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Nuevatribuna publishes the winning stories of the Atocha Lawyers Award

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Every year the Fundación Abogados de Atocha convenes the Atocha Lawyers International Young Narrative Prize, which is attended by a good number of stories, written by young people under 35 years of age who come from all corners of Spain and a good number of Latin American countries.

This year, in the vicinity of the commemoration of the murder of the Atocha Lawyers, on the 45th anniversary of that January 24 when a group of far-right gunmen stormed the headquarters of the labor law firm at 55 Atocha Street and opened fire killing five people and injuring another four, the Fundación Abogados de Atocha has once again announced the winning stories of the Prize, in its V edition of 2022.

Courtesy of the Foundation, Nuevatribuna publishes the three winning stories of the literary contest.

The jury of the Lawyers of Atocha Award, made up of writers, trade unionists and patrons of the Foundation, has chosen the following stories:

First Prize: 'Infierno', by Cristina Pozo Palenzuela, based in Valladolid.

Second Prize: 'The end of the railings', by Pablo López Camiña, residing in Oviedo.

Third Prize: 'Cánticos justicieros', by Carmen Galván Bernabé, based in Alicante.

The three stories are very different and address very different topics. From the irreparable effects of a war, to the social inequality staged on the railings of houses, to the independence of justice over public opinion, or the parallel judgments of the media or the ignited masses.

The three stories respond to the challenge set in each call regarding the free choice of the topic, which must have, in any case, some relationship with the values ​​of justice, solidarity, freedom, or equality, which the Atocha Lawyers defended. .


HELL

The horror.

They no longer felt. They were gone. They were no longer. Just ghosts. Souls in pain condemned for the sins they did not commit.

The river was covered with charred bodies, floating like fleshy water lilies. They were dissolving like salt in water that looked like oil. Jet-black rain pierced his bones like clay.

Panicked, bewildered, desperate, and lonely, Hana kept moving forward. A faceless figure, hopping clumsily over the pile of ash that littered the floor, approached him, arms outstretched. Though a flicker of irrational rationality in her sequestered mind warned her that she might be a jiangshi, she neither changed her course nor quickened her pace. All the life that she wanted to take from her had already disappeared minutes ago. There was only an empty casing left that walked by mere habit.

In the light of an unnatural blue flash that flooded the entire wasteland, she soon realized that she recognized that supposed faceless monster; and that she was stretching out her arms to prevent her skin, which was hanging in strips, from touching the ground. That undead had been Tadashi, her neighbor. He was five years old.

"H...help..."

Hana turned slowly and saw that the hand she was holding on to her ankle was indeed not an illusion. Her owner, lying on the rubble, had melted ears, and his eyes were bulging out of their sockets.

"Agu... a... wow..." she croaked.

Her voice, born from entrails in full view of her, gave no indication of having been human. Someone had opened the gates to hell, and thrown all those thousands of innocents into its flames. That was the only plausible explanation in the face of such carnage, such torture, such atrocity. That is, if there was any plausible explanation. If someone had asked Hana if she believed that was hell, she would have said no. Hell couldn't be that bad.

"Mrs. Uchida..."

But, just as she thought that only the worst of demons could hold the key to the apocalypse, she caught a glimpse of an American helicopter disappearing over the horizon...

"Mrs. Uchida!"

The receptionist's voice yanks Hana out of the past. 50 years and millions of births after hell. Long enough for the state unemployment management body, in which one of its offices is located, to be called "Hello Work". Not long enough for Hana not to get a shiver hearing it, as with everything in English.

The receptionist, her mellifluous voice smeared with stale lipstick and her tiny eyes fixed on Uchida's obvious tumors, explains slowly and clearly, as if she were addressing an animal:

—According to what appears in your file, you have not come to work for a minimum period of six months nor do you have a permanent residence assigned. I am sorry to inform you that, due to the absence of any work activity in your history, you are not authorized to apply for any unemployment benefit... much less for retirement.

Hana purses her distorted mouth into a fine line. "You didn't let me do it," she spits out wordlessly. “Just as you didn't let me get married, have friends or children. No one wants to hire hell, no one wants to marry hell, no one wants to be friends with hell, no one wants to breed with hell. And you are no less to blame than the Americans. Thus, you get what you want: that hell cannot leave us.

When she's about to ask if she knows of any soup kitchens that accept hibakushas (that actually accept them, not making their stay so impossible that they're forced to leave), blood-tinged nausea jumps out at her tongue.

The receptionist jumps to her feet, crushing her heels, and, forefinger outstretched like a tamer's whip, she bellows hysterically:

-Get away from here! NOW!!!

