Free Deep Down Dark by Héctor Tobar Page B

of the boy’s days with as much love as he can give him. He’s become the boy’s personal cheerleader, comedian, and preacher, leading him on a series of outdoor adventures and pontificating, always, on the wonders and idiosyncrasies of electrically operated machines, and on the common sense and sensitivity it takes to care for both horses and dogs, and also on the Sepúlveda family’s rural roots as huasos , the poncho-wearing, horse-riding Chilean equivalent of cowboys. She has watched father and son ride horses and kick around a soccer ball together, and sit before a television screen again and again, enraptured by a movie about fatherhood, loyalty, and warfare that’s Mario’s favorite: Braveheart . Mario is a big Mel Gibson fan “because me and my son, we aren’t tall, and neither is Mel Gibson.” Gibson’s Academy Award–winning film is titled Corazón Valiente in Spanish. “Your heart is free,” the movie says. “Have the courage to follow it.”
    Mario has told his son, “I am your Corazón Valiente,” and now that Chilean-miner Braveheart is on the television. First in his employee photograph and then, most improbably, in a video in which he’s talking to the camera, laughing, being Perri.
    The only images we have of the miners are these recorded by Mario Sepúlveda, the television says. Mario loves to film things, and there he is, narrating a description of the bunk beds in the house where he stays with his fellow out-of-town workers during the seven days he’s in Copiapó.
    Elvira travels to the airport for the flight to a city she’s never visited. Later that afternoon she’s over the southern edge of the Atacama Desert with her weeping son, who can’t stop saying how much he misses his father. And also with a daughter who was once hospitalized for believing a dream that seemed like madness, but which has now taken form in the waking world, in images and words broadcast and repeated on all the televisions and radios around her as she steps off the plane, into the light of a desert winter: Mario Sepúlveda Espinace, father of two. Feared lost in the San José Mine.

4
    “I’M ALWAYS HUNGRY”
    The trapped men eventually begin to turn their backs on the curtain of stone that separates them from the surface. They split into two groups. The first, smaller group decides to search in the mine’s matrix of intersecting tunnels and excavated holes for a passageway to the surface. About eight men in all, they head for one of the cylindrical chimney shafts bored into the stone between different levels of the Ramp. The main purpose of these chimneys is to allow air, water, and electricity to flow into the mine, but they were also supposed to have been fitted with ladders to provide an escape route between each level. In theory it should be possible to climb about ten such passages and make it past the collapsed section of the mine, but in practice only a few of the chimneys have ladders, and los niños don’t have much faith that they’ll be able to find a path upward. Still, they start off for the nearest chimney opening, a short walk downhill to Level 180.
    A second, much larger group of about two dozen men heads back to the Refuge to wait, walking back downhill toward the personnel truck. As the two groups split up, Florencio Avalos, the shift’s foreman and second-in-command, takes Yonni Barrios aside. “Down in the Refuge, take care of those two boxes with provisions,” he tells Barrios. “Don’t let los niños eat them yet, because we may be trapped for days.” Avalos says this sotto voce, because he doesn’t want to spread a panic among the men. He chooses to tell this to Barrios, because Yonni is among the oldest and most experienced in the group—and also because Yonni is the kind of guy who will follow any order you give him. “Yonni, I’m trusting you, I want you to take care of that cabinet for me. Don’t let anyone open it until we get back, please.”
    Carlos Mamani, the