spiritual fullness that started occurring more and more frequently.
I am now alone in that same place on the mountain where we had been
ephemeral visitors, in that deep silence of the snow that for a time absorbed
our voices.
Calls from one to another, still shocked and terrified after the echo of
the crash; cries of pain and agony; names shouted from the darkness and the
pressing urgency after the avalanche, the voices sounding broken with
anguish and strangely distorted due to the tiny enclosure we had been buried
in. These stand out like jagged needles in the throng of my memories,
although time is slowly smoothing them and making the jagged edges less
sharp, just as it does to the peaks of the mountains.
In this place for centuries upon centuries, there had been no other sound
besides the thundering landslides, the crashing of smaller rocks over the
smooth and steep rock cliffs, the creaking of breaking ice, the whistling of the
wind blowing with no obstacles in its path, perhaps a muffled earthquake, or
the brutal force of an avalanche. But in this slow world, which one day we
were part of, any disturbances settle and it becomes peaceful again, and
silence returns to rule its domain in the immutable serenity of the mountain.
The equilibrium returns, inevitably. The storm ceases, the rocks roll to a stop,
and the snow returns to its quietude after the fall. The volcano returns to its
sleep of a thousand years.
Our intruding voices, faint but persistent, were the great exception in
this ultimate solitude. So was the music of “Ave Maria,” a sublime result of
human creation, which we heard one clear dawn in the mountain air. The
melody that rang out in that superb natural amphitheater was the only thing to
come close to matching its magnificent beauty. And we were there, too, not
only as impassive witnesses. The landscape becomes complete with what
arises in the human soul that contemplates it. We are no longer insignificant
beings facing the void as long as our emotions make us participants in that
immensity.
Sometimes, in the harshest of circumstances, our ability for awe
remains. I remember how, in my brief and imprudent nightly trips outside the
fuselage just after the crash, I stayed outside, staring at the mountain as it was
at night, bathed in the soft azure glow of the stars. There was something
unfathomable in its beauty, something capable of captivating me and making
me feel so fulfilled that it was always an effort to cut that dialogue short. I
didn’t want to leave it, but if I lingered too long out in the elements I could
die.
In those seventy-two days, the talks among the group had been growing
steadily less animated and less frequent, little by little filtering out everything
that was not absolutely necessary. There were whispers that almost always
accompanied our brief wanderings as doomed ghosts. Quick and unimportant
whispers in the midst of our everyday activity—requests, responses, brief
exchanges, ideas coming and going like lightning flashes, conjectures, grunts
of approval or of doubt—and also, in the calmest hours, slow and well-
thought-out conversations, some of which I can still remember today in
detail.
Words, so many words were extinguished one by one in the silence of
the cordillera, which remains even now silent and unchanging in its illusion
of eternity.
I look around this landscape, which has a hint of pristine purity in the
gradual and imperceptible way the changes occur. The peaks where the plane
hit are right there, just as dark and tall as they were then. The glacier where I
now find myself and where the remains of the Fairchild are hidden grows and
shrinks throughout the year in that circular time that marks the seasons. It
grows and shrinks very slowly, as if it were breathing, and some metal parts
from the plane that are visible seem untouched by the rust that grows on them
with the slowness of centuries.
I have been sitting by myself next to the iron cross that marks the tomb
of our friends. “Near, O God, to thee,” says the prayer inscribed on the cross,
in barely legible letters on one of its sides. And on the other: “The world to
its Uruguayan brothers.” Several bronze plaques, small objects, rosaries, and
messages around the cross speak of the many visits it has received from
people around the world. I am immersed once again in this almost unchanged
environment of total peace.

