To revisit this article, select My Account, then View saved stories
Find anything you save across the site in your account
By DT Max
When Beatriz Flamini was growing up in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in her room. “I really enjoyed being there,” he says. She would read books to her dolls and write on a blackboard while giving them math or history lessons. Growing up, she told me, she imagined herself as an instructor like Indiana Jones: the guy who stepped away from the classroom to “be who he really is. “it was. “
In the early 1990s, while Flamini was reading to a sports instructor, he visited a cave for the first time. She and a friend traveled north of Madrid to El Reguerillo, a cave known for its Paleolithic carvings. “We stayed until Sunday and only went out because we had categories and work,” Flamini recalls. El Reguerillo was dark but welcoming, and within its walls, I felt a sense of love impossible to resist. “There were no words to describe how I felt,” she says. .
After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her air of mystery and commitment. ” They were all looking for me for their classes,” she says. They fought for me. ” At the age of forty, in 2013, she had a partner, a car, and a house. But she wasn’t satisfied. She didn’t care about monetary stability and, unlike most people she knew, she “didn’t need children. He’s been through an existential crisis. ” You know you’re going to die today, tomorrow, fifty years from now,” Flamini said to himself. “What do you need to do with your life before this happens?The immediate response, he recalls, was to “grab my backpack” and move on to live in the mountains.
Flamini moved to the Sierra de Gredos, in central Spain, where she worked as a caretaker at a mountain refuge. She became certified in safety protocols for working on tall structures, and she learned first-aid skills, specializing in retrieving people from deep crevices and other perilous locations. Speed and precision were crucial. She told me, “After a fall, the short elastic cords of the harness hold you in place. They act like a tourniquet. You have twenty minutes to get out.” She sliced the air sideways to indicate what followed if you didn’t: amputation. Flamini was also an avid climber and hiker, and she told me that she’d once helped save someone who’d been buried by an avalanche. Another time, she witnessed the death of a hiker who’d been struck by lightning. “There’s nothing you can do,” she recalls.
Flamini found his paintings arduous but satisfying. She had moments of intense intimacy with other people, but spent most of her time alone. He even lost touch with his family. Flamini started living in a caravan and enjoyed it, especially in winter when the doors froze, leaving her trapped inside until the temperature rose. “There were times when I would get stuck there for 3 days, waiting,” she says. To keep warm, he would light a small stove in the back of the truck; If it was too cold for the stove to work, he would curl up in blankets, alternating between reading and sleeping.
The outside world wouldn’t leave her alone. On two occasions, thieves tried to break into her mobile home while she was elsewhere in the mountains. After the second attempt, she told me, she dented the side panel of her vehicle: “four kicks, pow-pow-pow-pow”—because “no one would disturb a car like that. “
Flamini, an enthusiastic photographer, was proud of her mountain adventures, and she maintained an Instagram feed full of her exploits in rugged locales. “I didn’t do it out of narcissism,” she told me. “I expressed what I felt.” Sometimes she posted photographs that other people took of her. In one image, she is dangling by a purple guide rope hundreds of feet above a rocky cliff bottom. “Coming from where I’ve been lets me decide where I’m going,” she wrote. Her signature hashtag was #autosuficiencia (“self-sufficiency”). She enjoyed social-media interactions: she presented herself the way she wished to be and could ignore responses that made her uneasy.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, Flamini drove his motorhome into the mountains of Catalonia and settled in a deserted pre-Romanesque hermitage. He told me he enjoyed “its cemetery, its rows of the dead, the sunset,” adding, “It’s a quiet place. “Flamini talking on the phone with an old friend and hearing how bad the covid-19 scenario is in Madrid; Then he went on a hike among the wolves.
In July, 2021, just after lockdowns in Spain ended, Flamini thought about coming down from the mountains. But her real desire was to go somewhere more remote: the Gobi Desert, in Mongolia. Only one European had ever crossed it alone on foot, she’d learned. She moved to northern Spain and began training for the Gobi expedition by hiking steep mountain trails while carrying a backpack weighed down by bottles filled with water. She soon decided that she was prepared physically—she could carry twice her weight at six thousand feet—but not mentally. The longest stretch she’d ever spent alone was ninety-five days, in the Cantabrian Mountains. (A passing shepherd had told her to go home.)
Flamini reflected on essays that would prepare her for the prolonged solitude of the Mongolian desert. She decided that spending time in a cave could provide her with useful lessons in staying strong and focused. She had transferred many times from El Reguerillo, and in the past In the 90s she had spent longer periods with teams of cave explorers, serving as a photographer. She had never had a bad time in a cave.
