... that mark our place and in the sky ...
...the planes still bravely winging fly ...
It was warm and quiet on Wednesday afternoon. Madrid in August is, in my view, at its best. There is no traffic, the boiling July heat has given way to a milder warmth and for those restaurants that are open, no reservations are required. A great place to be.
Still, some people still work and that involves travel; others drive off to holiday homes in the sierras or fly to island retreats.
So, three days ago I drove out to pick up a colleague who was flying in from Switzerland. The traffic was light so that I noticed the ambulance behind me, surely one of the first, earlier than on a busy day and scooted over a lane to let him pass, siren screaming and lights flashing.
On the horizon the black smoke was just starting to boil up. The plane cannot have gone down more than a minute or two before. There was something terribly wrong. In my gut I knew that this was not just a normal fire, a warehouse or burning brush. Something very bad had happened. I picked up my colleague and we left the airport before chaos set in.
And today, another perfect August day in Madrid, there is a picture in ‘El Pais’ of the interior of one of the huge exhibition halls at the Feria Madrid, very near Barajas. It is one of those very functional buildings, with the framing visible on the interior and the floor an easy to maintain granite or marble – ochre, shiny, cold. It is so enormous that the line of people passing by on the far side occupies just a fraction of the photo. In the foreground are rows of sheet-covered bodies, stretching the length of the hall.
It must be very cold in there. The technicians have turned the air-conditioning to maximum, the living are wearing dark colours, heavy coats.
This is the same place that the bodies were laid out in the wake of the terrorist bombings at the Atocha station, a similar number of victims, a similar feeling of numbness.
This time the deaths are not the result of insane fanaticism but the result is the same. It feels as though lives have been ripped from us out of time. You should die old and surrounded by your loved ones, shouldn’t you?
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