Elizabeth Nash: Silence speaks for Madrid's anguish

COMMENT

Madrid has received its fair share of terror scares in the nine years I've lived here, many of them around election time. So many of us were apprehensively sniffing the wind, fearing something terrible.

My first instinct last Thursday morning was to cleave to the radio. In this articulate and gregarious city people often speak not to communicate, not to convince, but simply to be heard.

And usually the radio emits a stream of brilliantly turned, clunkily edited drivel. But early on March 11 the radio snapped, as it does at moments of crisis, into crisp, non-stop reporting pitched perfectly between objectivity and emotional engagement.

It became the soundtrack of our day. You switch on the television too, of course, but only for the pictures.

This was no normal Eta bomb. The death toll that doubled and trebled within minutes, the multiple explosions, the timing, the place, all designed to cause maximum carnage among ordinary people. And it hushed this roaring city to a whisper.

I hurried from my flat down the boulevard past the Ritz hotel, the Prado Museum and the Botanical Gardens to the noticeably seedier area around Atocha, where commuters from the southern suburbs pour into the capital every morning.

But the streams of folk who usually boldly look you in the eye were crouched over their mobile phones, their faces troubled, their eyes cast down.

I reached the city's handsome fin de siecle rail terminal at Atocha to find police had already cordoned off the area. Traffic that swirled around the huge and beautiful roundabout was locked into a honking chaos.

David Fernandez was standing with his workmates looking at the station from which they had scrambled, still with their hard hats on.

They had been working on a new tunnel across the city to link Atocha's high-speed train terminal to the new high-speed line heading north. "We'd come early and were just having a coffee in the site cafe before starting work when the earth trembled with this terrible explosion and people fled screaming, trying to get out. We didn't know where to go or what to do."

The tunnel they were working on is dubbed with typical Madrileno irony "the tunnel of laughs" for the disruption the building works are causing in the capital.

"Well, we're not laughing today," David said grimly. "Today only a killer would laugh."

At the news stand on the corner, people anxiously queued for their papers, not to read the horror they knew had not yet been printed, but to talk, to find out if there were two explosions or three, whether Eta or al Qaeda was responsible, whether they knew anyone involved.

Strangers turned to each other in eager, jittery conversation. "Bastards, they should be hanged," shouted a woman.

Then the mobile phone network collapsed, compounding the panic and uncertainty. We all stabbed stupidly at our phones, which boiled with silenced missed calls. It was as if the volume of this high-decibel city had been turned to mute.

Swiftly the traffic started moving again. But the only vehicles circulating were police cars, fire engines and streams of ambulances.

At this point, people rushed home; the streets emptied; metro travellers vanished. Sirens and flashing lights continued, but everyone on the road now seemed part of a city-wide rescue operation, an effort that approached the scale of normal metropolitan traffic.

In the nearby Estrella cafe, young health workers from the ambulance services were filling their faces with milky coffee and gigantic flaky pastries in preparation for the task ahead.

"It's going to be a heavy day," mumbled one through a mouthful of crumbs. The TV was blaring as usual in the corner, and a dozen workers in their bright green jackets swivelled towards it, pastries suspended in their hands, as the newsreader announced yet another updated death toll.

I turned from the payphone into which I had been shouting above the racket to find that the cafe, too, had emptied. Outside on the street ambulances peeled off to the main hospitals, which were promptly so overwhelmed that the Health Minister asked people to stay at home unless they were badly hurt.

Appeals went out for blood donors, and the response was so swift and enthusiastic that queues soon snaked round the mobile units in Madrid's main squares.

And before long the message rippled through the bush telegraph now beating through the city in defiance of the phone meltdown: no more blood now, thank you. We have enough. Come back tomorrow.

At the 12 de Octubre hospital it seemed the whole building, indeed the whole city, had become a co-ordinated rescue effort. Staff were efficient and helpful. I found Jose Gallego sitting quietly, with a huge bandage on his head. He'd been lucky, he said, just needed a few stitches after being flung from the train.

He'd been amazed at the bravery and calmness of those who had gone back into the wreckage to pull out passengers, he said, as if he had not been among them.

As I criss-crossed the city in what felt like the ghoulish pursuit of an escalating tragedy, it was clear that the usual hectic bustle was stunned into near-paralysis.

Taxi drivers silenced their habitual rant against separatist murderers to listen to radio reports of the mounting ministerial condemnations and the screams and sobs endlessly replayed as the hours wore on.