Link copied
She read on the Internet about people who had survived in caves for extended periods. The modern record was four hundred and sixty-three days. It had been set in 1970 by Milutin Veljković, a Serbian man who had gone underground near the town of Svrljig. But nobody had inhabited a cave in the way Flamini was envisaging. “They either wore a watch or talked on the phone every day,” she told me. “Or their families brought them food, or they had a pet for company.” Veljković, for example, had remained in contact with his nearby village, thanks to a phone with an extremely long cord, and he kept up with world events by listening to the radio. Flamini decided to not only beat Veljković’s record but do it in a way that felt right to her. She recalls settling on “five hundred days, just to round it up—because I knew I could, I just knew it.”
Since self-sufficiency was Flamini’s motto, he first imagined that he would identify a cave in Spain that had never attracted human visitors, bring back more than a year’s worth of food and water, and return after eating it all. But when Flamini asked for advice from experienced speleologists, they told him that it was to have a cave for five hundred days at a time: he would need two thousand rations and more than two hundred and fifty gallons of water. Besides, how are you going to take out the trash without seeing the light of day?She would need a team to help her. And, once full cavers are involved, it would be contrary to their codes of protection to allow her to remain alone underground without any recourse in case of emergency.
Flamini had not built a life of compromises, but he saw that in this case some concessions would be necessary. He consented to the installation of two security cameras, a panic button and a computer at the cave site, to send one-way communications to other people on the surface. To enable knowledge transmission, it will also be necessary to install a Wi-Fi router. But Flamini wouldn’t settle for any device that would allow you to send messages or have real-time contact with her. This left her at risk: She may simply break her leg due to panic or cameras and not be able to call for help. But he was satisfied, and even welcomed, by the danger of the situation. He tried to visualize the situation in the cara. de a catastrophe: “how to remain calm in the face of pain, in the face of despair, when death approaches. “
Her basic goal remained intact: to neither see nor speak to another human being for five hundred days. She didn’t even want to see her own face. “I wanted total disconnection,” she says. If her expedition worked as planned, it would feel somewhat like spending a year and a half inside a sensory-deprivation tank.
He contacted a caving club near Granada that knew of an ideal cave in the mountains north of Motril, a hunting town on the Andalusian coast. The cave was humid but not rainy and remained at a habitable temperature throughout the year. It was protected near its front across a drop of more than two hundred feet: teenagers in love, or foxes or martens seeking shelter, simply did not venture there. At the back of the cave was a long gallery approximately one hundred to ten meters long, with a ceiling 40 feet high. Although the area was the length of a luxury loft, it was dark and damp, and the ground was covered in asymmetrical rock fragments. The organization proposed resupplying Flamini via a plant platform mid-descent: Motril volunteers could simply descend with essential items, and she could then climb back up with a rope to retrieve them. Volunteers will also monitor her well-being and rescue her if she becomes seriously ill. A catering company showed up to donate pre-cooked food and deliver it to the expedition.
Flamini packed a lot of clothes; I was curious to see how other tissues would behave in the air underground. She added a toothbrush and unscented deodorant. She also brought a stick — her “Harry Potter wand,” as she called it — that she had kept in her van. for good luck, as well as two full animals: a teddy bear and a witch. She promised herself that she would not treat them as confidants in the cave. As he explained to me, “I didn’t need Wilson,” a reference to the volleyball player who became Tom Hanks’ only partner in the 2000 film “Castaway. “She wasn’t looking for a replacement company. ” I was going to be my own Wilson,” he told me. I searched for “Having those kinds of conversations only with myself. ” What do we deserve to eat today?””What sounds appealing?”” Listen, let’s eat beans. ” No, I don’t need beans. “”Let’s go!”” It is ok. It’s all in my head.
