Twenty years ago today we were in Madrid. Stunned by bombs placed in train carriages full of students and workers, we were praying against the tide so that the death toll would not increase every minute. He stopped in the distance, at 192, an intolerable figure. There are times when I assume so much empathy that I think because the dead didn’t forget to set the alarm clock that morning, just like I watch Titanic thinking that today the ship will dribble the iceberg and Di Caprio will survive.
It wasn’t ETA even though they tried to embed it on us by land, sea and Urdaci. They were half-hour heroes who in the name of their god left hundreds of families sunk in eternal misery, while no one will remember these miserable murderers since they died.
Aided by a band of Asturian quinquis, some shameless bread soaked in oil portrayed magnificently in the Disney series Nos vemos en otra vida, based on the book by Manuel Jabois, the killers had in them the butlers who served the dynamite for at the Atocha breakfast.
Emilio Suárez Trashorras was a police officer and at the same time a drug-addicted psychopath who took advantage of the brazen innocence of a gypsy boy named Gabriel to earn money while the boy, at the age of sixteen, transported rubber 2 to the belly of the coaches from Avilés to Madrid in exchange for four duros and twenty stripes. This boy from an unbearable family, who before the age of ten had already stolen piggy banks from the Domund or the box for the blind from the ONCE, was an accomplice to the massacre without pretending or knowing it.
It is healthy to put a terrorist act like that of 11-M into perspective to try to understand how some miserable beings here and there perpetrated that orgy of blood and pain.
One of the survivors of the massacre explained that there is no worse memory of that morning than the soundtrack of dozens of cell phones ringing cheerfully and haphazardly in the middle of the depot of corpses in the wagons. It is painful and unbearable to put yourself in the shoes of the callers without finding anyone to answer them. How intolerable it is that, after reading Jabois’ book or watching the Disney series, someone would wickedly question whether it was ETA. In the 34,175 years of imprisonment in Trashorras, king of the lumpen, we find the answer.