Bodies pile up as Madrid buries its dead

By PETER POPHAM

MADRID - The Saturday before a general election in Spain is set aside as a day for reflection.

But the silence in Madrid was the quiet of the tomb, as dozens of families buried loved ones killed in the terrorist attack on Thursday.

In the suburb of Polideportivo Juncal de Henares, little Marcos Gonzalez wiped tears from his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket as he stood by the coffin of his father Felix.

There were many more tears shed that day, and it was just the start. They cried beside the coffins of Jose Ramon, of Maria Teresa Mora Valero, of Hector Figueroa, of Neil Astocondo, of Frederico Miguel Sierra, of Laura Laforga and, at the vast necropolis of Almudena, on Madrid's eastern outskirts, they cried as they buried Antonio Sabelete.

Antonio came from Entrevias, "Between the lines", a tough inner suburb notorious for its poverty before the old tenements were replaced by new estates.

But Antonio, 32, had done well: he had a good job, working with computers for the Army, though he was not a soldier.

Antonio was a normal guy, a bit "formale", his relatives said, "super felissimo", super happy, in his marriage with a son of 6, soon to turn 7. He boarded the train for the short, humdrum journey into town to work, as he did every working day.

"They had so much to look forward to," a cousin recalled outside the cemetery's chapel. Family and friends stood talking quietly, waiting for the arrival of Antonio's mother and widow and child.

Almudena cemetery was a busy place: Antonio's funeral at midday was to be followed immediately by another, and then another.

The architecture seems designed to take visitors' minds off their troubles: 19th-century neo-Aztec, delicate and fanciful red brickwork, punctuated by thunderous stone columns and twiddly bits and beautiful wrought iron gates.

It was a busy place because the rush-hour massacre has turned into a rush-hour of the dead. Here, as in other cemeteries around the city, scores of victims were lined up to be buried.

Meanwhile, 40 bodies or bits of bodies remained unidentified. Relatives with emotional exhaustion etched on their faces tramped into the cemetery and into the tender care of Red Cross volunteers in fluorescent red outfits. They brought as requested some personal item that might help in DNA identification, a toothbrush or a hairbrush.

That's what it has come down to in Madrid. You know your loved one died because he didn't come home and he is not to be found in any hospital.

That is something you have discovered through grinding effort, driving from one hospital to the next, from hospital to morgue, braving the fatigue of doctors and nurses whose nerves have been stretched to breaking point by all the horror they have had to process.

But still you need firm information, and something to bury, some way to draw a line under the terrible day.

If Almudena can't help, they will send you to the other side of the city, where the Institute of Forensic Anatomy has begun the painstaking work of DNA testing.

But they are not equipped to deal with dozens of cases at once, so the remains are stacked up at Almudena until they can clear the backlog.

Nearly a full day passed after the explosions before Antonio's family found his body, a day in which one horror led inexorably into the next.

It began with bodies strewn across the tracks, mobile phones bleating within the shredded clothing of the dead and injured.

Many lay on the gravel for two hours before workers could heave them away on to station benches used as makeshift stretchers.

And the nightmare continued all day, while the stunned city slowly came to terms with the enormity.

For Antonio's family it finished at 5am in the surreal setting of a vast new exhibition centre way out near the airport, converted into a mass mortuary.

There he was and thank God he was fully recognisable. "He looked pretty good," said a friend. "He had some wounds on his face from flying glass, but that was all."

A hundred or so came to mourn Antonio's passing. It could have been any ordinary funeral. Except that Antonio was cut down in his prime, and scores more just like him were waiting to be buried.

- INDEPENDENT