See You in this Life or in the Other

One characteristic of evil is that it ceases to be a temptation. That’s what interested me about Gabriel’s story, a youth known as Baby and nicknamed El Gitanillo by the press after the 11-M attacks in Madrid. His normality was typical until it became too much for him to maintain.

This is the boring, lost and true life story of a boy unafraid to die. This is his sordid story, coldly narrated by Manuel Jabois, an author who describes with a simple and direct style the acts before and after 11-M of the first person convicted for the attacks, Gabriel Montoya Vidal, and the only minor involved in the death of 191 people. It took a year and a half to convince the protagonist to speak for the first time. In this book, Jabois listens and describes. There are no explanations of “why” in Baby’s story. They don’t appear in this chronicle full of violence, betrayals, drugs, lies and police persecution. Hatred appears in the distance feeding on the indifference and detachment of a group of common criminals who ended up helping suicide bombers to commit the bloodiest terrorist attack in the history of Spain.