Hana picks up her belongings, no more than the occasional trace of her honor lost from her; and she leaves Hello Work. At least she's no longer looking at that manga the receptionist was sneaking behind the counter: a shojo about a fifteen-year-old going to Nebraska for a bright future.

Bleeding from his torn gums as a reminder of a belated promise, she strides across Aioi Bridge, her tattered scarf billowing kite-like across the sky; a sky that still surprises her to see blue, and not dead red.

"We both carry hell in our veins," she whispers, as she caresses the varnished irons. But you were restored.

Hana lays her eyes on the Ōta River, in its clear waters, now clean of corpses. Her embrace must be cold, enveloping and static. Placid. The opposite of hell.

Slowly but surely, she drags each of her oversized feet over the bridge wires, until she's standing on the railing. The cries of hundreds of passers-by are immediate:

"Ma'am, don't jump!"

But no hand reaches out to hold her, and her pleas soon subside. Despite being disproved hundreds of times by science, the belief that radiation is contagious continues to spread like a cancer, as silent and incurable as hers. And one less hibakusha is one less hell in the world.

Uchida closes her eyes, and, falling into the same cross position of the compassionate god worshiped by the liberators of hell, she is lost in the darkness of the Ōta.

As she begins to submerge, she thinks she can distinguish in the black depths the bodies of her family, her classmates, her boyfriend; of all the people who perished on that fateful morning in August 1945, whose only crime was being born in Hiroshima, and whose punishment would not prevent the world from building nearly 15,000 more nuclear bombs...

...she's also been dead ever since.

Cristina Pozo Palenzuela



THE END OF RAILS

Back then, life wasn't exactly what it is now. Perhaps the big difference was that there were no railings on the balconies, although there was a belief that they had them, so that people who thought they were leaning on their beautiful railings fell into the street quite frequently. But, what was truly ridiculous was the fact that the railings of the balconies of the houses had become a way of demonstrating the social status of families and their economic power. This made it essential to be clear about what your railing was like, to be able to describe it to others in detail without getting into inconsistencies over time. Thus, the families met once a week to review the description of their balconies, in order to avoid contradictions between them, in what became a kind of ritual known as "the hour of the railing" (or "the hour of the rambarde”, as the bourgeoisie of the time used to say, alluding to the fact that it was a French invention and, incidentally, showing off their linguistic skills). In the Movement for the Railing (known as MoBa) we called it “the time of the balcony”, in an evident declaration of principles against class society since, at that time, the wealthiest classes lived on the first floors of the buildings , so their falls were not as dangerous as those of the poor who lived fifty feet above the ground. The MoBa, moreover, always remembered that the simple fact of spending time imagining what your railing was like was in itself a bourgeois act.

What defined the power of the families was the number of railings, the material with which they were made and their decoration. The description of the railing had to be detailed but believable, although the mere fact that the railings did not exist meant that, a priori, anything could be valid. Technically everyone could say what they wanted, because there was no legislation that would limit you when describing your railing, nor any committee of architects that would prepare a feasibility study on the matter. In fact, this was used to explain that the railings represented the imaginative and artistic value of the families and not the economic issue, as we defended from the MoBa. However, as the brilliant Irish historian Ashley Walsh explained in her famous thesis “Railings and class struggle: from the bourgeois rambarde to the worker balconing”, a series of logics had been established based on the economic power of each family, which imposed a set of restrictions on what each could or could not have on their balconies. If a working-class family that worked in a textile factory, for example, were to say that its railing was made of glass brought from the Czech region of Bohemia and that it had decorations that imitated exotic animals from the African savannah, it was evident that they were lying because there was no way they could have afforded such a luxury. In this way it was achieved that, in the end, the poorest families all had more or less the same railings, and the imagination was left for the use and enjoyment of high society. Therefore, what the imagined railings defined was not the creativity of the families, but their possibility of being creative or not.

I was from a very humble family. My father was a shoemaker (and, to tell the truth, he wasn't one of the best in the city), my mother was a housewife, and sometimes she also made arrangements of sheets and curtains to order. My parents had three children. The first of them fell off the balcony at eight months. Then a girl came and, a year later, I arrived. We had only a small balcony that was accessed from the living room, which coincided right in the center of the facade of the building, which had seven floors. The balcony was fifty-five centimeters wide by one meter long. Our railing was also humble, as expected. When my parents got married and went to live there, they determined that her railing would be two feet high, but after the fatal accident of her firstborn, my mother decided that it would be eighty-five centimeters, for greater safety. The railing was made, like practically all the railings in shoemakers' houses, with Velcro. The good thing about these railings was that they allowed decoration to be removed and put on easily, which gave us a little room for imagination, making us a kind of privileged among the unfortunates. The bad thing was that sometimes unwanted things stuck to it. On the right side, we had some floral motifs as decoration, which were a handful of hooked thistles that we had put in memory of our grandfather, who died in the war choking on a thistle at Christmas Eve dinner; In the central part, we had several pieces and tools that my father used in his shoe workshop, as a sign of identity and pride in his trade; finally, the left side was rarely used, because my mother was obsessed with the idea that the house could fall if we put too much weight on the railing.

