The scene that Antonio García Condado, 78, a retired pharmacist from Urda (Toledo), finds when he arrives at the place where the trains have collided is Dantesque. A middle-aged man is lying on the floor, still leaning back in his seat, with his palms on his chest and his face bloody. It doesn't move. Antonio is one of the first to access the site; There are still no emergency personnel.
-Be calm. Are you cold? -Antonio asks the wounded man.
-I'm not well.
-Your whole body hurts, of course.
-The back.
-Well, don't move until they come for you. You calm down, okay? -Try to calm him down.
A little further away, another man, also middle-aged, also lying on the ground, also bloody, also motionless, speaks into the phone held by an uninjured passenger.
-My right leg is broken, I am conscious. I don't know how long I've been conscious. I just don't know where I am, okay? I mean, I know I'm heading to Seville, but I don't know at what point we had the accident because I fell asleep.
"Between Ciudad Real and Toledo," says the man holding the cell phone.
-In Los Yébenes, in Los Yébenes -Antonio specifies.
-Simply so that you can tell Maite that I am alive, that I love her, that I love the children. The Lord is good, okay? The Lord is good. I think we are in Los Yébenes. The Civil Guard has arrived, there is a helicopter, etc. I just met someone who has a phone and the first thing I did was call them. I'm alive, I have some gap, I feel my legs... Nothing, nothing, just wait. Just see how you can best break the news to Maite. If you can tell my parents...
To the right of this scene, Antonio sees a younger man standing with his back turned, also motionless. The white sweatshirt he is wearing is missing the sleeve and the left arm. In its place are shreds of bloody cloth.
Some of the victims of the brutal crash are sitting upright in the seats - which have been thrown -, apparently fine, also motionless, perhaps in shock. In the background, where the almond tree field, somewhat away from the mass of iron and the corpses - there are many corpses -, dozens of passengers are sitting on the ground, leaning on the trees or walking without an apparent direction.
Antonio was having breakfast when his daughter alerted him. "Dad, there was an accident at the Urda station." "Don't tell me, is it serious?" "Don't know. "The doctor has gone there and we are without a doctor in the town."
He then left breakfast, got in his car and drove to the place as quickly as he could. «When I got there, there was no car, there was nothing. The trains were stopped there, one next to the other," he said at midday on Wednesday, sitting in the garden of his house, still processing what he had just witnessed. «I have seen people almost leaving the carriages and I have arrived at the scene of the accident. The cabin [that of the AVE], the one that has crashed against the Iryo, you couldn't see if it was a cabin or what it was. It was a mass of iron, it was not shaped like a cabin or anything. And corpses piled up on top of each other, dying people. For me, that has been spectacular, Dantesque. Because I was also practically alone, although the doctor was there, but he was on the other side, and the four police officers in the area... Really, for me, that has been a tremendous trauma that I will surely have to digest in several days," he continues. «Consoling people, because I couldn't do anything else. People thanking us, the poor victims. And there was really nothing I could do: put someone who was dying in a better position. For me, the most dramatic thing has been a person, who I don't know if he died or not, because I had to leave afterwards, saying goodbye to his family: "Maite, take care of the children." Saying goodbye to his family, the children, and saying at the end 'God is very good'. That has also touched my soul.
Probably because of the impact of what he has experienced, some of the memories that Antonio transmits seem somewhat distorted. That last scene that he described to us, for example, has been recorded on his mobile phone and, as we have reproduced at the beginning of this article, in it the protagonist, rather than saying goodbye to Maite, tries to convey to her that he has survived the accident and that he loves her.
«I turn around, I get up, and I see that there is a man behind me saying 'ambulance, ambulance,' and I look at him and his arm is missing. "He has his shirt cut off and his arm cut off, but without any fuss, nothing more than saying 'ambulance, ambulance' and with his arm cut off."
Faced with such a panorama, he decided, Antonio explains, to return to his town, to return to Urda, to take everything that could be useful from the pharmacy and return to the scene of the accident. «I took everything I had in the pharmacy: bandages, gauze, serums, painkillers and opiates, and I went there with the bag full. "There were already controls."
He finds the way to the accident site already blocked by the Civil Guard, but when he introduces himself as a medic and tells them that he is carrying medical supplies, they let him through. "They tell me to go to the other side, where the Iryo is, because the Iryo has stayed on one side and the AVE on the other," he explains. «When he arrived at the Iryo, well, that was no less Dantesque, that was another tragedy. I look and there is a car stuffed inside another. Imagine the passengers who have seen themselves swallowed up by another car that is coming towards them. A car within another, impressive," he says, showing the images he took, in which it is seen how the last car, the Iryo, has swallowed the penultimate one when it was hit by the AVE that was coming behind.
«Even then there was more assistance, there has been a brutal displacement from all provinces and all areas [of ambulances and other emergency services, that is]. Within all the tragedy, what I value most is human solidarity. There is always a positive part, which is what gives you a little comfort.
-Do you know what happened to those people? The boy who had his arm amputated?
-I don't know because when I go to my pharmacy to get medicine, when I return they don't let me go to that area. The strange thing is that the man was as if nothing was happening to him. In those moments, adrenaline or I don't know what, anesthetizes our pain. The man with a cut arm, with a torn shirt, with his arm slanted, and saying, but without anger and without haste: 'An ambulance, an ambulance'...
-Some survivors have told us that, more than the images, they have been impacted by the sounds.
-Not to me. When I arrived it was a dead silence. The people, as if they were satisfied, very calm, with their cell phones, calling, I imagine, their families, with their carry-on backpacks. But very calm, very calm. And I already said that this man whose arm was missing, asking for an ambulance, but with this tone, 'an ambulance, an ambulance', without shouting.
-Until what time have you been helping at the accident scene?
-I've been there for two and a half or three hours. When we saw that we were really no longer needed there, because everything was already under control and unfortunately nothing could be done, we came to Urda, to see if we could help here with something. But we have seen that everything was also saturated, with food, drink, doctors, psychologists. Thank God, he screwed up on that topic.
-Have you ever been involved in an emergency?
-I have been involved in car accidents. I have had to remove people, even corpses. But not this what I have seen there.
-What are you going to do to digest it? You will have to go to the psychologist.
-No, I think I'm pretty strong. I will have to go little by little healing this horror because in my life I imagined that I could see this.