Although Flamini had designed a unique and deeply private experiment, he discovered that the extremity of the exercise would be of interest to others. He invited researchers from two institutions in Andalusia, the University of Granada and the University of Almería, to monitor her during her prolonged isolation in the dark, in case she turned out to be favorable to science. After all, humans may one day travel in space pills to Mars. The academics were enthusiastic about Flamini’s concept and agreed to collect and analyze knowledge from his experiment. Scientists would focus on other facets of his physical and intellectual state: how his cognitive talents behaved under prolonged pressure; how living in the dark affected their circadian rhythms; how he made sense of any intellectual decline. Julio Santiago, an intellectual experimental psychologist in Granada, who planned to read about the adjustments in Flamini’s temporal and spatial perceptions, told me: “You don’t locate someone very well who needs to be isolated and disoriented in that way. ” »The scientists put her through a series of initial interviews and tests and gave her a bracelet that would track her circadian rhythms, measuring her distal body temperature and determining whether she was lying down or standing up. To better prepare for the adventure, Flamini met with Débora Godoy Izquierdo, sports psychologist. Godoy gave him her recommendation on how to recognize hallucinations, so as not to be afraid of them, and encouraged her to verbalize her mind in the cave, to give herself a greater sense of reality.
María Dolores Roldán-Tapia, a neuropsychologist from Almeria, invited Flamini to her lab for two days. Flamini, dressed in skin sensors and virtual headsets, guided a spacecraft and searched for planets while dealing with mechanical failures and overcoming other obstacles. These simulations helped identify their basic states, from tension and amazement to boredom and fatigue. In addition, Roldan-Tapia gave Flamini something called the Iowa Gambling Task, in which a subject chooses cards from a set of decks. The purpose is to deduce which decks are more advantageous than the others and thus maximize profits. Flamini scored well, completing fifty dollars in thirty minutes. Roldán-Tapia discovered in Flamini “a very decisive, very motivated and disciplined person”.
Flamini also invited Dokumalia, a Spanish production company that specializes in outdoor-adventure series, to create a video record of her experience. Dokumalia provided her with two GoPro cameras, whose screens had been removed, to make a diary of her time in the cave. The footage could be mined by both Dokumalia and the scientists. Electricity would be supplied by solar-charged batteries sent down the vertical shaft with other provisions, allowing Flamini to turn on a couple of lights, and the Wi-Fi router would be placed on a wall at the bottom of the shaft. Flamini gave her project the name Time Cave.
In mid-November 2021, Flamini posted on Instagram, “On Saturday, November 20, the ship sets sail back,” adding sheepishly, “See you in April/May 2023. At the time, volunteers from Motril had cleared an area for a helicopter to land in front of the cave, in case an emergency evacuation was necessary. In a nod to the many other people who were now helping her, Flamini added, “#ni_sola_ni_en_autosuficiencia” – “neither self-sufficient. “
As they descended, she and a small organization of volunteers gathered at the front of the cave. Joy and anxiety made an impression on his face, as if he didn’t know whether he was going on vacation or to prison. Using her phone for the last time, she left a voicemail to a friend looking to wish her luck; his eyes sparkled as he said, “Enjoy the internet, Pinterest, and your videos. Thank you for crossing my path. “
He put on a caving helmet, strapped a giant duffel bag on his back, hooked a carabiner to a consultant rope, and prepared to rappel down the vertical shaft. The cave opening was so small that Flamini had to struggle to enter. He went down the long, narrow slide, looked at the volunteers, stuck out his tongue and joked, “Just for one night. “
His Instagram account remained silent for the next hundred days.
I first met Flamini in May, 2023, at the Hospital Universitario Puerta de Hierro Majadahonda, in a suburb northwest of Madrid. She had emerged from the cave on April 14th, almost exactly five hundred days after she’d entered it. “Who bought the beers last Friday?” she had joked on exiting. The baby fat on her cheeks was gone—she had lost twelve pounds—but the sparkle in her brown eyes was still there.
The first impression he gave was that his stay on the cave floor had been child’s play. In a press conference he described his stay in the cave as “excellent” and “unbeatable”, and told me that he enjoyed the delight so much that he “came out of the cave making a song”. She had read dozens of books, drawn pictures, knitted hats, and exercised; You could almost say it was a vacation. While she was in hiding, she had turned forty-nine, then fifty, alone, but she told me that she never celebrated her birthday anyway. “My mom enjoyed it, maybe she’ll save money,” Flamini joked.
Some professional cavers had expressed disbelief that the experience had been easy. They had looked for flaws in Flamini’s story. A veteran speleologist named Miguel Caramés told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that he would never attempt such an adventure “in the most inhospitable environment for a human being. ” know” and suggested that Flamini “explain in more detail the logistics of the challenge. ” Others called the vacation a setup. As one excessive sports authority pointed out to me: “Being in a cave does not make you an expert speleologist (Flamini has declared that she is not an expert in caving).
