Minutes before five in the afternoon of August 17 five years ago, a murderer improvised, for religious reasons, a massacre with a white van.
It was placed in the center of Barcelona's Ramblas and at full speed it zigzagged the 530 meters necessary to kill 16 people and injure more than 130. Two children died, three and seven years old.
34 nationalities gathered the victims.
Too many flags in a cannibalistic moment of symbols and lures.
The assassins killed them for who they were, for being where they were, for no other reason than hatred.
Impotence.
The fury.
Like a plague is exterminated, like zombies are fought in a video game.
You enter with a van and run over everyone you can and then those who will clean up the account books will come, they will argue and determine innocent people and blame and responsibilities will be laid before clarifying what can be said and how to say it so that neither victims nor victims are offended. assassins.
It is not that some claim compensation and others get upset and kill us again with better arguments this time, with a bomb or run over by a vehicle at full speed on the most emblematic promenade of Barcelona.
Las Ramblas (or La Rambla, as Carandell wrote, depending on whether one considers oneself a polytheist or not) was a special place of initiation for all Barcelonans.
I write in the past tense because I doubt how the younger generations live them now.
On the day of the attack, at that time, most of the victims were tourists because the management of mass tourism in Barcelona has expelled the people of Barcelona from the center of their city.
But five years ago, when one was finding out all the details of the massacre, you recovered those streets, you felt the need to approach Las Ramblas, almost on a pilgrimage of recognition to that place where, if you were born in Barcelona, the first time you go you always did it hand in hand with someone.
You grew up and the Ramblas were a territory where you found the instruments with which to draw your sentimental education.
On the Ramblas -and the arteries that lead to and cross them- you found everything you were looking for and what you didn't even know you were looking for: vocations, madness, clothes, records, books, friends, bars and problems.
Sordid, belonging to everyone and no one, radically Barcelonan from the bastard: those Ramblas, five years ago, were the scene of a massacre, chosen to rule out a larger, more lethal, more symbolic attack.
They would have liked to kill in the Nou Camp or knock down half of the Sagrada Familia.
But the bungling led them to choose the Ramblas, that day and at that time.
vocations, ravings, clothes, records, books, friends, bars and problems.
Sordid, belonging to everyone and no one, radically Barcelonan from the bastard: those Ramblas, five years ago, were the scene of a massacre, chosen to rule out a larger, more lethal, more symbolic attack.
They would have liked to kill in the Nou Camp or knock down half of the Sagrada Familia.
But the bungling led them to choose the Ramblas, that day and at that time.
vocations, ravings, clothes, records, books, friends, bars and problems.
Sordid, belonging to everyone and no one, radically Barcelonan from the bastard: those Ramblas, five years ago, were the scene of a massacre, chosen to rule out a larger, more lethal, more symbolic attack.
They would have liked to kill in the Nou Camp or knock down half of the Sagrada Familia.
But the bungling led them to choose the Ramblas, that day and at that time.
That a city like Barcelona and a society like the Catalan one squandered their opportunity to establish themselves as a world symbol -as necessary as it is fatuous- against barbarism, only shows the social and political swarm that was 2017 in Catalonia.
To some and others it seemed, that one, an enormously inopportune attack.
Something that distracted them from what was important and a destruction loud enough to wake up a population from the mantras of the tribe and its apocalyptic jailers.
He mattered more that one flag was imposed more than the other.
He cared more about showing that he was self-sufficient and blocking the Spanishness of solidarity, than denouncing mismanagement or mismanagement.
It was more important to talk about global dangers, to point out what the important things were and not to go around playing hide and seek ballot boxes and doing gymkhanas along the country's highways.
It mattered more to boo the King, Puigdemont or Colau than to respect the people who had died just because of the bad luck of coming for a walk and spending money in our streets.
It only remained to tell them that this had happened to them - their own murder - for being tourists.
The worst of us as a society, as a political class and as citizens appeared in the days after that attack and in its aftermath in Cambrils with a murdered woman.
The contempt for the victims, the partisan interest, the posh nihilism, the colonial tics and the fascination for revenge with the terrorists shot down - hunted down in the following days - by a police force that, being ours, could avoid giving explanations.
We realized that we are only Charlie Hebdo when he is in Paris.
That here we always and only know how to be either Barça or Madrid.
Barcelona did not change.
The fear hardly appeared.
We are a trusting society, which opens the doors when they ring the bell.
We cannot help but trust and believe that nothing bad will ever happen to us.
The interested information appeared, the clumsiness, the conspiracies, those who relativize a massacre and not an offense in writing, the police collaborating in the confusion, the private life of the terrorists, as integrated into a Catalan and rural society as resentful and protected by the same tolerance they detest.
People did not change and no one wanted to remember what happened to the dead or anything related to those days because the image that was reflected of ourselves was piecemeal, petty and bitter.
We had the opportunity to show ourselves great and show what kind of society and life we want and we didn't.
The portrait showed the real appearance of Dorian Gray.
And immediately, each other, we did everything possible to blame the other -boyars, the collaborationist imam, the CIA and the Mossos- and, especially, to remove from the field of play that inopportune and annoying attack, full of victims with shorts and tacky t-shirts, during free time for day and a half tourists, for nothing a murder of patriots or symbols or hymns, kings or liberators.
We prepared ourselves for identity and transcendental events,
09:48
You can follow EL PAÍS Catalunya on
and
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter
50% off
Subscribe to continue reading
read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber
