The night dragged on until absolute desolation overcame us. Only then, stunned, brutalized, saddened, collapsed by a resounding disbelief, do we dive into bed to embrace insomnia. A ferocious wind was blowing that filtered through the windows and presaged a colossal tragedy, but we did not want to recognize it because the impact exuded an intolerable bestiality, inappropriate for our times of cutting-edge technology. The images we saw did not correspond to a distant Asian territory ravaged by the monsoon. This time The horror, formidable and frightening, was planted right on the edge of Valenciain towns that we have all visited and where family and friends live. But the worst hit us when dawn broke. The implacable reality squeezed our minds, overwhelmed by the vision of a landscape full of darkness. The remains of a long and unequal battle between man and the blow of nature. The Silla runway, one of the main access roads to the city, recalled that ‘highway of death’ where the dying ironwork of the armored vehicles of Saddam’s Army lay, bombed by Yankee planes as they fled towards Baghdad.
We heard above our heads the apocalypse of the helicopters, stripped of Wagnerian epic. Scrapped, twisted cars, composing monstrous metal sculptures, typical of a dystopian universe. Vehicles of any tonnage fused together in improbable foreshortenings. The city woke up idling, fearful, trembling, scared, saddened. The streets exuded the sour perfume of ‘shock’, of absolute commotion. Our eyes bathed in the molasses of confusion spit out the devastating “how was this possible?” Few people on the asphalt and little traffic. We understood without transition that the car was nothing more than the death trap where our fears crystallized. Nobody grabbed the wheel except for work imperative. But perhaps the worst thing came crashing down our throats in the face of the ocean of uncertainty.
Uncertainty oxidizes the heart, destroys morale, crushes the spirit. Uncertainty surrounds you with a sticky fog where panic prevails. Uncertainty produces a strange helplessness of certain failure and severe defeat. Uncertainty is the heavy burden that sticks against your back. Not knowing where your loved ones are generates unbearable anguish. Too many missing. Too many silent phones. Too many absences. A friend from Paiporta, one of the epicenters of pain, contacted me via SMS, the only thing that worked for her. First the electricity was cut, then the water and a little later the telephone coverage dropped. They were alone, helpless, incommunicado, exhausted by the real and palpable danger that was brewing at their side. When we lose the most basic of our existence, that cell phone, that light bulb, that internet, that faucet from which water always flows, our essential tools are taken from us, we are left naked and we recover the terror of caves because we return to the savagery of yesteryear, It’s just that we are no longer prepared for the wild, rough life of pure survival. We forget our fragility as puppets that shipwreck in the face of catastrophes. And we forget it because our first-world arrogance keeps us deceived in the midst of artifice. But it will be difficult not to remember the night of October 29. This date will join others…
Our elders, in fact, grew up with the deep wounds of the flood of 1957 that massacred Valencia. ‘The war against mud’. This is how they named the fight against the slippery and thick silt, helped by the heavy machinery they were lifting at that time, the military from the Torrejón base, who were urgently transferred. We believed that they were telling us about battles from yesteryear and that we, a disaster of such proportions, would never know it. But those of my generation lost our innocence and pride when we tasted, for the first time, the poisonous pain caused by the floods when the Tous reservoir evaporated. People in the towns near that dam still suffer nightmares due to the roar of the wave that suddenly escaped. It sounded like the hoarse bellow of an enraged titan. And today’s young people, in short, have suddenly woken up to this new avalanche of water and mud. Each generation will exhibit its scars of cruelty concentrated in a kind of sinister stalemate due to the cycles that harass us on this peaceful shore of the Mediterranean. The day passed in a bubble of blood and mud, of death and tears. And uncertainty, always uncertainty distressing our actions.
Half of the radio editorial staff could not go to work because of the blocked roads, a real scene of war, and those of us who were present looked stunned at the number of deaths. It was rumored, among whispers, that the garages mutated into murderous spaces because the blanket of water arrived as quickly as it was treacherous, with the silence of the rattlesnake that bites you in the blink of an eye. “Does anyone know anything about Silvia?” «I’ve been calling her since yesterday and nothing…». And luckily we had news. It was isolated, without any coverage, with half the house destroyed. But alive, and it was about that, to resist, to breathe, to walk, to fight. «Does anything be known about Paco’s wife?» I wouldn’t wish the night that Paco suffered on anyone. His wife, a teacher, left the institute and evaporated. Then we celebrate the happy ending when we find out about his misfortune. She abandoned the car and was picked up by a truck driver who collected people, accumulating them in his cabin, in his trailer, in his soul. She arrived home yesterday at noon, muddy from head to toe, as if she had been able to escape at the last moment from the clutches of a zombie plague. We all know stories of this caliber because the ax blow has affected us all in the close face to face.
Most behaviors displayed the best of the human condition. But a minority opted for barbarism. They packed the supermarkets to hoard water, groceries… and the inevitable toilet paper. A certain attempt at collective hysteria flourished and hoaxes, traps, absurd news, and last-minute nonsense circulated that no one contradicted. Some spread terrible gossip: that if another flood came, that they evacuated a certain town, that if some Kaffirs looted certain stores… The alarm circulated freely in infernal splendor. Lies to power. The miseries of routine pettiness triggered by the habitual wretches who seek satisfaction in chaos.
The street, today, now, is a sleepwalking wandering of people stranded because we have run aground in the atavistic drama that we have endured for centuries and that is persistently repeated like the stench of that slaughterhouse that closed, but that still gives off the abominable stench of the viscera. . We will rise, we will recover, we will honor our dead from respect, although also from angerthe result of a catastrophe that could undoubtedly have been managed better. But we will not forget. Another atrocious date is tattooed within the folds of our memory.
#Ramón #Palomar #mud
