“When the legend becomes reality, print the legend.” The journalist Josep Miquel Bolló uses the quote from the film The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance to tell in a few words all the pain that, beyond his kidnappers, a good part of society perpetrated on Maria Àngels Feliu. This Wednesday marks 30 years since the end of her kidnapping. The longest and cruelest in recent Spanish criminal history and which was inexplicably survived by a kind and simple woman who turns 66 this year and who refuses to stop working in her pharmacy.
Bolló was one of the few journalists who interviewed her. And over time she was unable to break the bond of affection that she was born at that moment and that they maintain. Like many other chroniclers of events, Bolló defends the need to maintain a certain emotional distance from the protagonists of the stories in case he has to talk about them again, and not for the better. But he broke his rule with Feliu and, despite the countless occasions that he has written and narrated about the case, thirty years later, he is still able to offer unpublished details of those 492 days of kidnapping that are sadly commemorated.
What will Maria Àngels do this week? Carles Porta, the journalist at the head of the Crims factory who in 2021 published La pharmaceútica, 492 days kidnapped, wonders aloud. A book for which he delved into an investigation that produced a new account of the kidnapping, without the help of the woman, but with the victim at the center of the story.
La Vanguardia has brought the two journalists together at the Kiosk in the Boqueria market in Barcelona to remember the episode. “Maria Àngels was a criminalized, blamed and stigmatized victim from the first moment,” says Porta. So it was. When Bolló refers to Liberty Valance’s film it is precisely because during all these years, with honorable exceptions, no one has been interested in what really happened. The public, in general, was so fascinated and trapped by the force of the story and by the legends that were generated about the kidnapping, that the victim took a backseat.
On the occasion of these three decades, Ricard Ustrell interviewed Sebastià Comas, known as Iñaki and in charge of custody in captivity, on his TV3 program Col·lapse. Like the last times he opened his mouth, with Tura Soler in El Punt or Carla Turró in Ara, Sebastià C once again placed himself at Feliu’s level, presenting himself as the least bad of all the kidnappers. He only needed to say that they should thank him because he went out of his way to ensure that that woman who had turned into a ghost with the passing of days, weeks and months did not die in that unhealthy, humid and bug-infested well. He released her on March 27, 1994 and she spent 8 of the 17 years to which he was sentenced.
In those days, Sebastià Comas was already aware that the kidnapping was a botch, that his cronies would not collect the ransom and that they were considering letting her die. After a failed attempt to free her, he finally managed to do so coinciding with the Mercat del Ram. He took Maria Àngels out of the storage room, put her in his van and after driving a few kilometers without really knowing where to leave her, he remembered that in Lliçà there was a warehouse next to a bingo hall and that at the end of a small climb on the road, a gas station was located. always open.
The kidnapper made her get out of the car. She was barely standing. She was completely bent over due to lack of muscle, weight loss, and the fact that she had been unable to stand up or walk for so long. The man gave him two hundred peseta coins and warned him: “Now count up to 2,000 and when you finish you start walking towards the gas station. When you arrive, call by phone.”
“Would you have counted?” asks Bolló. “Maria Àngels counted up to 2,000. She didn’t even leave a number. And only then did she start walking. It was a full moon night and she had to stop several times because her strength was failing. She arrived at the gas station and the first thing he saw was a Coca-Cola machine. He didn’t think about it. He inserted a coin. “He swallowed the hundred pesetas and the Coca-Cola didn’t come out,” shouts Bolló, sharing the general feeling at the journalists’ table of regret and unease. It is inexplicable to decipher how she must have felt at that moment.
Maria Àngels had spent 492 days kidnapped, believing at every moment that it would be her last and that she could be killed. Fighting day by day to get to the next one. She had been hungry, thirsty, cold, hot and disgusted, like when the ants covered a piece of bread that she saved; and in that first gesture of freedom, the machine had left her without coin and without Coca-Cola. He could have given up right there. But she didn’t do it before, or at that moment. He weakly hit the machine, drawing the attention of the gas station worker, who approached to ask what was wrong with that woman who looked like a beggar. “I am Maria Àngels Feliu, the kidnapped one,” she said serenely. The man knew about her story, but he didn’t quite believe it, and asked her to remind him of her ID as proof of truthfulness. With the number written down, she telephoned the Civil Guard, who confirmed her identity.
As the gas station worker did in that first moment, from that moment on everything Feliu said was questioned. He headlined this newspaper on the front page. “The appearance of Maria Àngels does not resolve the doubts.” What doubts needed to be resolved? The cleanliness, dignity and integrity with which she appeared before the media was questioned. He didn’t like that she smiled. She did not understand her serenity and she raised doubts about that first fleeting kiss with her husband in front of the cameras.
These days, like all those that coincide with a date related to the kidnapping, the pharmacist will try to go unnoticed and avoid approaching the establishment. For 30 years, two out of every five people who enter do so to snoop. For a while she considered leaving the pharmacy, but then she told herself that she wasn’t, that she had stolen enough kidnapping from her to also lose a job that she was passionate about.
Those days in that smelly hole where her menstruation stopped in the second month, and from which she emerged with her back rotten by the humidity, she suffered a lot without imagining all the worse damage that would come later. Maria Àngels Feliu took a while to understand why people didn’t trust her. She did not understand that they did not believe her and that she gave rise to theories such as the one that she said she ran away with a lover.
Carles Porta summed it up very well when he published his book. “Maria Àngels Feliu is the resilience of a woman in the face of general imbecility.”
