Pure human senselessness
Translation by Jessie Turner

Jon Ariztimuño

In my case, the tragedy woke me up in the form of a phone call. Samuel, one of those people I consider a true friend, called me to ask, "Are you okay?" And the rest is history: backpack bombs, trains… and the biggest terrorist massacre in European history — more than 200 deaths and thousands left wounded. Pure human senselessness. That's how it all began… with such an emotional day and an intense period of four days that would culminate in the change of the Spanish government.
The feelings were intense and on different levels. In the first place, it touched me to see how many people did just like Samuel when he picked up the phone, concerned about me. It is in those moments when one pays attention to the simple and valuable things in life, like family and friendship.
Each one coped in his or her own way. Some donated blood, others went to pray and light candles. I did neither. I watched television all day, amazed, absorbed, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. It was like watching some type of macabre movie through that cold, unreal distance that television creates. That same television is capable of mixing two minutes of drama from the massacre with instant soup advertisements. Pure human senselessness.
It was also difficult to understand the absurd lottery, which chose to kill train riders at 7:23 a.m. and not those who took the train five minutes earlier or later. Babies, blue-collar workers, immigrants… dozens of stories uprooted in a moment's time. I could have been there, too, but as luck would have it, I left from the Atocha station the night before and not that death-filled morning.
A week later, I went back to the Atocha train station. A wave of heat struck my face as I entered one of the transit passenger zones. Hundreds, thousands of burning candles had formed some kind of urban sanctuary. Among them, I found flowers, teddy bears, letters, photographs and other mementos of all those stories — so full of life — that the pure human senselessness had decided to end. Several people looked at the scene and wiped away tears. A few meters away there were information panels with railway routes, ticket windows and train platforms full of workers and families on their way home, to work or to shop.
Life was going on.