Finally, to the makeshift mortuary in an exhibition centre near the airport, where scores of hearses were lined up waiting, the grimmest stop on the day's macabre tour.

Clear spring sunshine gave way to soft twilight. Extended families filed into the pavilion, along with groups of undocumented Romanians, men in suits and Peruvian immigrants, a typical cross-section of modern Madrid, to try to identify a loved one.

Some came away with good news and tears of relief when told a relative had survived in hospital. Others slumped in despair. "No, I'm not looking for anyone any more. Unfortunately I've found her," choked one man.

By nightfall the streets were still subdued. When I fell into my local bar towards midnight the usually extrovert owner was dining wearily with his family.

He was closing early, he apologised. It had been quiet all day.

"No one's talked about anything else since eight this morning, and now they have all gone home."

But he rustled up a chorizo sandwich for me and my colleague in from Rome, and brought from behind the counter possibly the finest bottle of wine I've tasted in Madrid.

Friday was, if anything, worse, as numbness yielded to pain. Instinct propelled people to Atocha.

I and other outsiders marvel at how locals have often wallowed in the anguish of death, but at the impromptu shrines outside the station and in its high and airy circular atrium the atmosphere was rather of gentle, tremulous delicacy.

Carmen Sanchez approached the collection of lighted candles and bouquets that grew while I stood. She took carefully from a plastic bag three pots of fresh primulas, crimson, gold and cream, and laid them gently on the ground. Did she know anyone involved?

"No, but I brought flowers as I would to a friend who was bereaved." She touched the black ribbon pinned to her coat. "When I went to the haberdashers for this, the sales lady gave them to us, saying she could not accept payment. We all feel united at this moment as if they were our families."

Downstairs, another shrine was growing rapidly. Pedro Sanchez wept as he laid a bouquet of carnations and lit two candles. He, too, had no one involved. "But I feel as if I do. I've cried a lot these days. This touches us all. I cross this spot twice every day. Any other day it could be you or me."

It could have been my cleaning lady Ana Maria, a Peruvian who has European Union citizenship thanks to her Italian grandfather.

"Oh, Eli!" she calls me. "I always take that train into Atocha at that hour, but I didn't because my little girl had a bad cold and I stayed with her. I still can't believe what happened."

Ana Maria told me of a young Colombian girl with whom she often travels to work.

"She told me that the brother of her friend is missing but the family are afraid to go to the mortuary because they have no papers and they're frightened of being expelled."

I told Ana Maria that the Government in a gesture of humanity to the city's legions of immigrant workers had promised Spanish nationality to all victims and their families.

"Oh, really? I'll tell her straight away. It's terrible to think of some poor body lying unclaimed so far from home."

And the city convulsed with traffic again, as it always does on a Friday when it's raining. But this time Madrilenos were rushing in readiness for the evening's mass demonstration. They are proud of their demonstrations that halt the city and unite people of every class, age and political hue.

These mobilisations are unique in Europe in their gigantic scale and mixture of dignity and gaiety.

The first of its kind was prompted by a failed fascist coup in 1981. Then there was one to mark the death of the young politician Miguel Angel Blanco, murdered by Eta in a Basque village in 1997. A year later the death of the constitutional lawyer Tomas y Valiente, shot dead by Basque hitmen in his university study, brought millions out.

Friday night's was the biggest yet, more than two million, half the city, good-humoured, relaxed, emotional.

Madrilenos are wonderful in crowds. They love the intense physical contact, the combination of intimacy and spectacle, the rapid-fire exchange of words and glances.

And on these occasions they can generate the most unexpected response imaginable: silence.

Chants from hundreds of thousands of throats, defiant, satirical or charged with grief, suddenly cease. In Europe's noisiest city, where it's almost impossible to get people to shut up for a moment, where normal conversations are conducted with blowtorch intensity, silence is the most powerful expression of the depth of their anguish.

As the demonstration's last stragglers headed off to Atocha yet again late on Friday night, splashing through huge puddles of rainwater, when traffic resumed and weary demonstrators with their sodden banners formed orderly queues down the steps to the metro, the atmosphere changed again.

The irrepressible spark of fiesta flashed through the cold and damp. "Assassins! That's enough!" screamed the young voices, amid laughter and high spirits. They weren't being thoughtless or disrespectful, but true to themselves.

If the people of Madrid's capacity for histrionic suffering might seem excessive to buttoned-up northern Europeans so, too, is their lust for life.

- INDEPENDENT