Silence reigns in the area.
The wind rocks the treetops.
There are no signs of human life in sight.
A stone path that someone built long ago climbs up a hillside.
Up there stands, imposing, an abandoned-looking stone construction, discolored by the passage of years.
It would seem uninhabited if it weren't for that figure peeking out of one of the windows.
It is about a mannequin or a petrified man who has drawn the curtains to observe the newcomers.
The blue-gray of a television pulses against the glass in the next room.
Around the apparatus sit in chairs and rocking chairs a dozen old people, congregated like our ancestors around the fire.
Come without blinking
Doraemon
, a cartoon starring a cosmic cat and his clumsy adolescent friend, while their world - the one that began shortly before the Civil War -, out there, is extinguished.
This year, 2020, was the year of bad news.
In this nursing home hidden in a beech and birch forest in Madrid, the management of the center decided not to tune in to the information channels in the room where the inmates spent the day, locked up.
If they had, they would have exposed their grandparents to stories about the thousands of deaths that occurred in places like theirs, where they live the last stage of their life, or in hospitals or apartments where people died alone and abandoned.
The neighbors would notice after days by the smell that filtered under the door.
Those spring days, when the pandemic spread in full force through Spain, although with special speed in Madrid, seem distant, as if it had happened a decade ago.
The paradox is that the lost year, as the
Guardian
has called
2020, seems to have slowed down the days until it became a pasty time that is reluctant to end.
Perhaps it is because the label of historical time hangs over it, a period that will be studied and analyzed in books.
This chronicle will be nourished by images such as those illustrated in this text, the work of EL PAÍS photographers who took to the streets when the entire population was locked up.
Journalism often consists of driving in the opposite direction on a highway, dazzled by oncoming lights.
Several of these photographers had experience in international conflicts, it was not the first time that they faced a catastrophic situation.
The novelty is that now it happened in their buildings, it affected their families and friends.
To life as they knew it.
Disasters stopped being something that happened in distant places to become a domestic affair.
When reviewing the photos it is verified that there are three types.
Those that reflect emptiness, those that show pain and those that capture strangeness.
The first took place when the entire city was cloistered.
Pigeons fluttered in surprise in the lonely parks.
The wild animals looked out to the cities, which looked deserted.
They must have felt the same amazement as the explorers who happened to find abandoned cities, products of an earlier civilization, such as Teotihuacán.
This unsettling stillness was broken by the siren of an ambulance, the engine of a garbage truck, or the stealthy advance of a hearse.
About the second, those of pain, there is little to say.
They speak for themselves.
Distant shots proliferate, those that do not invade privacy, those that condense a moment without the need to show explicitly.
There are some that were taken and never published, but that remain in the memory.
Through a glass, three women watch the moment in which the funeral home workers place the coffin of their sister, who died from COVID-19, in a crematorium.
One of the women broadcasts the moment live with her mobile phone for the Honduran family of the deceased.
The process, with an industrial aspect that added to the grief, took only a minute.
That was the end of the road.
The last of this capricious typification, to which no scientific method has been applied, are the ones that caused astonishment.
Those photographs whisper to the reader: "Look at me well, because you never imagined something like this around the corner."
In them appear nurses, doctors, military, dressed in special suits.
Now it is part of the landscape, but then they caused strangeness, as if it happened on another plane of reality.
It can be any detail, each reader will have attracted a different one.
A caravan of mortuary cars in the cemetery, a makeshift hospital with no doors or privacy, the corpses of old people dead in their beds waiting for days for the army to pick them up.
The year is about to end.
The photographs stay.
They are the silent witness of a time that we believed impossible.
The reports that tell the metamorphosis of Madrid on alert
Personal experience: anecdotal from Madrid during the health crisis