A family has breakfast calmly. Next to him, a young woman drinks a coffee while checking her cell phone. Another, a newcomer, asks the waitress if she has oat milk. At the other end of the bar, two retired men take a break from their morning walk to warm up and read the newspapers. Laura assists everyone with ease and a smile, while talking on the phone through the headset about pending orders. The scene is similar every morning, surely. Yesterday, however, the day lent itself, every so often, to commenting on what had happened just a few hours earlier, when the arrival of a bloodied man in the premises froze the usual Thursday afternoon bustle.
About twenty customers were at the Ni Contigo bar around 8:30 p.m. “They heard the shots. They thought they were firecrackers, until the injured man came in and they saw the blood. Then panic began to set in. He shouted to call the police and went into the kitchen to hide,” says the waitress, who reconstructs what happened based on the version of her colleague Melisa, a direct witness who, due to the stress of the moment, is now on sick leave.
Laura did not see the victim of the shooting even though, informed of what had happened, she quickly showed up at the establishment. “They had already taken him away,” he indicates, estimating that the police intervention in the area ended around 10 p.m. It was then, after collecting the testimonies of all those present, that they could begin to clean up the mess.
The visible remains are now limited to Vitoria Street, where an obvious trail of blood shows the route taken by the shooting victim from the bank in front of portal 163 to the place where he took refuge from his attacker. These drops attract the attention of those who walk by and are aware of the event, although there are also those who do not even know what happened and are concerned when they hear the story of those who were already aware. Julio is one of the seconds. He stops and shakes his head disapprovingly. He heard the frenzy of police and ambulance sirens and knew that something big had happened, but he was not surprised, he says with regret, because for some time now “there is a lot of mafia in the area,” he says.
In his story, he points to some businesses around the so-called Bernardillas, in the vicinity of Francisco Grandmontagne Street and Plaza Roma, as the epicenter of the problems he detects. There, he says, night parties are held “behind closed shutters” that culminate even early the next day and lead to “commotion” in the surrounding streets. “They leave there drunk and shouting,” he says, linking this circumstance with the settling of accounts that apparently motivated the shooting in the middle of Gamonal’s main road.
Because the horrendous scene captured in several videos circulating on social networks took place at the busiest zebra crossing in the neighborhood, during an hour of intense traffic, with some businesses still open. The one located next to 163 Vitoria Street, without going any further. Rubén, an employee, was in the warehouse when everything happened. “It was so fast that when they told me and I left there was no one there,” he comments, explaining, resigned, that “sooner or later something like this was going to happen, you see it on television every day in different places and it had to come.” Trust, however, that it is a specific and isolated event.
Rocío, a clerk at another business in the area, is expecting exactly the same thing, still in shock even though she did not see the incident, as they had closed a few minutes before it happened. The news came at night and the first thing he thought was that it was “lucky” that there was no additional misfortune. Holding and firing a weapon on such a busy street and near a bar that is usually full at that time “is an enormous danger,” he emphasizes, to celebrate that there are no more victims to be regretted among passers-by.
All those who, every so often and alerted by the aforementioned drops of blood on the ground, stop and comment on the play, surprised, reach the same conclusion. They all continue on their way after the brief talk and normality returns again to the point that the previous afternoon became an “almost movie” scenario, with a stampede included after those present assumed the situation. “From what they tell us, it was tremendous,” Laura says, before adding the next coffee.
