Parque Retiro
(The following is an older piece of writing. I lost my other account and put it here to preserve it. It has been unchanged to maintain it’s authenticity.)
Oct 24, 2018
I am trying to remember the way that I felt when it all happened. At first it was this childish curiosity. I knew there was a hubbub. Something was happening. A police car sped up to us, told us that the park was closed, and then sped off again. There was a mass of people exiting from the Crystal palace, our final destination. We could have turned to exit with the crowd, but I urged Gabby to come with me through the exit dead ahead because I could tell we would be able to see something. And then we saw it.
To end up at that park three things had to happen. One: I had to get sick. I went to Cadiz to celebrate Carnival despite my cold, and — although it was worth it — my cold only got worse upon return. The Spanish winter wind hit my throat every morning and, like a dumbass, I kept forgetting to buy a scarf. Two: I had to lose my notebook. Still sick, wandering deliriously home from school I stopped at a bar, the library, and a bookstore. This combination of locations describes me very well: books, wine, and more books. When I got home, I realized that my notebook was no longer with me. Three: I had to meet Gabby.
Having exhausted the other two locations, the bookstore was the only place to look. She was wearing a green faux-fur coat with shoulders that went up to her ears. Standing in front of me in line, I could see only her Mia Wallace bangs and her Monroe lips. The fact that she was buying harry potter y el caliz de fuego was what caught my attention. When she left the store I asked the clerk if he’d seen my notebook. He told me to ask the guy in the back. The guy in the back told me that the guy in the front might know.And so, I knew all my schoolwork was gone forever.
Walking outside, feeling strangely free, I heard her speaking english to someone. Until that moment I assumed she was Spanish. It took all my effort to explain to the clerk that my notebook was lost, and so the idea of having an easy conversation with Americans was tempting. But I was shy. Every nerve in my body told me not to talk to them but then I thought, what the hell?
There’s this weird phenomenon that happens to me when I go to diners; I start speaking to waitresses in a slight southern accent. I don’t know why, but it happens all the time. Maybe it was a defense mechanism, but when I opened my mouth a little southern drawl came out.
“Are y’all from the south?”
“Yes! I’m from Georgia, what abou you?”
“…California.”
“Oh, then why’d’ya say ‘y’all’?”
“Oh, well… I lost my notebook.”
We got along Swimmingly. Gabby, her friend Josh and I talked as we made our way through the labyrinthian Judería. I was on my way home, and they were just seeing the sites. They were teaching english in Málaga, on a short weekend vacation to Córdoba. Before we split we decided to pay the two Euros it took to climb the Mesquita watchtower, the tallest building in the city. All the way up the 17 stories we were posing and taking pictures of each-other for our “influencer headshots”. As we caught our breath at the top we looked down at the ancient Córdoba below us. The wind chilled me that high up. We stopped at the Burger King only ten feet away from the Cathedral and we had a discussion about the differences between the Catholic, Mormon, and Atheist philosophies.
It was nothing but laughter for hours. Going to so many places so quickly made me feel like we were Sloan, Ferris, and Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It helped that I was actually ditching a class when I met them. Josh was clever and just the right amount of polite. He didn’t waste his time with the niceties. It made you feel like you’d known each-other for years, so it wouldn’t make sense to be polite. Gabby had a personality that I can only describe as a green flame popping with white-hot sparks.
We decided to regroup and celebrate the second weekend of Carnival together that night. Gabby painted her face to look like a cat. She made up my friend Adriel — who I brought along — and I to look like payasos, or clowns. Josh opted out of the makeup. We danced and drank with the rest of my friends, said our goodbyes, and — like all the wonderful people you meet while traveling — expected to never see each-other again.
Whatever rush of childish curiosity I felt immediately vanished when I realized what was happening. I saw two shoulders rising and falling from behind the tree in an motion I knew all two well.
11%. That was the number that kept bouncing around my head. After all my hours training for CPR as a life guard, pounding on the chests of manakins, I never forgot that number, the number of people who actually survive CPR. There was a waitress, standing frozen in the doorway. We asked her what had happened. She kept staring straight ahead.
“Un Niño” was all she could say.
My cold still hadn’t gone away. After Josh and Gabby left Córdoba I spent the rest of the semester hacking up phlegm during classes, but still going out every weekend. I kept forgetting to buy a scarf and the wind would hit my throat, making it worse. But classes finally ended, and after a sleepless night at the Sevilla airport I found myself alone in Madrid. I was supposed to be meeting my best friend Demetrius, but the wind still found a way of fucking me over.