In January of 1973 a detachment of the Andean Relief Corps and a Chilean

priest came to the site in helicopters to organize the burial of the bodies. I’m
sure they could never have imagined then how much this site would be
visited in the future.
The inaccessibility of the site would suggest the opposite. The journey
by land takes two days on horseback, skirting the edges of cliffs, crossing the
mad currents of rivers and torrents, enduring the increasingly intense effects
of the altitude and harsh storms.
Going up to the Valley of Tears is not even always possible. The first
time I wanted to revisit the site with my wife and children, the weather was
so bad that we weren’t able to make it up to the glacier at all.
Neither does going by air guarantee easy access. In 2002 I had joined a
team from Paris Match in an unusual foray in a helicopter. The machine had
a transparent floor, which made me feel a little like Peter Pan flying over the
Andes. But that scenic flight couldn’t make it to the Valley of Tears, because
of the turbulence, and we had to settle for landing far below the valley, where
we could at least see the cross.
The mountaineers from the Andean Relief Corps chose that spot to
build the grave because it’s outside of the natural avalanche gully, and also
because there they found enough earth to dig a pit and form a mound atop it,
which supports the cross.
After a few days of work, when they had finished burying all the
remains, they held mass in honor of the dead.
Before leaving the site, in an attempt to clean up the area, they doused
the fuselage with gasoline and set fire to it, apparently hastily and
incompletely, since even today, in every thaw, scattered parts appear
everywhere.
The metal tube that was our home for those seventy-two days was only
partially burned. It must have been hidden beneath the snow for many years,
because we never heard news of anyone having seen it. Then in 1995, the
first time I returned with eleven other survivors to the place where we had
suffered and learned so much, at one point in the rough ascent, we suddenly
saw it in front of us in the cavity of a huge crevasse, as if the mountain had
opened its fist to show us what had been hidden for decades from all other
eyes that weren’t ours.

In 1994, twenty-two years after our rescue, the idea of going back to visit the
site started forming slowly. After mentioning it to my cousins Daniel and
Adolfo, we realized that we all shared the feeling. It seemed like a good idea
to many of my other brothers of the cordillera too. For some reason, almost
all of us were feeling the necessity of going back at the same time.
Roy was the most involved in organizing the trip, which took place a
year later. It was an intense experience for everyone, and even a necessary
one in my opinion, crucial for the last stage of processing everything we had
experienced. Sitting next to the grave that first time, I cried deeply; and since
then I have been able to do the same every time, as if the seal that kept the
full expression of my pain locked away had been broken. At last I could
mourn my dead friends, something I hadn’t been able to do properly in those
days, when our emotions had shut down to enable us to survive from one day
to the next.
On the first night that we twelve survivors camped next to the cross,
there was such a strong wind that we began to feel afraid, which brought back
our memories even more vividly. We had changed, grown and experienced so
much in the last two decades, but the endless and brutal wind seemed to be
exactly the same.

