Ballad of Platform No. 5
Translation by Jessie Turner

Sara Nso

Each Friday, for two months, at about 6:30 p.m., I sat in the second bench in Platform No. 5 at the Atocha train station in Madrid. I waited for the Talgo that would take me to Murcia, on the Mediterranean Coast, where I worked weekends.
I always got to the station at least a half hour early and I would sit on the same bench. The trains came and went, preceded by a monotonous howl. Their cars, illuminated with yellowish neon lights, allowed for a glimpse of all the diverse faces. In the grayness of the neighboring platforms, they scattered color onto the urban landscape. Some were hidden behind newspapers, others looked drowsy; there were those who looked curious, sticking their heads out over the track, and then there were those having fun chatting with their companions.
Where has that black man gone whose hand, cracked with dryness, holds onto a young child? And that group of noisy adolescents, dressed in tiny little skirts? That young man with Arabic features, looking at the ground lost in thought while his companion whispers something in his ear, he looks sad… All the faces that I had once seen from Platform No. 5 were concealed in a story that I would play at deciphering as I waited for the train.
Today, contemplating the destruction caused by the bomb placed in the Atocha station by the terrorists a few months after I stopped taking the train, some of those faces have passed through my mind and I have not been able to hold back the tears. So many stories cut short by tragedy!
I want to think that writer Claudio Magris was right in saying that life is made up of the minutes in between when one stops walking and when one starts walking again, in those moments of waiting in lines at the bank, before entering a doctor's office or meeting a loved one, in the desire to hear an answer long hoped for or simply while waiting for a train. Because if I think about it, if I believe it with all my heart, it is possible that there is meaning in the life and in the death of all those faces that suddenly disappeared or were mutilated on March 11, those faces that perhaps one time I myself discovered at Platform No. 5.