Not long ago, a very prestigious psychiatrist visited an old friend who had just been released from prison for a sentence that he considered clearly unjust. They ate, chatted about unimportant things and, at the end, the doctor asked him how he was feeling. When the friend told him that he was still angry, the psychiatrist responded: “Very well, that’s what it is. If in a few months you continue like this, we’ll see what we do, but now the normal thing is that you feel angry.”
Until, yesterday afternoon, tens of thousands of people turned out to demand the resignation of President Carlos Mazón, the city was experiencing a situation that was very difficult to understand. Just six or seven kilometers away, thousands of neighbors continued to bail out the mud that washed away their houses—without even time to mourn their dead, without breath to search for their missing—and yet, life here It remained unchanged, perhaps watching the television screen or the cell phone, which turned the tragedy so close into something almost virtual, something that did not stain or smell. For this reason, those who crossed the bridges that resisted the flood in the morning—volunteers, police, soldiers, journalists—did not understand that when they returned to the city with mud-stained wellies, life would continue as if nothing had happened.
For this reason, Claudia, who is 22 years old and has studied Fine Arts, yesterday took a piece of cardboard and a thick black marker and looked for a phrase that, as accurate as a gunshot, would summarize the feeling that overcomes the victims of the flood. And he wrote: “You have left us without a present, without a future and without a past.”
Claudia says that the phrase is not hers: “It’s from the Valencian group La Raíz, but it comes in handy. These days I have met many people who have lost their homes, who no longer have the strength, time or money to rebuild their lives and who, if that were not enough, do not even have the consolation of memory, because the flood took away their memories. . What do you have left?” The rage, finally. The realization in the street, all together, one plus one that becomes a crowd, that the neighbors on the other side of the ravine are not alone, that although the bridges have fallen and the subway has broken and the cars are alone be a mass of iron, reeds and mud, here they are, the young and the not so young, and to shout at Carlos Mazón, the highest representative of the State in Valencia, what his boss on Génova Street is not capable of making him understand . That perhaps he only has one gesture left capable of somewhat cushioning his great irresponsibility. Because, as Hermini Pérez, a veteran public works worker who has arrived from El Puig and who is walking a few meters behind Claudia, says, the Valencian president is already a man without honor who only seeks to defend himself: “Let it happen “The flood may be inevitable, people dying is intolerable.”
A few days ago, Ignacio and Jesús David, residents of the hardest hit area of Paiporta, said that on the evening night of the flood, when no authority had warned of what was coming, they heard screams of elderly people who died locked in their lower floors. . For them, and for so many others, Valencia yesterday expressed its rage and its commitment, its enough is enough. La Raíz, that music group that Claudia likes, has a song that says: “Come back, we will set the world on fire again. We’ll see each other again when we come out of the tunnel. Knocking down a wall to be able to see the clouds.” Rage, fight and hope. Those of us who have seen them fight against the mud these days already know that they are not a generation of glass, but rather of steel.
