By IANS
Madrid : The victims of the attacks in Madrid on March 11, 2004, are the main characters of “Donde Dios No Estuvo” (God Was Not There), the first novel about the train-bombings that left nearly 200 dead and some 1,800 injured, the Spanish news agency EFE said.
Sonsoles Onega, who was in El Pozo station that day as a reporter for CNN+ television and who afterwards followed the investigations and the court trials step by step, has based a work that is part fact and part fiction on testimonies gathered over the past three years.
“The events are absolutely factual, all that the novel talks about really happened,” the author told EFE about the work that begins before dawn on 11-M, as the date is known here, hours before bombs exploded on four commuter trains at the peak of the morning rush-hour.
Through the narrative, published by Grand Guignol, parade the politician who gambled his future in the elections held three days later, the journalist reporting on the campaign, the cheated wife who gets an unexpected chance because of the attacks, and the immigrant who has finally saved up enough to return to his homeland before the explosions obliterate his hopes…and his memory.
“What happened to him happened to an 11-M victim, although the character isn’t real. Nonetheless I did want to include an immigrant because I believed there should be some acknowledgment of the large number of them riding on the trains that day,” Onega said.
The first part of the novel, in which she presents the characters, leads into another that “moves at a frantic pace to reflect all that happened in only 24 hours.”
This is where Onega uses the statements of those who were on Platform 6 of the Ifema installations that day – where the bodies were taken and where the press was not admitted – and of their conversations with National Court Judge Juan del Olmo – “he never talked to me until the investigations were over” – and with prosecutor Olga Sanchez.
In the book, however, it is a woman judge who is standing in that day and who cannot stop asking herself why all this happened as she observes the dead bodies where the blasts took place.
“In that way I tried to disassociate the character from the real person of Judge Del Olmo, but they are his experiences during those days that are described in the book,” said the 30-year-old writer, who also introduces into her work the young wife Turia, married to a small-time criminal from North Africa who abruptly disappears and whose part in the day’s events she immediately suspects.
“I was very interested in the role of people near to the terrorists. In fact, reading the summary I believe that the role of women in 11-M has been crucial. Turia does not exist, but everything that happened to Turia was real. Turia accused her husband and nobody paid any attention to her,” she said.
The novel recounts how members of the Islamist cell that perpetrated the massacre got to the Alcala de Henares station and got on the trains where they left backpacks full of explosives, but does not explore their feelings or their motives.
“The story could have considered what made them kill, but I don’t think they deserve that much thought. They killed, period. I wanted the book to reflect the feelings and experiences of those who suffered from the attacks, not of those who carried them out,” the author said.
Sonsoles Onega, who still works as a court reporter, currently for Noticias Cuatro, won the Literature Prize III for the Short Novel in 2004 with her first work, “Calle Habana, Esquina Obisbo” (Havana Street, Bishop Corner).