Montserrat Soler claims that she woke up strange that morning, with a dark premonition and to describe it she makes a gesture of displeasure with her mouth.
Maybe that feeling is simply a memory made up by the weight of what came next.
Or maybe not, and something in Montserrat was able to guess what was coming.
She says that that Thursday she got into the car at seven o'clock in the morning to pick up a friend and go to work together.
At the height of the Juan Bravo bridge—Montserrat remembers that day with chilling precision—she passes her Nokia phone, those with the little folding antenna, to her friend.
She wants me to call her sister Susana de ella, in order to coordinate Montserrat's 50th birthday, which is on the 18th. But her sister, four years younger, doesn't pick up the phone, she doesn't answer.
The two friends chat, on the way to Nuevos Ministerios, without turning on the radio, without knowing what is happening, what just happened.
Between 7:38 and 7:40, 10 bombs exploded on four different trains on the same commuter line in which some 6,000 people were traveling: one was at the Santa Eugenia station, another at El Pozo station, and another on Téllez Street. , a step away from Atocha, and the fourth in the same Atocha station.
On the train that stopped on Téllez Street, the terrorists hid four bombs in four cars.
Susana Soler was traveling in one of them, and when she was pressed for time, instead of risking the bus, she decided to take the train.
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The residents of Téllez Street whose house faces the tracks and who look out the window at that moment, frightened by the detonation, only see at first a cloud of black smoke that quickly dissipates.
Then they manage to distinguish some travelers who get out of the carriages as best they can and who, stunned by the noise, confused by the explosion, begin to walk along the tracks without knowing exactly where to go.
Susana is not among them: she has been badly injured in one of the cars.
At ten to eight in the morning, the radio is already reporting very imprecisely: it talks about an explosion on the AVE tracks, an empty car, that there are no injuries.
Shortly after, Montserrat arrives at work, at an aluminum company where she is the president's secretary.
By then something more is known, there are more details.
Her colleagues inform her, alert her, ask her, they know that her mother and her sister live in the Santa Eugenia neighborhood.
She does the math, calculates Susana's schedule and calls her again, but her phone remains silent.
“Then they called me from her work, worried because I hadn't arrived, my colleagues started helping me, clearing phones so I could call more places, I called the hospitals, my brother, my cousin, my brother-in-law…” .
Not only Montserrat calls.
At that time, all of Madrid is calling each other on the phone.
The radio stations broadcast that calls be centralized at 112 and also ask that the streets be left clear in the area of the attacks.
In the twenty minutes following the explosion, 200 distress calls were received on 112. The injured arrived mainly at the Gregorio Marañón hospital, the closest to the places of the explosions.
That's why Doctor Esquerdo Street is a deafening hallucination of ambulance sirens and the beeps of taxis and cars with injured people hurtling towards the entrance to the Emergency Room.
In just over an hour, 229 people enter.
Never before had that hospital endured such pressure.
Remains of the cars of the train that exploded on Téllez Street on 11-M.Manuel Escalera
At around ten in the morning, Montserrat, who is still tied to the phones, increasingly scared, receives a call from her cousin, who has precisely gone to Gregorio Marañón to donate blood.
“She told me: 'Susi is here,'” she says.
“The boss lent me his car with the driver so I could go faster.
When I arrived, my brother-in-law, Susana's husband, and my brother were already there.
“I will never forget the hospital lobby because it was chaos.”
There are hundreds of relatives crowding the counters shouting names.
Some ask for information, others give it, they provide the nurses or guards with data or clues that help identify people about whom they still know nothing: a
piercing
, an appendicitis operation, a gold tooth... Others wait with anticipation. anguish in the mouth the lists of wounded or that one of the doctors names his son or his father or his friend.
There is a counter under a terrifying sign that reads: “Relatives not on the lists.”
Montserrat, her cousin, her brother-in-law Mariano and her brother are taken to their separate room.
They show them Susana's earring that Montserrat recognizes.
A nurse and a psychologist explain to them that she arrived with a thread of life but that she died in the operating room.
There is not even time to let yourself go, to sink into the horror of what you have just heard.
“Our concern was the child, who was eight years old, the son of Susana and Mariano, who at that time, around eleven o'clock, was at school.
“We asked the psychologist how we should act.”
With instructions on how to give the worst news of his life to an eight-year-old child and with the warning that they would be notified as soon as the body was transported, the family leaves in the direction of Santa Eugenia.
Mariano, the father, senses that Rodrigo knows something about the attack, because when they took him to school that morning they saw the ambulances at the station.
The director awaits them at the school, who gives them the office.
They sit in front of the child.
The father begins with a question: “Do you remember the ambulances this morning?”
Mariano explains to his son.
He does it slowly, gently, with clear words, without lying to her at any time, with all the delicacy of which he is capable.
Afterwards, Rodrigo hugs his father and his aunt and asks about his grandmother, his mother's mother, 80 years old, who also lives in Santa Eugenia.
