Another 11M
How many Marchs have passed since 2004? Memory does not fail, nor do the recollections, the emotions, the feelings. Fear. Because on that fateful day there was a lot of fear. FEAR, in capital letters. Not knowing is terrifying; knowing, sometimes, too. The bombs, the dead, the blood, the trains, the stops, the uncertainty, the impotence, the blankets, the solidarity. A country collapsing. Crying.
Madrid, the stage, with its local trains from those neighbourhoods that were beginning to wake up to the arrival of yet another day; with its carriages full of students, of workers. Rush hour. They knew what they were doing, what they wanted to do. And they succeeded. They broke the mould. They put us at the top of the terror list. To kill. And if you have to die, you die. Backpacks. Explosives. Almost 200 people lost their lives and nearly two thousand were injured. And it could have been worse. Never before had Spain experienced a terrorist attack on such a scale. It wasn't ETA. And we began to analyse, to want to know more about jihadist terrorism. Weeks after the brutal attack, in an apartment in Leganés, the terrorists, after being discovered, blew themselves up. For Allah, to reach paradise, to continue generating hatred in this often absurd world.
And the pain was mixed with lies, with ignorance, with exploitation, with defeats, with confrontations. There were only a few days left to the elections. The confusion and chaos also brought a change of political power in the country: from the PP to the PSOE. Because the people punish, because the people decide. A confrontation that also took place among the victims. As if the loss and the heartbreak of absence were not the same thing. Where there is politics, there are interests.
Another 11M. What has become of the victims who survived? Of those who lost their children, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, friends? Forgetting is fragile; remembering is punctual. But the smell of that 11M remains. The bitter taste remains. The screams of the moment remain. The sadness remains. The mysterious and unforgettable silence that settled over that bustling and joyful capital remains.
Silence. Yes, a brutal silence at Atocha station the day after and the day after that, where the only sound is the footsteps of those getting on and off the trains, where the candlelight placed carefully among farewell messages, photos, stuffed animals and letters takes your breath away. A station as dead as the victims themselves. We all died a little that 11M, we all felt the pain of so many affected families.
The daily passengers to Atocha suffered the contagion of that silence that also reigned in the streets, in the offices, in the homes. Unable to gesture words, there were even hugs between strangers after crossing their glances in front of any doorway, on the stairs of a metro, at the bus stop.
The sensations are not forgotten, even if some details may be lost along the way. We do not forget how vulnerable we are, we do not forget the silent weeping of Madrid.