On Instagram, he posted a list of favorite songs he had played in the cave, including songs by Joe Bonamassa and Jon Bon Jovi. All told, her story felt like an exaggerated edit of many people’s lives during the pandemic, something she didn’t even interpret. I knew it had receded until it resurfaced. His adventure in the cave seemed to suggest that humans were naturally resilient and made to survive.
At the hospital, Flamini was furious as doctors ran tests on her. “General blood pressure, ideal nutritional levels,” he told me. Perfect electrocardiogram. And the psychiatrists said everything was fine. She laughed and said, “Everyone knows me. “I was a zombie, but I wasn’t!”
She had on the same sunglasses that she had worn after emerging from the cave, and they gave her a glamorous Alpine look. I noticed that she walked unevenly, and that she was stooped. She told me that her balance was still off after five hundred days in a place where normal walking wasn’t possible, and that her pupils hadn’t yet readjusted to bright light. And there had been other detrimental effects. Her short-term memory, she admitted, had become dodgy in the cave, and remained so. She had also lost much of her peripheral vision while underground; a friend had driven her to the hospital on the day we met, because she couldn’t drive safely yet. Flamini noted, “Sudden noises from the back frighten me—anything that comes at me without my seeing it.” In the cave, she explained, there had been no light beyond that of her camping lamps. Most of the time she just wore a headlamp, meaning that she mostly saw only what was directly in front of her. “I spent a lot of time looking that way,” she said.
We drove twenty miles north to Moralzarzal, a small town at the foot of the Guadarrama Mountains. At first, she had offered him lunch at a Japanese restaurant, but he had forgotten that Moralzarzal didn’t have one. We settled in a place with typical Spanish cuisine, at the intersection of two busy streets.
I asked her, in Spanish, if she wanted to sit outside, thinking she would have to be tired of being inside. She said, “I don’t care” – “It doesn’t matter. ” We found ourselves at a table near a giant. window, watching the cars go by. She explained that she was staying at the home of close friends while she underwent the series of tests at the hospital. He liked the suburban hospital better than the ones in Madrid because Moralzarzal was green and its citizens “ran, cycled and skated. “
Flamini told me that she had enjoyed her time in the cave so much that she had not wanted to leave. She often felt nostalgic about a ritual that she had performed underground: before going to bed, she would turn the panic button on and off, to let her minders know that her imminent inactivity would mean only that she was asleep. In the cave, Flamini said, she’d experienced the overwhelming love that she had first felt in El Reguerillo.
I asked her what she’d missed down below, and she told me roast chicken with French fries—“the kind where you can soak the bread and the potatoes in the sauce.” The caterer had sent down decent food, but never that. Over all, she insisted, the time had passed quickly: “For me, it was just a moment—a single night. I didn’t have time to miss anyone.” In a vibrant, emotive voice, she spoke about her happiness underground so adamantly, and repeatedly, that it was a little hard to believe.
After lunch, we had a coffee in front of the space where she resided, a low stucco space with a garden. “It’s a magical place,” Flamini said as he led me to a gazebo where birds were singing. She wasn’t very familiar with bird sounds, she told me, but she had a sixth sense for detecting the presence of a wolf or a wolf nearby. His hosts, climbers who knew his habits, had lent him a sleeping van.
In the back of the truck he showed me a kitchen area, where he kept his clothes; There were also little pots and pans, reasonable tools such as pots and pans, which gave him a delightful sense of self-sufficiency. “It’s a lot bigger than my truck,” he said. It’s a mansion!” (His own caravan was still parked in Motril. )I asked if she’d noticed “Nomadland,” the 2020 film in which Frances McDormand plays a woman going from task to task in an RV, but Flamini hadn’t heard of her. As we talked, she said of the van, “You don’t have to look for anything here. You’re great and warm. ” There is no waste. She likened it to the quiet life in the cave.
As the sun moved across the sky and we drank our coffee, I noticed that his observations were getting darker. Reveling in the cave wasn’t something she would “recommend to anyone,” she said, adding, “I didn’t lose consciousness, but darkness steals your life. And he continues: “Loneliness, social uprooting, consumes you. Or, rather, you eat, you lose nutrients, but you consume yourself. A year and a part in the Motril cave would have allowed him to survive, he continued, but if he had remained underground for five years, he would have died. He had brought elastic bands for exercise, but had temporarily lost the preference to wear them. “I had a scale to measure ‘My weight,'” he recalls. I’d make ten prints on the tapes and then I’d have to lie down because I didn’t have anything left. I woke up and I had lost weight.
