Talking Big

This passage moved me.

I immediately recalled an image that had appeared in the press at the time, possibly after the Zargoza bombing, although it really doesn’t matter which, it was just one of those images you never forget; against a backdrop of desolation and destruction, the ground strewn with rubble and, hanging over it all, a malignant cloud of smoke, a policeman, his tie visible beneath his uniform, and his face all bloodied, is running towards the camera carrying in his arms a little seven- or eight-year-old girl, one of whose feet appears to have been half blown off, and whose face is a picture of pain, pure pain. In the background—it was one of those black-and-white photographs you can’t take your eyes off—you could see a couple, the husband with his arms about his wife, and the wife with one hand on a buggy in which her baby is still sitting, the child is, at most, a year old, and given his or her age, would forget everything it was now hearing and seeing. Elsewhere, you can see a father (I assume it’s the father) putting his arms out to another child of four or five, and beside him a taller girl, who appears to be staunchly coping on her own. What I remember most clearly, though, is the expression on the face of the young policeman, or was he perhaps a fireman, carrying the little girl. Although much of his face was covered in blood, so that you couldn’t really make out his features (the blood could have been his own or someone else’s, like the blood on the girl’s arm), his expression was a mixture of determination and profound pity, perhaps there was also an element of postponed rage and another of sheer incredulity at what he was witnessing. Determination to save the injured child he wasn’t even looking at, instead staring straight ahead, his gaze perhaps fixed on the hospital that he needs to reach as soon as possible. And profound pity for many possible reasons: not having been able to prevent the massacre, the sight of such unnecessary evil, the terror of the children who would have no idea what was going on and who lived there with their parents or pity for his colleagues who had just been blown to pieces.

• Translated by Margaret Jull Costa