Story without castaways

Do you remember the story? This is how Gabriel García Márquez prefaced

in 1970 . “On February 28, 1955, the news was known that eight members of the crew of the destroyer

, of the Colombian navy, had fallen into the water and disappeared due to a storm in the Caribbean Sea (…) The search of the shipwrecked began immediately, with the collaboration of the North American forces of the Panama Canal, which carry out military control and other works of charity in the southern Caribbean. After four days the search was given up, and the missing sailors were officially declared dead. A week later, however, one of them appeared dying on a deserted beach in northern Colombia, after spending ten days without eating or drinking on a drifting raft. His name was Luis Alejandro Velasco.”

Velasco, who was honored as a hero by the Colombian dictatorship and disowned for telling García Márquez (who had to go into exile in Paris) and

that this destroyer was dedicated to smuggling, told the story to the then Colombian journalist. Today it is a universal story. Because stories are told, someone hears them and reads them and remembers them, and in this way stories cross time, sometimes years, sometimes centuries. Names and places are remembered, we force ourselves to ensure that something is not forgotten, which is what is going to swallow us all in a hundred years.

Now read this: nine decomposed corpses appear on a boat that left the African coast supposedly heading to the Canary Islands, which at some point took a wrong course and ended up arriving in Brazil, crossing the Atlantic Ocean. It is a shocking and deeply moving story that no one will ever be able to tell, a defining feature of many immigrant tragedies.

Who was the last to die and how long did it take him to do so, surrounded by his eight companions? Who was the first and what did the others think when they realized that the boat would never reach land with them alive? What did they talk about, how did they manage the last meals and the last drinks, did they come to trust that someone could survive and tell the story? There is nothing to tell first-hand: no one survived, no one could survive in those conditions, unless the miracle occurred that the canoe crossed paths with a ship. All that remains is conjecture and hypothesis, reconstruction, as when we come face to face with the ancient world, new remains of Pompeii. What happens with sunken canoes, even with the canoes that are the protagonists of stories as extraordinary as these, is that they are not separated by centuries.

The most impressive reports, the feats of survival (how many snow societies or similar ones do we have before us today and will we realize tomorrow?) and the crudest testimonies that can be read or heard belong to one of the most deep-rooted problems that exist in the planet: people who cannot live in their countries because of extreme poverty or war, and move, or try to move, putting themselves in the hands of the mafias.

The information and the way people approach it is curious. It has to do with the sentimental mile, but also with the volume; Do you remember Julen, the boy who died in a well in Totalán, and how his frustrated rescue stopped Spain? How many children fallen into wells would stop him until the people—the audience—got tired? The more volume, the higher the bar of interest. This canoe, for example: drifting in the ocean after passing the Canary Islands and arriving in Brazil. Without history because there are no witnesses; without names that will be remembered, because of the tens of thousands of immigrants killed in seas and oceans, one is remembered from time to time, as long as the photo is powerful and opens debate (Aylan). With the pain of few and for the glory of no one.

Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without limits.

Subscribe

_