Crazy and deranged neighborhood
Montserrat remembers the crazy and deranged neighborhood that morning, shaken by the explosion, frightened by what she saw on the news, shocked by the death of her neighbors.
She remembers arriving at her mother's house, the incalculable pain of that house, also deranged and crazy.
She remembers keeping an eye on her mother and her nephew.
Then they are notified that Susana, along with the rest of the bodies, is going to be transferred to a warehouse at IFEMA, the fairgrounds in Madrid.
The City Council, after weighing other possibilities and faced with the increasing number of deaths, has decided to convert the empty pavilions into an improvised and gigantic funeral home.
About 50 meters from pavilion 6, the relatives are received by a legion of psychologists and emergency services personnel.
There is a meeting room on the premises set up to accommodate those who must face the death of a loved one.
Little by little, starting at one in the afternoon, the IFEMA is filled with desperate people who have unsuccessfully made a pilgrimage from hospital to hospital, without ever finding the name they are looking for on the list of injured.
There are psychologists, volunteer health workers, civil protection personnel, even about forty priests sent by the archbishopric.
They all have the same mission: to comfort those who arrive, either because they know that their relative's body is there, or because they begin to suspect it.
Montserrat and Mariano also arrive at IFEMA.
They will remain there all afternoon and all night.
Time is dictated by public address announcements of the name and two surnames of a victim, followed by the agonizing screams of the relatives of the person mentioned.
Montserrat assures that she remembers those screams perfectly, 20 years later.
Also from the battalion of people who helped them.
“If you fainted for whatever reason, if you leaned on a column because you were tired, a psychologist would come to ask you questions, to give you a hand.”
Several funeral vans loaded with corpses from the attack arrived at IFEMA on March 11.
Bernardo Perez Tovar
Since the afternoon, Madrid is a city knocked out, beaten, in pain.
The nervous solidarity activity of the first moments (taxis carrying wounded people, blood donors collapsing hospitals, people trying to help in whatever way they can) has given way to a need to collect oneself, to take refuge.
The restaurants are empty, the streets beat almost without a pulse.
On Ibiza Street, however, next to the Gregorio Marañón, there is a packed bar that does not close in the wee hours of the morning: upon entering you see dozens of people with exhausted features on their faces, sitting in a circle, looking in silence the television, which broadcasts news and images of the attack on a loop.
They are the relatives of the injured who spend the night in the hospital.
At that time, not far from there, in a vacant lot in Vallecas, a police bomb specialist is trying to deactivate one of the bombs that were traveling on the trains but which, due to a poor connection of the cables, did not explode.
She was found hours ago at the Vallecas police station, in a backpack, confused among the hundreds of bags and backpacks abandoned by travelers from the El Pozo train.
The specialist, risking his life, finally manages to deactivate the bomb.
The mobile phone that serves as a timer and detonator will be the thread that the police begin to pull to arrest those responsible for the massacre and who, contrary to what the Government of José María Aznar repeatedly and intentionally assures, have nothing to do with see with ETA.
Friday the 12th will be an ugly, cloudy and sad day in Madrid.
It has already dawned when Montserrat and Mariano understand that their turn has come.
Over the public address circuit you hear: “Relatives of Susana Soler Iniesta.”
There is no place in the M-30 funeral home to hold her funeral.
They go to Carabanchel.
On Saturday she is cremated in the La Almudena cemetery.
That Saturday afternoon when it doesn't stop raining, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrate in the center of Madrid, from Plaza de Colón to Atocha.
The silence and contemplation of the march shatter when President José María Aznar arrives and the concentration turns into the now famous cry “Who was it?”
The question is a way of telling the Government to the face that they know it is deceiving them and is not telling them the whole truth, that it is playing with the attack to win Sunday's elections.
Meanwhile, on that bad rainy afternoon, in a small apartment in the Santa Eugenia neighborhood, Montserrat accompanies her mother, her brother-in-law and her nephew, oblivious to the demonstration and everything other than the bottomless pain of her family and the your own.
On Sunday after burying Susana's ashes in the Vallecas cemetery, she will go to vote.
She will do it without anger, without being aware of the controversy that is devouring the country, driven only by a civic duty and the conviction that if Susana had not died they would have gone together.
“I voted for her and for me.”
Days later he will begin to read the newspapers and find out more.
And twenty years later he recognizes that the so-called conspiracy theory - the hoax that attributes, without evidence, that the authorship of the attack in which 192 people died and 1,900 were injured does not lie with the convicted jihadists - has done him a lot of damage.
“It has revictimized me.
Sometimes I even feel guilty and feel that I have to apologize to a part of society because my sister was not killed by ETA, but by others.”
On the verge of turning 70, Montserrat is obsessed with the fact that the attack is forgotten, that society forgets the dead, and that is why she is part of the 11-M Association Affected by Terrorism.
Mariano, the father, sold the photography store where he lived in order to better combine his schedules with those of his son.
Rodrigo, the son, is today a 28-year-old man about to finish a master's degree.
“A master's degree in Psychology,” the aunt points out with a touch of pride.
“In the end we got a psychologist.”
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