Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

The air is thick with tobacco and crack smoke and the stench of urine. Gingerly stepping over bare feet, tattered shoes, and boxes, I carry cups of coffee and hot chocolate. A group of men in the back corner of the tunnel huddle around one man who is using a lighter to heat up crack on top of a tinfoil platform. A woman who just had an abortion after four months of pregnancy asks me if there are more sandwiches; she looks as though it pains her greatly to even stand up so she can make this one inquiry.

Every Monday night I go with a group of volunteers—university students, teachers, pharmacists, business executives—to Atocha, one of the main transportation hubs in Madrid. Although we distribute food and hot beverages, our intention is primarily to establish relationships with the people we see each week and to inform them about the social resources available in Madrid. The Spanish terms for homeless people are gente sin hogar (people without a home) or gente sin techo (people who lack a roof). Unlike the English phrase, “homeless people,” these terms call attention to the people, as opposed to the circumstances that render them without homes.

Right now it is winter. As part of the Campaña del frío (Campaign Against the Cold), the municipality of Madrid opens up a pedestrian tunnel beneath the ground that is part of the Atocha metro station. Given the shortage of beds in the shelters (there are an estimated 8,000-9,000 homeless people in Madrid and only 1,200 beds in the shelters), an extra 100 people can sleep in the tunnel from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. any given night. The tunnel offers no beds to sleep in, only space for 100 bodies to stretch out on cardboard boxes over a grimy tiled floor. On its fullest night I counted only 60 people in the tunnel, but it already felt over capacity.

As I walk to the head of the tunnel, near the only exit, I am conscious of the fact that cardboard boxes do nothing to fight the chill of a cold floor and only wound the dignity of the people to whom this Campaña del frío is already a bitter insult. As the haze of smoke circulates in the turgid air of the tunnel, it occurs to me that cardboard boxes are also highly flammable. It would be so easy for someone to merely leave a cigarette unattended for a single moment next to a piece of cardboard. A fire would be disastrous—dozens of people fighting in panic to get out of the one exit in the long, filthy tunnel.

Once we’re outside the tunnel with our 12 empty thermoses and bags emptied of sandwiches, lollipops, plastic cups and cookies distributed by the Red Cross, Carmen, one of the volunteers, takes a small container of liquid hand cleanser out of her bag. “Just in case,” she says, as she squeezes the fruity fuchsia gel onto our outstretched hands. “It’s really horrid in there, isn’t it?”

“I can’t imagine what it’s like,” muses Pepa, our group coordinator, “that so many people come here and endure conditions like this. I can’t even imagine what they left behind.”

I rub my hands, methodically, and turn to look at the door to the tunnel, which is ajar. Ali, a handsome 20-something from Morocco, is talking to one of the security guards outside. As he speaks, revealing the jagged triangular gap that is missing from one of his front teeth, he turns to look at our group. I rub the gel into my hands and I can’t look back at him. How does he perceive our disinfecting ritual? What am I trying to clean off? I think of the tuberculosis outbreak that occurred last year in the tunnel, prompting the municipality to keep the tunnel open, but to prohibit groups of volunteers from entering.

Bedri has lived in Spain for six years and is one of the 45 percent of immigrants who is homeless in Madrid. He tells me about the fruit stand that he ran with his cousin in Kosovo and of his flight from the country after both his fruit stand and his home were bombed and destroyed. He cannot work because he refuses to go to the Yugoslavian embassy in Madrid to get papers and acquire legal status. “I’m Kosovar,” he asserts. “The Yugoslavian embassy doesn’t represent me.”    

Spain, being part of the European Union and boasting a coastline, has been the site of much immigration in recent years. Without papers, without governmental permission to live in the country, immigrants in Spain are entitled to no benefits. “I’ve lived in Germany, France, Spain,” Bedri tells me. “But in reality, it’s all the same. Without [immigration] papers, the government does nothing for you. I had a home in Kosovo; I’m still sleeping on the street here.”

He gestures to the white plastic cups stained with coffee residue that litter the concrete outside of Atocha; the overflowing trash cans; the cloying remains of instant coffee, powdered milk, and sugar. “This is Europe,” he says. “I don’t care what they say about monuments and magnificence. If you ask me what Europe looks like, it’s what you see right here.”