What was called storm Hugo in Spain was part of the same current of winds called Hurricane Toby on the East coast. All flights were delayed. This turned out to be a good thing because I had Madrid to myself for a while. I spent the first day bedridden. Doing nothing but sleeping, eating, and staring at the cobblestone streets just beyond the Plaza Mayor outside of my Balcony. The next morning I was cured.
Going down to the hostel plaza for breakfast I noticed Mia Wallace bangs out of the Corner of my Eye. It was Gabby. We ate breakfast together. Happy to see each-other but dumbfounded at the odds that we would intersect again. She told me that she was waiting to meet her parents in London. To celebrate the strangeness of fate we decided to spend her last hours in Madrid as a two person walking tour of the city. See what we could find.
We saw the Plaza Mayor.We went window shopping in the streets below the Museo Reina Sofía. Gabby bought some posters of vintage photographs of the city for her family. Finally we found ourselves at Parque Retiro.We went through the gardens of Dr. Seuss looking trees. We went to the base of the huge pond below the monument to King Alphonso XII (pictured at top) and watched the rowers get rocked about by the wind-blown waves. I didn’t know it then, but storm Hugo was blowing through Madrid.
Finally, we walked through the wooded area, headed toward the crystal palace. We heard a loud crack. It echoed from all different directions off the thousands of trunks we were surrounded by. The park is home to 19,000 trees of 163 different species. I remember we didn’t think much of it. We may have even laughed at how cartoon the sound of a tree falling was. We looked for the tree for a moment and then continued on to the palace.
“I can’t be sure he’s dead.” That’s what I kept telling myself. But in my heart I knew it. Gabby and I exited the park, and made our way back to the hostel through a new path. I choked on my words several times trying to tell her how I felt. Trying to eulogize this boy I had never met. But what could I say? We were nonentities in this twist of fate. Who could I blame? The wind?
Some have blamed not the wind, but the mayor, Manuela Carmena. They point to the fact that there have been four deaths by fallen trees in the last four years in Madrid. All of which happened after budget cuts to the parks, in lieu of the Spanish struggling economy. The city has said that the park was officially closed at 1:00 pm due to winds, and that the boy died while the park was being evacuated. Antonio, a runner who was one of the first at the scene tweeted that this is false, that the park was not yet closed, and that the statement is an attempt from the city to save face. Of course, Antonio’s twitter where he made these claims has no profile picture and only one follower, El País, the newspaper he testified for. Some have said that’s suspicious.
The details on those four deaths are as follows. On June 21st, 2014 a 38 year old man was killed by an Acacia while walking with his two young children. On September 8th, 2014 a 72 year old man was killed by an Elm tree while walking across the street. The tree had been declared safe 20 days earlier. On July 12th, 2016 a pine fell on the head of man sitting on a park bench, killing him. And finally, while playing with his father on his scooter, a four year old boy was crushed by a tree on March 24th, 2018, about ten minutes before Gabby and I got there. The father suffered a broken arm and a severe panic attack after the incident. A team of psychologists was sent to the hospital with him.
I do not blame the mayor. When something freak like this happens, people are always looking for somewhere to point the finger. Facing the truth is too terrifying. The truth that no matter where you are, for no reason at all, while you’re riding your scooter with your papá, a tree could fall on you. I think people wanted someone to blame because they believed that these deaths could have been avoided. But to connect these deaths to the mayor seems like a false correlation. Something drummed up because it’s too scary to realize that chaos comes, whether we are ready or not.
This is the story as clear as I can tell it: The wind danger at the park that day was at a code orange. A code red is required to close the park, but the city decided to close the park early at 1:00pm. The tree fell on the boy and his father at 1:30 pm and forty minutes later he was pronounced dead. It was the anniversary of the monarchy gifting the park to public. Two days earlier there had been an inspection on the park, and the very tree that killed the boy was declared safe.
Gabby and I arrived back at the hostel. She picked up her bags and hugged me goodbye. We didn’t say anything about what we saw, what was there to say?
I stayed in the lobby, trying to find any news on the boy. But there was nothing, we were there before even the journalists. I asked the host if he’d heard about it, but he said he hadn’t. The tourists outside the hostel kept shopping, taxis buzzed by, and the wind got a little stronger. A boy had died and Madrid didn’t even blink.
Once again I found myself alone in the city. I spent the rest of the day waiting for Demetrius to arrive. Looking into the other deaths. Opting to stay inside.
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