At first, Flamini had written a diary on the computer and shared it with investigators, but it didn’t last. He first tried to keep track of the days that passed, but by the middle of the second month, his sense of time had completely distorted. Scientific experiments have also failed. Before going downstairs, he had promised to use the computer to perform the Iowa Gambling Task and other cognitive exercises at normal intervals, however, Roldan-Tapia told me that after a few weeks, Flamini began sending messages “complaining that the computer wasn’t working. “laboring. The researcher added: “Then he started inventing random or imaginary passwords. The Time Cave organization asked the Motril spelunkers to leave a request for Flamini to start using the computer again, but she ignored him.
One day, Flamini, desperate to locate the contact, told a story aloud to the Motril team through one of the security cameras that the volunteers monitored, even though they did not transmit sound. But he did not do it again, concluding that he violated the spirit of his oath of solitude. He told me that he remembered some main points of what happened after the first few months. According to her, ninety-five percent of her time in the cave had been spent simply sitting or lying in the dark or dim light of its battery-operated lamps. “I went into hibernation,” he says.
However, Flamini kept turning on his GoPros and Dokumalia let me look at the footage for a while. In her early days underground, she can be seen looking to impose order on a new life without responsibilities. She takes care of her camp, with her kitchen, dining room, sleeping tent, training domain, and computer station. Each configuration is spaced about six meters apart to keep it moving. He obviously hopes to excel in the challenge ahead. For example, some time after your fall, you use a set of markers to draw on a stick. “It’s for my sense of color,” he says. At one point, he looks into the distance and explains that he’s doing an exercise to keep his vision at a distance.
But the momentum temporarily fades. Checking in with one of the GoPros, you see how difficult it is to not know if it’s day or night in the perpetual darkness of the cave. “It’s four in the morning,” she complains. As the days go by, her figure also becomes confused; She rarely goes 3 days without telling the team that she is going to bed.
Strangeness doesn’t make her unhappy. ” I’m fucked up but in love,” she boasted to the GoPro at the beginning of her stay. In another video, he explains that he knows “where I am and what my goals are. “” and adds: “There’s no loss of motivation for why I’m here. On another occasion, he holds a large silver thermos while wearing a blue puffer jacket; he theatrically turns to the walls of his cave and sings, “How beautiful you are. “You’re so sweet, and you’re so cozy! You’re cool and you’re full of crickets. I think they’re crickets. You’re a delight! In another video, he holds up the thermos and exclaims, “Coffee!
The footage takes some surreal turns. While tucked into her sleeping bag, she thinks that she might be hearing drums beating beneath her head, and imagines that some sort of shaman is trying to send her signals of welcome. On what she thinks is day nineteen—she’s actually been underground for nearly twice as long—she says to the camera, “I’m convinced that if I get past day thirty it’s a done deal!”
It seems you need to disconnect from the weather and its demands, but clues that the seasons are changing continue to catch your attention. The giant spiders on the cave walls disappear and are replaced by babies. One day, he needs to collect all the stones from the cave floor and concludes that this will have to mean it’s time to harvest above ground. (Actually, it’s summer. ) Flamini plans to document his menstrual cycle as a way to keep track of time, but his periods are too abnormal to serve as a calendar. The roots of his dyed red hair are growing, but he doesn’t have a mirror to inspect his new appearance.
Flamini’s camp is soon filled with clothes, blankets, books, pots and pans. She wonders aloud what her concept of self-sufficiency has to do with a task that involves eating dinner on a pile of pre-cooked foods that volunteers left in her cave. Her experience is often more like a TV shoot than a solo trek through the Mongolian desert. Suddenly, she sings a hymn to her favorite convenience food logo. “They offer flavor education!” sprouts. The meals, she jokes, offer a rare sensory touch in an environment where there are no new tastes or smells, “except for the occasional little fart you let out. “
Link copied
As the months pass, things get bleaker. Flamini battles a persistent fear of the dark, and at many points she seems on the verge of breaking down in tears from the stress. Weeks go by in which she doesn’t make a new video. When she does resume recording, it’s clear that her resolve is cracking. In the sealed world of the cave, small things cause big irritations, as if she were a passenger stuck in a middle seat during a transoceanic flight. The random noises that at first charmed her, like the shaman’s drums, begin to grate. She thinks that the floor of the cave may be moving.