Just two blocks from our house, there was a large square where the children of the neighborhood used to go to play. On one of its sides there was a pretty pastel-colored building, on the first floor of which the Riopedre family lived, until their fall from grace, who owned a ceramics factory. Its five striking railings were known throughout the city. The most spectacular was the one in the main room. From it hung a coat of arms – with real weapons – and a jug from which, if they pressed a button, lynx urine could come out as if it were a fountain. One day, when leaving mass, Mr. Riopedre said, under the attentive gaze of all the parishioners: «I have brought from London, to place on one of the railings of my palace, the original portrait of the Mona Lisa, a painting painted by the magnificent Laudrup'. When Don Arturo, the teacher, explained to the astonished audience that this was impossible, that the Mona Lisa painting was not in London, but in Paris, and that its author was Leonardo Da Vinci and not Laudrup, Riopedre lost all credibility, his company went public and everyone stopped buying products from his factories. A year later, the Riopedre family had returned to business success after investing in pilates classes, all the money earned from the sale of their railings.

On the street with the balustrade, near the Town Hall, the owner of an oil company, who was a very provocative man and very much at odds with the MoBa members, had his railing in the shape of a staircase, including a handrail varnished with oil. He said that it was to show that the MoBa were afraid of him and that, although they could enter his house through the balcony stairs, they would not dare to do so. The fact that there was no railing helped her a lot to reaffirm his convictions.

With the passing of the years, disputes grew between the wealthiest families to describe their increasingly opulent and bizarre railings, while the poorest had their cardboard railings rot when the autumn rains came. Unforgettable was the day Mr. Castañeras, a powerful financial businessman, claimed to have a reverse railing. In other words, instead of rising from the floor of the balcony, he fell from the roof of the building – six floors above –, up to half a meter before touching the tiles of his balcony. As if that were not enough, he alternated bars of wrought iron and gold plated, with others of totally unnecessary esparto grass.

Fortunately, those crazy times of invented railings in which I grew up have passed into history, since the MoBa revolutionized the world by boarding up all the windows of the houses. As Ashley Walsh prophesied: “The bourgeois will go to extremely absurd points of creativity in order not to allow the working classes the slightest freedom of imagination. But the day will also come when the proletariat and all those marginalized beings fearlessly look at the precipice and refuse to continue falling.”

Pablo Lopez Camiña



JUSTICE CANTICLES

His reddened and dark eyes are fixed on mine, a deep sigh escapes from my chest and as an act of benevolence I must remember that distant day of my adolescence in which I decided to dedicate myself to this profession due to a vocational feeling that led me to exercise justice, to impart it with honors and thus prevent the suffering and tragedy of the people.

During my long career as a judge, I have felt disappointed many times. I have wondered what justice truly consists of. I have had many defendants in front of me and I would have asked many of them not about the crime committed with their actions, but about the crime they committed with them when they were young, how their life has been, who has thrown stones at them path, who has supported them, but they say that justice must be blind and exemplary and I wonder how far that ability goes to manage to abstract from the eyes that look at you.

The righteous songs of a clamorous public at the doors of the courts encourage me to be implacable with who I have in front of me. They have already issued their judgment and I feel like a simple puppet in their hands who must obey their orders. A judge in the hands of society, so many times we judges have seen ourselves bound by the decisions of angry people.

The people would have liked a popular jury to decide the guilt or innocence of the crestfallen woman I have in front of me, but it has not been like that. Although many believe that she committed a homicide, she never wanted to inflict any harm on her own son. The unfortunate circumstances of her life have caused her death and I must now judge a mother who has been abandoned by society.

She was twelve years old when I saw a mass funeral on television, that day the songs of justice were directed against cruel murderers who had released the hatred of their guts on a group of defenders of freedom. That day I knew for sure who the executioners were and who the victims, a halo of mystery pierced my heart and at that moment I chose my future. I decided to become a defender of justice, I wanted to defend noble causes and uphold the values ​​of freedom, solidarity and social justice that had been truncated by those criminals.

Children are always influenced by the transcendental events that happen in the society that surrounds them and that tragedy that ended the lives of five young lawyers was the event that most marked my adolescent spirit.

That day, we all knew who should be condemned for such a terrible act, but there are times when not everything can be divided so easily and the guilty party can be a victim at the same time. And that is what I see in these eyes that now look at me.