It is now 2006, and I have returned again with Ricardo Peña. Ricardo and his
brother Victor have left to explore the glacier with James Vlahos, a
photographer and reporter for National Geographic. I stayed behind with
Mario, the horse handler, who then set off by himself to look for water and
view the landscape.
There is no one else around within thousands of yards. Never before
have I been so completely alone in the Valley of Tears. My thoughts soon
plunge into the depths of my memory.
I decide to wait for my friends to return before setting up the tent we
brought. We have already set another one up at the base camp, located
halfway up the ascent to the cross, about four or five hours away on
horseback. Around me is the equipment and supplies we need for our five-
day visit: rope, sleeping bags, camp stoves, food, and headlamps.
For a few days we will have to limit ourselves to eating dehydrated
meals, which are rather good at first, until we get tired of them and prefer
cured ham, nuts, cheese, and fruit, which we also have in our provisions.
Still lingering in my mind is the conversation I just had with Mario. He
told me about the suicide of his son and about how the mountain saved him
from falling irretrievably into the darkest of depressions. I feel connected to
him in our shared capacity to capture the healing power of this magnificent
environment.
The day is beautiful and the calm is absolute. Every time I come back
here, I am reconnected with our story of survival as if with a guiding thread
at once firm but also flexible, because the memories never come in the same
form or in the same order. I stop at one detail or another in a certain event,
and sometimes others appear that hadn’t surfaced before in the mass of
memories that always flow unpredictably in the mind, fed by images in the
subconscious and the various associations of thought.
I take pleasure in remembering those intense moments, even though
they were so painful, like the morning when we heard the search had been
canceled and the bitterness that crept into our hearts once we recovered from
our shock and disbelief.
I remember the uncertainty that we had been holding at bay rushing in
and filling our minds like a torrent of water. We had to manage it carefully so
that it wouldn’t become desperation. We had to live with it and learn how to
take things one step at a time, just like the mules that go single file on the
razor-thin edges of a cliff. And as a sort of reward, more than two months
later, we heard the news, through the same weak little voice of the radio filled
with static, that they were coming back for us. That is the memory I treasure
most, and the one I always come back to: our cries of joy, seeing those
among us who were on the verge of death stand up for the first time in a long
time, everybody hugging each other and rolling around in the snow.
I relive that moment again and again, as well as the moment the
helicopters actually arrived. I can still hear the whirring of their blades, which
was like the rhythmic sound of applause. We had achieved the impossible
and life was our reward. But it wasn’t the life we had had before; it had
become something new. Often, in moments of difficulty, the vision of those
helicopters is something I conjure as a way of regaining hope. The image
represents salvation—a result of effort, sacrifice, and silence. That moment
has become for me the visual representation of everything I learned on the
mountain.
All of that happened long ago, and it remains in the past, except here
under this infinite blue sky, this place where I can come to immerse myself in
that past again, to feel that I am part of something limitless, something with
no name, which despite being so vast is not empty, because I return from it
feeling fuller than ever, overflowing with a vital energy.
At times like this, when I’m here on a perfect afternoon, the good
memories prevail, not because I have forgotten the suffering or the death that
permeates our story, but because I feel that all that pain has been integrated
into a spiritual reality that transcends all of us.
In addition to what we lived through in those days as the Society of the
Snow, there are the memories of all the experiences related to it that
developed in the years afterward. Now the flow of memories is even richer in
what it contains and still continues to grow as if it had a mind of its own. We
all have the feeling that those who come to listen to us tell our story want to
understand what we experienced in order to know more about themselves, to
begin to see the depth of human capabilities, to take what we learned on the
mountain and put it into practice in their own cordillera, because everyone
has one in one way or another.
The first time I spoke in front of an audience about our experience was
for a group of theater friends of the actor Gian DiDonna, who played me in
the movie Alive. The talk was in an old building in New York where an off-
Broadway institute was located.
I remember the strange nervousness I felt as I climbed the stairs of the
old building to the third floor, where I was going to face the challenge, new
for me, of talking about the subject with strangers. There were thirty guys
waiting for me in the room, all studying to be actors, and shortly after I
started, I came to realize how moved they were by my words. The necessity
of speaking in English made it twice as hard, but even so I began to feel at
ease, and my nerves left me entirely. After the lecture was over, we moved to
a loft where one of the actors lived and continued to talk for hours.
That first experience, so moving for me, inspired me to share my story
with other audiences. The second time was in the city of Buenos Aires, in the
San Miguel Jesuit Seminary, in front of about one hundred people, mostly
members of the seminary and their families. I was moved by their attention
and their total silence as they listened to me, and by the long applause at the
end, which I hadn’t expected, and afterward by the dozens of people who
approached me to thank me and to ask me questions. I think it was then that I
became fully aware of the importance of sharing with others what I had
learned in those seventy-two days.
Since those two unforgettable lectures, I have spoken to audiences many
times and in many different venues. Audiences vary, and I never say the
exact same things twice, but the interest and the emotions are constants.
Having experienced a unique story so revealing of essential aspects of
human nature has put me in contact with people from different cultures, and
in the sharing of my experience, I have come to see many places and gained
valuable friendships. Ricardo, for example, is one of the many dear friends
the mountain has given me, as if it wanted to compensate in some way for the
ones it took away from me.
The mountain also taught me a new meaning of friendship that I have
carried with me all these years. In the Valley of Tears we were able to strip
ourselves of what, almost incidentally, usually obscures the real essence of a
person. Up there we had no costumes or masks. We were human beings
disconnected from everything that often gives us consistency. It didn’t matter
what family we came from or whether we were good or bad students, or how
old we were, whether we were good at sports or not, whether our social lives
were glamorous or boring. All of that had been left in another place, another
world, inaccessible and for the moment useless.
We had become beings stripped of our environment, however much
each of us carried with him his past, his abilities, and his acquired skills. The
ties between us were centered much more on the individual himself,
regardless of other elements that sometimes determine, favor, or hinder the
beginning of a friendship.
I think about Carlitos, for example. He was seven years younger than
me, a thing that, at our ages then, would have made it unlikely for us to share
the same group of friends. It was the same in the case of Javier, married and
much older than the rest of us. If we had met under any other circumstances, I
would have seen him as belonging to the world of adults, people whom,
however fond we may have been of them, we wouldn’t easily have counted
among our lasting friendships. Yet I became bonded with both of them,
despite our differences in interests and ways of life. The experiences we had
on the mountain expanded my concept of friendship, freeing it from all
previously acquired ideas. The mountain made friendship and love transcend
all barriers, and I always try to share this when I speak on the subject.
Many people approach me when I give lectures. I can understand why
the ordeal we lived through is of such singular interest, since there are no
known precedents to our experience. Its allure appeals directly to the deepest
aspects of human nature, and those who hear our talks can find inspiration for
overcoming their own difficulties and painful situations.
There are also those who are so strongly connected with our story that
they have gone up the mountain to search for the very thing that I have found
in its peaks. Many of these people have surprised me with unforgettable
moments. Such was the case on one visit to the crash site with Jeff Muhr,
who woke me up one morning when the sun was peeking out from behind the
Sosneado volcano.
“I have something for you, Eduardo,” he told me and handed me an
iPod with headphones. As soon as I put them in my ears, the sound of
Gounod’s “Ave Maria” transported me to another dawn, another sunrise,
when that song was for me an unmistakable sign of salvation. I’m sure he
didn’t even realize the magnitude of the gift he had given me that morning.
Experiences, memories, and friends like these are some of the richest
treasures the mountain has given me.

