The survivors’ debt (+audio).

She takes a cloth gently in her hands. With it she rubs, in tears, the surface of the photo as if the young man’s body would emerge from the image at any moment. Along with this one, 16 photographs guard the Plaza de la Vigia this Saturday morning.

There are 17 names. Seventeen chimes are heard in honor of those who a year ago put their chest in front of the flames and, from the fire, the courage and the passion of free spirits like theirs, knew how to deserve immortality.

She, like all the relatives of the fallen during the fire at the Matanzas Supertanker Base and the people, remember with the shudder of the first day, the fateful August 5th, 2022.

Someone might think that after a year, time will have mitigated the pain, but it has not been so, 365 days are not enough, just as a lifetime will not be enough to erase the timbre of their voices, to forget the last moment they shared together, the caress that managed to destroy any attempt of worry, the embrace that rebuilt the soul.

Embraced, they mourn their children, their parents, their siblings, like a big family united by the heartbreaking feeling of absence they share. Only each one of them fully understands the suffering of the others, because only each one of them lived it in their own flesh.

The flowers return to the place where they rest. The moment they stop in front of the grave, the memories of happy days, the memories of the trials they overcame together, the advice, the anniversaries, in short, their life together suddenly return.

Now she caresses the cold white stone that separates them. He knows he can no longer hear her, but he trusts in that connection that always existed between them and she lulls him with her words, kisses the white rose in her hands as if in it she left him all the love she had reserved for him and did not have time to give him.

I, who watch them from a distance, conceal the tears that appear. This pain does not compare with theirs, so intense and deep that it reaches the bones, the arteries, the heart. The debt we owe them is unpayable. We, the survivors, owe them our survival.

…ONLINE AUDIO