In January 2022, he started hearing a sound. It looks like a duffel bag dragged back and forth; Maybe it’s an animal. In a GoPro video, he urges the Motril team to send a device to document the noise. “It’s not paranoia,” he tells GoPro. They’re not hallucinations. “”. Soon after, his eyes wide with anxiety, he invites the organization to pay attention and says, “Fuck this shit. If it’s an animal, it’s a big animal. Maybe he fell. Maybe he came in here through a hole. ” I don’t know. “He starts sleeping with a knife in his tent.
Members of the Dokumalia team who saw the GoPro footage were baffled, as were the scientists for whom the tests were planned to be conducted on the computer. Some other people on the team felt that their obvious auditory hallucinations suggested deep distress and expressed concerns about their stability. There were discussions about getting her out of the cave. But Godoy, the sports psychologist, argued that the hallucinations weren’t exactly disturbing and backed the idea that the team would simply send puzzles and more books to help Flamini stay focused. (Godoy told me that he never shared the concerns of others and even Alconcept Flamini treated hallucinations appropriately, “though they might be reports to most people in their lives every day. “)
Flamini straightens up, but at times returns to a sensitive state of mind. In other images, a swarm of flies has deposited larvae in her food, and she holds back tears as she rubs her eyes in despair. Leave a note for the volunteers of Motril, asking for help. They place a roll of fly paper on the rocky plateau. He had originally planned to go the 500 days without music, relying on meditation and visualization exercises to calm him down. But shortly after entering the cave, he asks for an MP3 player to be sent to him that he left with the equipment. Flamini loves blues music and her favorite songs help her triumph over her preoccupation with darkness. (For a moment, he sleeps with a blanket). his MP3 player in his first aid kit.
Shortly after its descent, the walls of the cave are so damp that the Wi-Fi router starts working. The spelunkers of Motril drop a luminescent bottle through a hole in the ceiling of the cave with a handwritten message explaining the problem. The blow of the bottle hits the rocks as it descends into the pit and surprises Flamini. The message asks you to move to a corner of the cave where you may not see the spelunkers coming to upgrade the router. However, as they make the repair, she listens to them. respiration.
After about six months in the bosom of the cave, Flamini succumbed to its rhythms. He stopped looking to keep up, as that had only increased his anxiety. He has neither hope nor despair. ” In the cave, the timeline disappears and everything floats around you,” he told me. “A while ago I was born. ” A while ago I’m going to make a stopover in Mongolia. There is no past, there is no future. Everything is present, everything is from some time ago, and everything is brutal and strange.
A temporary marker remained. After five bowel movements, he took his tea, in plastic bags, to the exchange point and then quickly returned downstairs. “If there’s food, I’d take it,” he recalls. Otherwise, I would go back. “
Flos angelesmini has become sore and stiff. In April 2022, he asked the GoPro to be able to lift his legs slightly. He began spending much of his time in his tent, a cave within a cave. He remembers sleeping for very long periods of time and having dreams. Flos angelesmini told me about one in which she imagined herself being outside the cave. I told him that it reminded me of perhaps the most famous scene in Spanish drama, from Pedro Calderón de los Angeles Barca’s 1635 Plos angelesy, “Life Is a Dream. ” A prince wakes up to find that he is locked in a tower; When he closes angelesims that he was once free, he is made to believe that it was just a dream and he despairs. Flos angelesmini told me that she was actually satisfied when she woke up and knew that she was still in the cave of Motril: she had not failed in her challenge.
At this point, Flamini was only capable of sporadic bursts of activity. She did a few shots of her experience (one was of the Time Cave crew members checking out books for her at the library), but left out everyone’s facial expressions. Every time she was drawn, she would put a blindfold on her. “I refused,” she told me. She knitted wool hats for her friends. She read the books that the Motril team had collected in the library. (They explained to the librarians that the reader was in an unusual location and might want to keep his books longer than the popular loan. ) He read sixty titles, telling me that he had forgotten almost none of them unless ” Endurance”. “, an account of Ernest Shackleton’s failed attempt to make it to the South Pole, which she had brought with her and read shortly after arriving at the cave. Life unfolded in a series of states of tranquility. There was a time when She told me, when she thought she was going to die. She didn’t feel it as a suicide but as a liberation: “There was no difference between what I felt at that moment and what I perceive as death. “
Apparently, what kept Flamini going were the two GoPros. After all, she wanted a Wilson. Se snuggled up with a camera and played in front of it in front of a backdrop of stalactites. He smiled at the camera and even flirted with it. . She was combing her hair and joking about getting a new hairstyle. And he foolishly imitated the bats that moved around the cave, calling them “poor things. “At one point, she explains to GoPro how disorienting the passage of time is for her: She’s stopped shaving her armpit hair and tried to use its duration as an indicator, but it doesn’t seem to grow. Is it roughly how long it’s been underground, or does a body need light to grow its hair?(In fact, hair grows faster in the sun. )
Except for a few periods when Flamini was deeply depressed, she recovered from GoPro recordings. On-camera confessionals have become the clandestine equivalent of social media posts: a one-sided replacement for conversation, with self-presentation that can shape. In the video, she talks about her afterlife, noting, “On the mountain, you’re alone, but everyone, every once in a while, someone appears. Here, I’m very lonely. Every day I’m happier with myself. And every day the conversations between me and me are getting friendlier. I learned that I had a new superpower: I can communicate myself telepathically.