The filming of Alive had caused us great apprehension since the moment we
found out it was going to happen. We were worried about who the director
would be, which actors would play us, and many other things. Behind our
concern there was probably a deep fear that we wouldn’t recognize ourselves
in the fiction. The news that the director was American gave us even more
doubts about whether he would be able to understand the cultural differences
enough to portray us accurately.
I didn’t know who was going to play me until the filming had already
begun, which worried me a great deal; but as soon as Gian DiDonna
contacted me to ask for advice, I realized that I had been very lucky. Not only
did Gian, who as it turns out is of Italian heritage, manage to carry out his
work responsibly and respectfully, but we ended up being great friends, to the
point where he named me as best man in his wedding.
The movie Alive made the whole world aware of what we had lived
through. They filmed it in a ski resort called Panorama in the Canadian
Rockies, and several of us assisted on set.
There were two sets: one at the resort, in a big tent where they
reconstructed the environment where we had lived for those seventy-two
days, and the other at the top of a glacier, where they had laid out (with the
help of a helicopter) the fuselage of an airplane identical to the broken
Fairchild.
 Being on set merged fiction with memory. When we came and went,
trying not to miss a moment of what was happening, we would cross paths
with actors in costume, whom we would recognize as one of our brothers, or
even ourselves. There were injured men who, during the breaks in filming,
walked around calmly, people who assumed the role of those who had died,
trying to imitate their movements or saying their words, which we had heard
in their original context. There was a real mountain, where it was freezing
cold and sometimes snowed with real snowflakes, not props. It all seemed
like a crazy dream, and yet it was very raw and real to us at the same time.
At night we watched what had been filmed that day in a small room. We
lived between amazement and latent attacks of emotion, which at any
moment could overcome us without warning, not so much because of the
reenactment of dialogue or the reanimation of people, but because of the
physical environment and the atmosphere that was all around us, capable of
transporting us back to that other place, the memory owned only by us.
Adolfo and I shared one of our most powerful experiences when we arrived
at the set of the fuselage one cold morning. That day the filming was taking
place at the set back at the resort, so up there alone, with only the pilot of the
helicopter that had brought us, we found only silence and snow around the
body of the Fairchild, lying in the mist like a ghost of the one that had been
our home.
The film didn’t leave us all satisfied, because much of what it depicts
isn’t really accurate. Nevertheless, I remember that when we saw it for the
first time in an exclusive premiere for the sixteen survivors, we were all
moved to tears. We also went to see the premiere in New York and were even
invited to tea at the house of the famous director Martin Scorsese, who at that
time was in a relationship with Illeana Douglas, who played the part of
Liliana.

