On Friday, the two children went to the store to buy candy. They were very happy because it was their birthday. Presumably, their mother accompanied them because the two twins, Iker and Daniel, were three years old. The next day, at nine o’clock in the morning, The mother watched from the balcony of her home, on the tenth floor of an elegant neighborhood in Madrid. He carried the two children in his arms. He jumped into the void. She died instantly. The children, as I write this, are still alive, but in critical condition.
I can’t get this shock out of my head. News is already disappearing from the media, like everything we don’t like, so there is no way of knowing what happened. And this is the fundamental question: What was going on in this woman’s head? jump from the balcony and take his children with him. What was happening to him?
Every hypothesis I can think of is scarier and makes things worse. The journalists went there and did what we always do in these cases: ask the neighbors. But you know how neighbors are: many of them, in exchange for a minute of fame, know how to say what they think the journalist wants to hear, and that’s how the string of truculence begins. This woman didn’t talk to anyone (usually neither did I). That he had divorced (me too). That he shouted from the balcony that he was going to jump, as if at nine o’clock in the morning on a Saturday, in a neighborhood like that, someone would hear what is being said from the tenth floor. That she felt persecuted. That she said they were spying on her, something very common among the large number of people who dedicate themselves to seeing nonsense on social networks. In short: she was crazy. This is the neighbors’ diagnosis.
What is it to be crazy, I often ask myself. And I don’t know. For centuries, we have treated crazy people, weird people, sorcerers, heretics… those who don’t think like us, those who are different, those we want to exclude from the majority group to which we belong. Throwing yourself out of the window with your children in your arms, are you crazy?
No. Or not always. It means you are afraid. An unbearable fear of loneliness, of helplessness, of those who look at you in the street without saying anything; and, one day or another, to the shadows that make noise around the house and that hide perhaps in the bathroom, perhaps in the kitchen, and whisper while waiting for you. A terrible fear of what we do not see, of what we do not know; so terrible that it transforms death into salvation because The life you are living is worse and, locked in your head, you no longer have hope. And that includes your children, too. The boundaries between loneliness and depression are very weak. The boundaries between depression and suicide may be even greater.
I know the children were taken to two different hospitals. Those who did it will know why, but They took away the possibility of being together, it’s almost the only thing they have left. I can’t stop thinking about them.
But as I said, the news almost disappeared from the media. This has (more or less) caught our attention for just a few days. If that’s not enough, it’s at least common in these cases. So let’s calm down and Let’s move on to the really important stuff, like discussing Eurovision. At the moment I can’t know anything about how the children are doing.
About The Author