The replacement Wi-Fi router brought new troubles: she perceived that it was giving off inaudible sonic waves. She began to have headaches. Her sinuses hurt, and her nose began to bleed. Using a security camera, she tried to communicate how bad she felt. David Reyes, the head of the Motril spelunking team, told me, “We saw her in front of the camera for a little while,” but, because the camera recorded no sound, “we didn’t know what she was saying.” In early September, 2022—nearly three hundred days into her adventure—she carried her tent up the shaft, then pitched it right at the cave’s exit. She went back down to retrieve food and water, then resurfaced. Six days after she left the cave, Reyes visited the site and discovered her tent. She briefly explained to him what had happened. The exchange compromised one of the key terms of Flamini’s self-imposed isolation. While a new router was acquired and installed, she stayed inside the tent. The interlude outside the cave would likely upend her attempt to surpass Veljković’s effort, but she was nonetheless determined to return underground and complete five hundred days. After eight days, she went back down.
His caretakers noticed that Flamini was finding it difficult to regain his balance in the cave. They discovered her becoming more and more obsessed with the idea that she was almost done. He became snappy with his GoPro recordings, then apologized for his rudeness, and then got snappy again. Two months after his second descent, he recorded a ten-minute harangue in which he accused a member of Motril’s team of tying a knot in the rope used to lower objects onto the rocky plateau without telling him. !” She says: “Being a spelunker is not a game!This is a grave mistake!” He dries his forehead under the effect of stress. “How many wounds are caused by this?” (She later confessed to me that she was the one who had remarried and forgot about it. ) Sonia Jaque, one of the filmmakers of Dokumalia, told me, “We didn’t think much about her brilliance because she was angry about everything at the time.
Flamini may have no longer been in love with the cave, but she stayed underground long enough to reach her goal. On the five hundred and eighth day, at 6 P.M., Reyes dropped down into the gallery to tell her that it was finally time to leave. Flamini told me that she was “just drifting off” when he arrived, but his voice roused her. She had saved a package of risotto, which she had fantasized about serving to any guests. She explained to me, “I wanted to say, ‘Before we go, would you like something? You’re in my home!’ ” But the Time Cave team was eager to wrap up the mission. Keeping watch over Flamini had been hard work for everyone. The next day, Reyes helped her gather some of her belongings, leaving behind her tent, her sleeping bag, and her drawings for later retrieval. At 9 a.m., she left the cave singing. Flamini had been reading “Twenty-One Years Among the Papuans,” by André Dupeyrat. When I met with her, in May, no one had yet gone back to the cave to get the book or the other personal items that she left on the cave floor.
Flamini had anticipated a quiet exit from the cave, but her tantalizing goodbye on Instagram had reached not just her friends but also Spanish journalists, who were interested to learn more about her attempt to beat Veljković’s world record. When she climbed out of the cave’s mouth, about a dozen reporters were waiting for her. A few hours later, Flamini gave an impromptu press conference. For someone who had spoken only to herself for a year and a half, she handled the experience surprisingly well. Her grin was even wider than when she’d gone in. Her red hair was pulled back with the kind of headband she’d worn underground. She looked simultaneously anxious and relieved; her face seemed to say that she had just landed on a foreign planet and was glad the inhabitants were so friendly. When a member of the press asked her if there had been a time when she wanted to give up, she replied, “Not once!” Everyone applauded. Some journalists filled her in on major world events that she had missed: Russia had attacked Ukraine; Queen Elizabeth II had died. These were not the types of things that Flamini particularly cared about, so no revelation rattled her. She did lose her cool, however, when a radio journalist later asked her how she had sexually satisfied herself in the cave.