It has now been more than two hours since my friends left to explore the
glacier, and they still haven’t returned, which worries me and causes me to
relive old fears. What if something happened to them and I’m left alone here?
I try to calm myself down and conquer my anxiety. I breathe deeply and
watch the sky.
 This site is one of my places in the world. Here, next to the cross, I am
myself, and I recover the best of myself. This is the second time I have been
here this year. The first was just a few days ago with Ricardo Peña, his cousin
Ana Lorena, and my children, Sofía and Pedro.
To control my fears, I try to focus on the good memories, and among
them the thirtieth anniversary celebration, in October of 2002, stands out,
when all the survivors reunited in Santiago, Chile, invited by the Chilean
rugby team, the Old Grangonian, the team our Uruguayan team would have
played back then if the plane hadn’t crashed.
We stayed in the Sheraton San Cristóbal hotel, the same place where we
had reunited with our families after the rescue. Fourteen of the sixteen
survivors attended, and those who had vowed never to set foot in an airplane
again drove over twenty hours to get there.
Before starting the rugby match, a mass was held on the field. When it
was over, I heard the sound of a helicopter. Was it a hallucination caused by
the strength of the emotion? The sound became louder and clearer, and then
there was no doubt that it was real. For a moment I thought that the helicopter
passing overhead was a coincidence, but when we saw it appear behind the
silhouette of the mountains and begin a slow descent toward us, we knew that
it must be part of the celebration. We watched it, stunned and amazed. It was
identical to the helicopters that had rescued us from the mountain. I heard
once again that sound in the air, and it immediately carried me back to the
forever-treasured memory of what I consider to be my second birth.
It landed among us on the field, and with another unforgettable sound,
the sliding door opened. I could barely contain my impulse to run toward it.
The emotion of this seemed unsurpassable, but there was another surprise in
store for us. Out of the helicopter stepped Sergio Catalán—the cattle driver
who had left his cattle, riding eight hours on horseback to get help. He was
smiling, happy to be seeing us again, his sixteen Uruguayan friends whose
story he had been linked with since that day in December of 1972.
Later we played the symbolic rugby match, which lasted less than ten
minutes, and afterward we received wool ponchos from the Chilean players
with our names, as well as the emblems of both rugby clubs, embroidered on
them.
Some family members of our brothers who had died were also part of
this touching celebration, which gave even more meaning to the event.
Now I’m really worried because my friends still haven’t come back. I look
around me so the landscape might transmit some of its peace and harmony to
me. An image of my son Pedro on his recent visit to the valley comes to me,
when on seeing this magnificent environment that surrounds me now, he said
as if to himself: “Now I understand many things.” They were few words, but
they had enormous significance. He didn’t need to say anything else. That
small phrase represented the strong connection between us and also between
us and this sublime place, whose mystique I will never fully understand.
There are things that mere logic cannot explain, and one of them is the
ability this place has to revive and replenish the most essential parts of one’s
being. In my first journey here with my wife and children, we had to stay at
base camp because the weather was too bad for us to go up to the cross.
Laura and I spent a sleepless night kneeling in the center of a small tent that
didn’t have a rain fly, so the rain seeped inside when we touched the walls.
Nevertheless, the next morning we felt a strange sensation of peace and
freedom, and we were as full of energy as if we had slept in the best of
conditions.
Every expedition brings something new, and often the discoveries speak
of events that took place here before our rescue, as if the before and after are
intertwined in a continuous plot of endless revelations.
Once, we unexpectedly found a lagoon of turquoise waters in one of the
high valleys, and the discovery made us remember the description of the
psychic Croiset, who had said that the wrecked airplane was near a lake that
nobody had ever seen before, surely because it was covered by ice.

With relief, I see Mario climbing the slope from the east. Solitude is
beautiful, but there comes a point when seeing a human figure again gives us
an instinctive joy, even more intense when the approaching figure is a friend.
Shortly afterward the other three arrive. Even from far away I can see
the satisfied expression on Ricardo’s face that he usually wears at returning
from his explorations. Every time, he tells of something new, some new
discovery. We both share that love of discovery, which brings us to recognize
in the mountain the constant renewal that makes it like a living organism. It’s
always the same, and it’s always changing. In its mantle of snow, it hides
objects, which appear later on the slopes below, or which are found in more
extreme periods of thaw.
Once, when I was nearing the site on horseback, slightly separated from
the rest of the group, I saw a piece of the very glacier where we now sit break
off. It gave me great pleasure to see this destruction—or maybe not
destruction, but transformation—from a distance of space and time, knowing
that where I was, I was completely safe.
I hope to go on like this until the day comes when I will make my final
visit to the Valley of Tears together with my family. My children will leave
my ashes at the base of this iron cross, to rest forever near my brothers of the
snow.
 EPILOGUE