She is standing in front of me, trying to hide her face behind the microphone. His words are clumsy and unintelligible. He does not understand very well the language in which I speak to him; An interpreter translates my questions for him.

The songs of murder are becoming more angry every day at the doors of the courts. Closing the windows does not stop them from influencing my thoughts.

I don't know whether to look at her as a filicide or as a poor immigrant who came to another country to seek a better destiny for her son and bad luck crossed her path.

Her lawyer is a young kid like I was many years ago. A boy who doesn't even know how to communicate with the one he defends. A rookie many would say. He doesn't stop looking at me, with his attitude he seems to ask my permission on how he should act. The State has appointed him to defend the woman who looks at me with pleading eyes.

On the other side, the prosecutor and her private prosecutor look at her with questioning eyes. And I have to decide as a Roman leader in a gladiatorial circus whether that young woman is guilty or innocent. But whatever you decide I know there is a defenseless baby who died of cold a few hours after coming to life. Her mother tore him from her lap and at night she left him to her fate at the gates of a school, covered with blankets and in a miserable cardboard box. But at the same time I wonder if she had wanted to kill her son, she would have thrown him into the mighty river near the school. The private prosecution belongs to a religious organization. They defend life above any situation, blinded by that ideal, they do not seek justifications for their actions. I should be like that too, completely blind, but is there really anyone who can believe that we judges are inert to everything that happens around the one we judge?

I wonder if all those who roar loudly at the scream of a murderess, would have opened the door in the middle of the night to a poor immigrant with a baby in her arms. Surely I wouldn't have done it either and yet I find myself in this situation of superiority judging her actions and deciding on her future.

The woman in front of me is only twenty years old. And when I look at her I don't know if I see a girl abandoned by society or a strong woman who wanted to find a better future for her son.

She arrived in Spain on a miserable ship with a child in her womb, she escaped from those who wanted to return her to a country at war, a miserable country in which her life was in danger. She wandered for months in an unknown city, a city in which she was invisible. No one was yelling for her, help her! however, now they yell murderous!

She gave birth in an old doorway at dawn, without anyone helping her and left her son crying at the gates of a school, thinking that among her children he would have better luck than with her. But death called that helpless baby, while her mother tried to heal his wounds and recover from childbirth in a lonely field. She was found the next morning with her body covered in blood and they soon learned that she was the mother of the dead baby who had appeared at the gates of a school.

Now everyone wants an exemplary punishment, but who should be punished, her, the society that did not help her, the country that forced her to seek an uncertain destiny, myself that I must behave blindly and not see that I do not have a culprit and one victim, but two victims?

I ask for a recess to the room, I have rarely done it. But those songs of justice that do not stop being heard cloud my mind.

I lock myself in my office for a few hours and ask that those gathered at the doors of the courts be evicted. I can't stand that cruel and absurd way of exercising justice.

I was always the boy who tried to solve problems between his classmates, a kind of Solomonic judge who thought he had the solution to everything. The sad event of the so-called Atocha lawyers was simply the detail that made me aware of what I wanted to be, a lawyer like them, a defender of freedom and social justice, but then I thought that maybe if I wanted to have the last word I was to become a judge. So many years later I realize that not everything is so simple, there are not always good and bad. Sometimes many lives depend on your decision.

I return to the room again. Those dark, tear-reddened eyes stare into my heart again. In a court, all those who stand before me, whether as defendants or witnesses, must be firm and convincing in their statements and crying and pleading are useless, because I have to be blind to everything. I only see the law before me. Easy theory for a contradictory reality.

That young woman has knelt begging for mercy, she thinks that she still lives in that country of torture and war.

I know that if I don't sentence her, she will be deported to her country and that will be even more punishment than going to jail.

Without meaning to, I have become the target of criticism by those who want an exemplary conviction. In my hands is the fate of a young woman who must not be forgotten, she has lost her son due to the tragic consequences of damned destiny and the society that she judges blindfolded too much.

I am going to impose a perhaps torturous sentence on her feelings, but perhaps it is the only way in which she can mitigate her pain.

She will take care of the orphaned children of the regional orphanage for four years in a semi-internment regime. In each child she will see the eyes of her child and she will know that nothing and no one will be able to return it to her now, but on the contrary, she will give her mother's love to other children who know that nothing and no one will return their parents.

The righteous chants begin to bellow against me. "Leaving children in the hands of a filicide is the most cruel and aberrant thing that a judge has ever done," they shout in the media.

But I keep thinking about the child I once was and why I chose this profession. Because some intransigent murderers wanted to erase the aspirations for change in a country that was beginning to see the light.

Carmen Galvan Bernabe

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