Scenes from a History of the Everlasting Club.

Number Four: The Miracle.

At night in the wrecked fuselage of the Fairchild F 227 the sixteen Uruguayan boys described to each other magnificent meals they had eaten or one day planned to eat. They described meals their mothers had cooked, meals eaten in expensive restaurants, their favourite desserts, their favourite foreign dishes. They tried to remember all the restaurants they had visited in Montevideo and came up with nearly a hundred. They devised exotic menus, invented new recipes, imagined colossal feasts and banquets. They recalled the most exotic and unusual food they had ever eaten, but here there would have been little room for debate. These survivors of the air crash were sustaining themselves by eating the flesh of their fellow travellers who had died in the air crash or the subsequent avalanche.

Before very long they decided that thinking and talking about food was nothing more than an exquisite form of torture, whetting appetites they could not hope to satisfy, stirring up saliva and gastric juices that could only go to waste. So they turned to other matters. They discussed theology instead. After all, the rugby team to which the boys belonged was called the Old Christians XV.

Their theology was not very sound. They compared themselves with Christ and the disciples at the Last Supper. Each mouthful of flesh they ate was a kind of communion. The bodies of the dead were giving them physical life in much the same way that the body of Christ gave them spiritual life.

Of course, in reality this was not so much theology as self-justification. Clearly they did not eat human flesh for the sheer hell of it. They ate it because they had to if they were going to survive. But they also needed to believe that their survival was sanctioned by God.

They had salvaged only modest rations from the aircraft wreckage; eight bars of chocolate, five bars of nougat, a packet of biscuits, three jars of jam, two tins of mussels, a few caramels, some dates and dried plums, and a tin of salted almonds. To drink they had eight bottles of wine, a bottle of crème de menthe, a bottle of cherry brandy, and a bottle and a hip flask of whisky.

Clearly this was never going to be able to sustain the twenty-eight original survivors for very long. It seemed that if they were not rescued within a day or two they would surely starve to death. But days passed, rescue did not come, and the flesh of the dead, conveniently preserved in the mountain’s snow and ice, became increasingly appetising.

In the beginning there were aesthetic considerations. At first they had only eaten strips of flesh cut off the dead bodies with razor blades, then dried in the sun so they resembled nothing human. This delicacy did not last. By the end they were eating livers and lungs, gnawing on the bones of arms and fingers, even sampling testicles and penises. They made a sort of stew from intestines, fat and brains, and they ate it out of bowls made from human skulls.

Not least of the boys’ problems was constipation. Human flesh is in no sense a balanced diet. In turn they would squat over a large hole they had dug at the front of the aircraft, and try very hard to shit into it. They had little or no success. They began to bet on who would be the last to go. The ‘winner’ finally excreted a small, black, dry turd after thirty-four days.

Nor were the boys very neat in their eating habits. When the helicopters finally came to rescue them, there were bits of human body scattered wildly all round the aircraft. They not only had no qualms about their cannibalism, they had no table manners either.

Once saved however, they became consumed by two things: the need to confess and the need to be understood. Priests told them there was nothing to confess, that they had committed no sin. They had broken a taboo but nothing more. The ‘theology’ here was simple. The bodies were nothing more than meat. The person who lived in that body was dead; his spirit had gone. There was therefore no moral objection whatsoever to eating this flesh. Whether they were understood is a different question. There are those who might insist they would rather die than eat human flesh, but the story of these boys’ survival in the Andes suggests that we might all do what they did given the same circumstances.

At home the boys’ families had been praying for their safe delivery. Only the prayers of sixteen families were answered, and one would have to ask whether these sixteen survivors were the most righteous, the most favoured by God, and whether their families were the most devout; and if not, why not. Twenty-nine people had not returned, at least not alive. One might argue, and some did, that the act of eating the dead was an act of incorporation. Their flesh had become the flesh of the survivors.

It was said that only a miracle could allow any of the people on that flight to survive, and to have a son return after ten weeks lost in the Andes must have seemed miraculous indeed. There were even those who suggested that their sons had received manna from heaven in much the same way that the Jews had received it in the wilderness, that ‘manna’ was some coded reference to, some euphemism for, human flesh.

It is said that the experience on that mountain had a profound but deleterious effect on the lives of the survivors. Some felt they had been through a mystical experience and had a duty to convey that experience to others. Surely, they thought, there must be some reason for their being spared. It seems to us that a person might become confused and tortured indeed trying to fathom that ‘reason’.

Certainly the rest of those boys’ lives would inevitably seem a little tame, a little undramatic after all they had been through. One wonders if, in some curious way, they might have begun to feel nostalgia for the shared suffering they went through. One wonders if, having forced themselves to acquire a taste for human flesh, they might not every now and then hunger for it once more.

None of the sixteen Uruguayan survivors of the crash has ever expressed any desire to become part of the Everlasting Club, but if they did, their applications would certainly be looked at most sympathetically.