Live and cry in Itaewon, the neighborhood of the Halloween tragedy

Dozens of shoes lined the street.

They are not the type that an office worker would wear, much less a politician or a priest.

They are sporty, the kind that people in their 20s or 30s use every day.

Most of them are very dirty, as if they have been trampled.

They were trampled.

For several minutes, for hours.

There are many small sizes, for women.

Apart from the shoes - there is nothing more unsettling than a shoe without an owner - the Seoul police also collected phones, coats, glasses, wigs, bunny ears and monster masks.

They are part of the 1,500 kilos of objects that were scattered throughout the network of alleys where 156 people died during the Halloween celebrations in the Itaewon neighborhood.

Before they had been picked up, an older man, the owner of a jewelry store right up the alley where most of the people died, spread out a mat early Monday morning, two days after what happened.

On it he arranged bowls of rice, spoons, chopsticks, plates of fruit, and two candles.

He lit them, then knelt on the pavement and bowed deeply until his forehead touched the ground.

He apologized to the dead.

He managed to do his ritual for a few minutes until a policeman approached him.

He had to go.

Other policemen arrived.

He explained to them why he had to do it.

Why was it an obligation?

He demanded that they let him do it.

There was no point, he had to get up.

He before he wept between spasms on the shoulder of an agent as if his granddaughter had died that night.

02:17

Videos of the deadly avalanche in South Korea

Last Friday I walked very close to that alley.

I used to live just five minutes from there, now about 15, but I often walk around the area.

Itaewon is my neighborhood, I moved nine years ago, the same as I have been in Seoul.

It is where I have spent more time, apart from the neighborhood where I grew up in Bogotá.

In three of the seven books I've written, Itaewon appears.

Topophilia, psychogeography.

With those words, some explain the intense relationship we have with certain places.

It is true that at night I hardly go down those streets anymore.

The reason: too many people.

But that Friday I came back, I was at a party from which you could see the alley and exit number one of the subway, where many people crowded when the emergency services arrived on the day of the tragedy.

Then I went to Mama Kim.

Its official name is Grand Old Prey and it is one of the few bars that survive from old Itaewon.

It was opened in 1973 by a Korean woman and her gringo husband.

only music is heard

.

Before, there were many American soldiers stationed at the Yongsan military base, a few blocks away.

Now they hardly see each other.

After almost 70 years of being in the middle of Seoul, they finally left the city.

Itaewon begins with the walls surrounding the base and ends with one of the largest mosques in North Asia.

In between are a myriad of bars, old tailor shops, restaurants serving dishes that can only be found there.

Uzbek, Nigerian food.

Foreigners and Koreans have crossed paths on those streets forever.

Before the 1988 Olympics, not many dared to go.

For several generations the name of Itaewon was equivalent to danger.

Soldiers, fights, prostitutes, drugs, occasional deaths.

But for others it meant freedom.

It is still one of the few neighborhoods in the city, if not the country, where being gay is not a taboo.

Through Itaewon came rock and then rap.

Itaewon was during the early eighties the only neighborhood where people dared to dress differently, women with pants and short hair,

men with accessories.

Only there can a transgender bar exist next to a butcher shop

.

More than a geographical space, it is a mental space.

It is a necessary laboratory for a country with few immigrants and too many social constraints.

That's why people from all over, not just from Seoul, come to Itaewon.

When I left Mama Kim late there were still a lot of people on the streets.

Saturday will be worse, I thought.

That's why I stayed home.

Around 11 p.m., the emergency notifications that the Government sends in the event of a disaster began to appear on the cell phone.

One after another.

Shortly after the sirens were heard.

One after another.

The videos began to circulate.

My wife and I went to sleep with 50 dead in our heads.

The next day we woke up with triple.

Two thirds of them women.

It was more difficult for them to get out of the human mountain that crushed them.

The following Monday I walked through Itaewon to get to the alley.

In a small square the official altar was almost ready.

As in wakes, people avoided making noise, raising their voices.

The silence magnified everything.

The main street, which splits the neighborhood in two, was still closed and only police buses lined up.

That same police officer who arrived late, who dismissed the previous 11 calls for help.

The first was at 6:34 p.m. on Saturday, four hours before several people tripped, fell to the ground and others fell on top of them in a domino effect that left them trapped.

That's why it wasn't a stampede.

Nobody could move.

According to data from the Seoul subway, 130,000 people used the Itaewon station that night.

Vigil this Saturday in Seoul in memory of the victims of Halloween night.

KIM HONG-JI (REUTERS)

As I got closer I began to hear the clacking of a wooden instrument that accompanies Buddhist chants.

At exit one of the station, 10 steps from the alley, an improvised altar had been set up.

Flowers, open liquor bottles as in Korean funeral rites, handwritten notes.

Three monks tried to comfort with their voices those of us who had gathered there, under a cloudless autumn sky.

My wife still doesn't dare to go and I don't know if she can.

She has lived in Itaewon since 2006, when the neighborhood still carried her ruffian fame.

She fears that fame will return like a dense shadow and be the excuse to completely erase what's left of the old Itaewon.

So that the big chains occupy the streets and with them comes uniformity.

That the alleys where she accompanied her friends to buy hip hop t-shirts

in the early 2000s. At that time he still did not dare to go at night.

She soon lost her fear and the reward was priceless.

The first time she tried Indian food was precisely in a restaurant in that deadly alley.

Many years ago there was also B1, a small electronic music club that she used to go to, where she realized that nightlife has a value that goes far beyond drinks and fun.

Like her, like so many Koreans, the young people who died that night went to Itaewon to free themselves for a few hours from the social pressure that grips and homogenizes them, to verify that there is another way of living and being with others.

I came back on Wednesday.

The official altar was already open.

Guarded by officials, with free coffee, with free flowers.

The sun filtered through the yellow leaves of the ginkgo trees and made the day unbearably beautiful.

I kept going straight and went to the other altar, the one for the people.

The monks were not there, but it had grown and was overflowing, beginning to occupy the main street.

Liquor bottles were now accompanied by cookies, yogurts, rice cakes.

Drink and food for the deceased.

And more and more flowers.

And more and more notes.

Also photos of foreigners.

Among the 26 who died that night, five were born in Iran.

In front of the street altar I thought to write

a piece of a poem by Robert Liddell Lowe on a

I couldn't, my hands shook.

I copy it here: "This resplendent sorrow is all I have of you / who are gone sooner than a wave is gone."

Andrés Felipe Solano

is a Colombian novelist and journalist.

He is the author, among others, of

or

. 

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