I come back every year now to my place in the world, that spot next to the
iron cross. I come back because it allows me to have deep communication
with my friends who remain here. And so that I don’t lose sight of the things
I learned from the solitude of the mountain. In spite of the hazardous journey
to reach the site, I and nearly all my brothers of the mountain have shared the
experience of visiting it with our wives and children. Seeing them standing
next to us, gathered around that iron cross where the remains of our friends
lie buried, is an incredible demonstration of life undefeated. There were
sixteen of us who survived: Adolfo Strauch, Nando Parrado, Roberto
Canessa, Carlitos Páez, Javier Methol, Coche Inciarte, Pancho Delgado,
Álvaro Mangino, Pedro Algorta, Gustavo Zerbino, Daniel Fernández, Bobby
François, Roy Harley, Tintín Vizintín, Moncho Sabella, and me. And today,
with our families, there are over one hundred of us.
This is the place where I feel closest to Marcelo. The avalanche on the
twenty-ninth of October, which nearly buried all of us in the Valley of Tears,
took Marcelo away from my daily life forever. Since then I can only sense his
presence in a realm unknown to me. Without seeing each other, without
hearing each other, it’s as if we are each on one shore, separated by a river
that flows through the mist, despite everything feeling each other’s quiet
presence, certain that we will always remain friends on our way to eternity.
In 2011 I brought to the site of the cross, along with Graciela Parrado,
Nando’s sister, the ashes of their father, Seler. As Nando didn’t want to
return to the mountain, I was honored to help Graciela. It was very emotional
for me to be a part of that ceremony, especially when I remembered Nando,
in those days of abandonment, saying over and over with deep conviction that
he would make it back to embrace his father again. His certainty gave me so
much encouragement, and because of that, Seler, whom I hadn’t even met
yet, had, without knowing it, played an important role in my life. No one
could have imagined then that one day I would return to the Andes carrying
his ashes, to lay them next to where his wife and daughter rest, at a spot not
very far from the mountain that bears his name.

Life has been progressing for all of us with its normal burdens of
responsibility, limited time, troubles, and joys. But the remarkable thing is
that our deep bond of brotherhood has never weakened. When we are
together, it feels like we are those same boys who shared so much suffering
and also so much happiness at being given a second chance. Now, nearly fifty
years after the crash, I can say that life has given me a great many things. I
have a wonderful family, and I am lucky to keep creating and working on my
art and in my chosen profession.
I don’t believe that all the positive repercussions each of us has had
since our experience in the cordillera compensate for the death of the twenty-
nine people who were with us on that trip. From that point of view, we can’t
help but see what happened as anything other than a tragedy. But if I focus
purely on myself, and if I ask myself whether I rejoice in having spent those
seventy-two days at the edge of death in the middle of the cordillera, there is
no doubt in my mind that I would say yes.
Of course I wouldn’t want to live through it again, but I celebrate
having learned what I did in that situation; I celebrate having discovered so
much, having been able to reverse the pain and to turn it into strength,
triumph, and a deep knowledge of myself and of the others.
I celebrate the knowledge that this has been a great opportunity for me
to grow and to meet so many friends and amazing people, through whom my
discovery of humanity has been enriched. I didn’t always trust in that
humanity, but I have experienced it, and I believe in it now with my whole
being.
I celebrate the fact that together with the brothers I have gained, those
of us who are bonded by something perhaps more powerful than blood, we
have learned to conquer our fears, selfishness, and hopelessness. We were
able to shape a society that could function well in the most adverse conditions
we could ever have imagined. There is a freedom in knowing that your
character has been tested to its limit, and you have emerged victorious.
 I celebrate the fact that this situation led me to find the silence and that I
have been able to continue hearing it, being strengthened by it, decoding its
message, trying to share it with others, and building my life around its quiet
presence.
At heart, what I’m talking about is nothing more and nothing less than
self-knowledge, which is the clearest expression of spirituality. It is good to
know who we are, for everything that happens to us happens within us. It is
only in silence, and in the tension of that silence, that we can start to look
inside. If we look hard and deeply and quietly enough, the sublime moment
arrives, the explosion of gratitude for life. This is what I have come to
understand: although nothing is certain, anything is possible. Something
beyond us protects us, and it is found in solitude . . . in observation . . . and in
silence.
 AFTERWORD
BY LAURA BRAGA

“I am almost as happy as after my rescue,” Eduardo whispered in my ear the

day of our wedding at the altar.
I knew about the Andes story. Indeed, I knew who Eduardo was before I
ever met him. I hadn’t spent my life living under a rock. But for some reason
I was always more detached from it than others in our community were.
When Eduardo and I met in person in the winter of 1977, almost five years
after the crash, our mutual attraction was immediate. To me, the look in his
eyes oozed mystery. Never in my entire life did I want to break that spell, nor
could I if I tried. For his part, I believe that he liked me from the start because
I didn’t have much interest in his previous life. Only his present and his
future.
Yet for as long as I’ve known him, Eduardo has maintained his devotion
to the mountain. His words at the altar were carved as if in stone on my heart.
Nothing good or bad could or would ever affect him as deeply as what had
happened to him there. He had suffered at the hand of the most destructive
forces in the world. Yet he also worshipped the power of those same forces to
evoke a beauty so magnificent that it is felt only in the soul. Horror and
ecstasy.
I thought I had understood everything there was to know about my
husband’s experience, but reading Out of the Silence was a revelation. In a
way, it allowed me closure, just as much as it represented a closing of the
circle for Eduardo. What happened to him was neither a tragedy nor a
miracle, just a mystery—like life itself.
In 2007 I finally met her: the Mountain. I had to be the one to go, after
all. The mountain would never come to me. Sacred, majestic, magnificent.
Always there, green or blanketed in snow, fixed in place permanently for all
time. Staring at my husband’s mountain, I wondered how man could possibly
believe he dominates nature. I felt a deep sorrow, as if I were perceiving
nature through Eduardo’s eyes. I felt, rather than saw, a ferocious but quiet
beauty. The sort that wouldn’t let you admire it with detachment. The sort
that aches. To me, this feeling is one of the highest experiences of aesthetic
passion the human psyche is capable of having, accessible to some through
music and poetry and art. It is truly one of the things that makes life worth
living, and it does so more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have
for living is finite.
The mountain wouldn’t come to me, and likewise I couldn’t take the
mountain home, nor did I want to. But I could bring Eduardo back with me.
Together, we continue to seek beauty in all its forms, and we are grateful for
all it has to offer us. We have come a long way, and we still have a way to
go.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Thomas Colchie, my agent, for his belief in this book
and for proving himself worthy of my full trust.
I greatly appreciate the superb work done by Jennie Erikson and Shirley
Ulrich on the English manuscript, not only in translating but in reviewing and
editing it as well.
I especially thank Mireya Soriano, for having succeeded so well in
understanding and interpreting the course of my thoughts.
Finally, I express my gratitude to Laura, my wife, for always keeping
the big picture in mind.
 ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Photo © Dimitri Alexander

Eduardo Strauch Urioste was born in 1947 in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 1968

he opened an architectural studio with his best friend from childhood,
Marcelo Pérez. He has worked as an architect and painter, and for many years
he has lectured about his experience surviving seventy-two days in the Andes
after the legendary 1972 plane crash on the Chilean-Argentine border. He is
married to Laura Braga; they have five children and live in Montevideo.

Photo © Diego Martin Soriano Lagarmilla

Mireya Soriano is an award-winning Argentinean-Uruguayan writer. She is
the author of The Rose of Tales, There Is No Time for More, Let the Sea Cry,
and The Sky of the Owl.
 ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Photo © 2018 Michelle Gray Photography

Jennie Erikson graduated from the University of Washington with a BA in

history and anthropology; she earned an MA in medieval archaeology from
York University in England; and she has worked on excavation sites in Easter
Island, Jordan, England, and the western United States. She met Eduardo
Strauch on an expedition to the plane crash site in the Andes and has been
honored to translate Out of the Silence from its original Spanish and help
bring his inspiring story to a wider audience.
Jennie lives in Colorado with her husband, where she reviews history
books for her website (www.historybookreviews.com), and reads voraciously
on every historical subject she can find.