The Time Cave study organization was eager to get to work. Flamini had refused to wear a circadian rhythm bracelet he had originally been given, complaining about its smell, but some time after his passage to the surface, he agreed to wear it. other. This provided researchers with useful data, as did the large number of GoPro recordings he had made.
But, a month or so after emerging, Flamini told the Time Cave researchers, in a WhatsApp video message, that she was putting a halt to participating in any more sessions. Her experience, she reminded them, “was unique in history,” and she had to heal in her own way. The scientists could no longer publish anything about her without her explicit permission, she told them. “We are the Time Cave team,” she said. “I am the leader of the team.” She had found an agent, and it was clear that she was done giving away her story for free. The researchers, who had put in many hours of work—and had spent nearly as much time worrying about her well-being—were baffled and upset.
In the video message, Flamini seemed very tense and some members of Time Cave saw it as a confirmation that she had been through difficult times in the cave and didn’t need to relive them. (Flamini herself told me she couldn’t stand to see GoPro’s raw footage. )They assumed the breakup was a defense mechanism, as was the frenzied positivity of many of their interview responses. (Flamini told me he didn’t remember the press conference. )Shortly after the press conference, he collapsed. An ambulance arrived, but friends took her to the hospital a few days later. Roldán-Tapia, a neuropsychologist at the University of Almeria, spoke to Flamini just before the incident. “What’s happened since he came out of the cave shows all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” Roldan-Tapia told me. “His survival in the cave was traumatic, even though he entered voluntarily. “He added: “There’s a lot of knowledge that makes me think that what she experienced there was fundamentally negative. (Because of Flamini’s heart replacement, Roldán-Tapia and the other researchers were unable to perform tests to investigate this hypothesis. )
It appears that Milutin Veljković’s record will stand. The tent interlude is an obvious issue. Flamini has nonetheless applied to be designated the female record holder, and a spokesperson for the Guinness Book of Records told me that the application is being considered.
Members of the Time Cave team are still waiting to analyze the knowledge they’ve gathered: Whether Flamini’s feat is a world record or not remains a strangely rare experience. Knowledge can simply provide information, for example, about the option of survival. on the far side of the Moon or the feasibility of a long retreat underground in the event of a catastrophic nuclear explosion. Santiago, a psychologist at the University of Granada, noted that Flamini’s stay in the cave is analogous to “many conditions on Earth such as living in solitary confinement, in a station in Antarctica or in a submarine. “He is willing to have Flamini examined to see if adjustments in his belief about time had affected his belief about space. “We know that the two are strongly connected in the human mind,” he said. Somewhat plaintively, Santiago suggested, “Urge her to reconnect with her team so we can finish our work. “
The last time I contacted Flamini, sending him a message on WhatsApp, he had just had some other medical examination at the hospital. He went on to state that his adventure in the cave had been a positive experience, as he had more or less made it. their goal. ” We excessive athletes don’t do things to suffer,” he insisted. “We do it because it feels good. ” It was evident that he had conquered his fears, like Shackleton, and that he had defied bourgeois expectations, like Indiana Jones.
Flamini wasn’t sure when she would arrive in Mongolia. He had lost a lot of muscle mass in the cave and had only regained some of it. No funder had come forward to fund a trip to the Gobi Desert. The documentary also failed to find funding. She wanted to ask Flamini if her total experience in Motril had let her down, but before she could do so, she was off the grid and heading back to the Cantabrian mountains in her pickup truck. Soon he was following her. One day he posted “It’s not Huir. Es to be”: “It’s not running away. It’s being. ” ♦
Should a charge of plagiarism ruin your life?
How ballet saved Mikhail Baryshnikov.
What it was like to meet Martin Luther King, Jr.
A Frenchman pretended to be an American teen-ager. But was he the one getting conned?
The actress who dazzled El Chapo.
Tonya Harding’s fan club.
Sketchbook by Roz Chast: “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?”
Sign up for our newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.
By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
By Margaret Talbot
By David Owen
By Ted Geltner
By Jennifer Gonnerman
Sections
More
© 2024 Condé Nast. All rights reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy, Cookie Statement, and your California privacy rights. The New Yorker would possibly earn a portion of sales of products purchased through our site as part of our partner component partnerships with retailers. Curtains on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used without the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Ad Choices