Verbatim

Welcome back to Verbatim. This week we hear from Sophie, a college student who loves to travel.

March 11, 2004

To think I was worried about my passport and how to say “exchange rate” in Spanish, and whether or not I should buy yet another short white skirt. All the while people were dying on trains in Madrid. We found out 12 hours after the fact, when were trying to board our train to get back to Seville, but we couldn’t take our original train because there had been a bombing, ten bombs. They were set off in Madrid, mostly at Atocha train station. There were at least 200 dead, 1200 injured. Atocha. We were there two days before and we had been there every day since we first arrived in the country. It was our favorite stop on the Metro because it led to the Prado and the Reina Sofia and the Rastro Market and a little Italian bistro with amazing chocolate and dulce de leche gelato. Atocha. I loved it there. Even the sound of it in my mouth, the a’s coming full circle, the repetition of the t and the ch – toe, cha. The station had a tropical garden inside of the steal and glass frame with loud birds flying all around – a little paradise. It is so perfect that even the birds didn’t shit on the floor. We were suppose to go back there on Sunday, we were going to get gelato and sit on a bench under the palm and banana trees, listening to ourselves and the birds that don’t shit in public. Two days. We could have been there. We were on the train to Cordoba when the bombs went off. In our bags we have three more tickets on those trains, all between seven and nine in the morning. I can still see the vaulted ceiling, the smooth cement platforms, but now the papers show the same platforms covered in ash and debris and maimed bodies and blood. We had to get on another train though. We had to get home that evening. Just 12 hours after the bombings. I have never felt such terror in my life. My body hurt and jumped at the sound of a foot tapping, a door closing, the lighting of a cigarette. I couldn’t reconcile the horrifying sensation of fear juxtaposed to the lavender color of the mountains outlined by the azure sky and the brilliant orange sunset to my right, outside the train window. It looked like a fiery explosion, like a bomb, but the sun was so brilliant and so good and so clear. Nothing matched up. The bombs. We could have been there. And I cannot remove those images form my head of the mangled bodies on the platform or the faceless men who walked on those trains and left the bombs. Ten men walked onto the trains and then walked off. They walked on and then walked off and no one knew they had just seen their own killers.