A Year After Train Blasts, Spain Still Aches

She reports to the hospital every day, arriving by car because she’s still terrified to take the train. With her doctors and physical therapists, she hoists her once-athletic body through the paces of bone-crunching exercises to learn to walk again and grimaces during treatment of the scars scorched onto her legs and arms.

One year after bombs ripped through four commuter trains during a morning rush hour in Madrid, Sonia Sanchez Farina is among hundreds of people still struggling to recover.

And like Spain itself, she still finds herself questioning how the deadliest terrorist attack in continental Europe could have happened here.

The carnage threw Spanish politics into upheaval, traumatized a thriving, tolerant society and opened Europe’s eyes to the presence of militant Islamic networks prepared to commit egregious violence.

The bombings also forced Spain to reassess its relationship with its immigrants. Some of them were the bombers, but many of them were among the victims. The government is planning to impose controls on mosques but at the same time has eased legalization for tens of thousands of foreign workers.

Despite their ordeal, Spaniards have proved resilient, say psychologists and sociologists who have studied the fallout since the March 11 bombings killed nearly 200 people and injured an estimated 1,800.

Most Spaniards have resumed their lives. Madrid’s famously late nightlife has returned, as have the tourists. Cafes, cinemas and soccer stadiums are full. The panic attacks and depression that plagued a third of the population have subsided. The arrests of 75 suspects (nearly half of whom have been released) have given many Spaniards a sense that authorities are having some success in fighting terrorism.

Madrid is a wounded city, Mayor Alberto Ruiz Gallardon said this week, “but it is not a city that has surrendered.” What does linger is an underlying fear and uncertainty and profound political divisions so bitter that factions cannot even agree on how to commemorate the anniversary of the bombings.

If the Sept. 11 attacks united Americans, the Spanish are fond of saying, the March 11 massacre divided the Spanish. Arguably, Spain is more polarized today than at any time since its civil war in the 1930s.

For the survivors and the relatives of the dead, the pain is personal.

“What scares me the most is I don’t want this to change me as a person,” Sanchez Farina said, taking a break after another therapy session at Gregorio Maranon Hospital, where a year ago she lay unconscious for two months with a broken vertebra and ribs, severe burns and shrapnel in her eyes.

Yet the changes are undeniable: She hasn’t returned to work, and she grapples with a newfound suspicion of her Muslim neighbors, such as the young men who hang out in Lavapies, an immigrant neighborhood where she is supposed to take university exams for the degree she was seeking before the attack.

Sanchez Farina, 31, was riding the train that morning from her suburban home to her sales job downtown. She remembers nothing of the day. Her recovery has included seven or eight operations, lots of painkillers and weekly sessions with a psychologist. “From time to time, I just go to pieces,” she said.

Slightly more than a quarter of those killed were immigrants. Lorin Ciuhat, who moved to Madrid from Romania 2 1/2 years ago, was on his way to work that morning and had just changed trains in the bustling Atocha station. He remembers a blast and a blow to his chest before passing out. He awoke in a mound of bodies.

“It disturbs me greatly to talk about what happened that day,” Ciuhat, 41, said, adding that the images of death and blood play over and over in his mind. “And the smell, the smell of the explosion remains inside my head, inside my nose.”

Ciuhat said he and his wife initially considered returning to Romania. But they decided to stick it out in Madrid. What had happened could happen anywhere, they concluded. The Spanish government gave residency papers to all immigrants hurt in the blasts and relatives of those killed.

Jose Rodriguez, a security guard at the Atocha station, was felled in a second blast as he tried to evacuate passengers hurt in the first explosion. One of his legs was broken in two places and his Achilles’ tendon severed. He spent a month in the hospital and is finally walking again, after extensive physical therapy.

Like many Spaniards, Rodriguez is fighting to understand why Spain was targeted. In part, he blames the previous government’s decision to send troops to Iraq, but he figures the threats predated that. Most people here felt Spain’s traditionally good relations with Arab countries inoculated them from some forms of terrorism.

“I wasn’t a racist before the attack, nor am I now, and I didn’t have negative opinions about other religions,” Rodriguez said. “I have feelings of rejection, of course, but rejection of violence and terrorism.”

Victims such as Rodriguez, and others even more seriously wounded, with lost limbs or vision, must learn to live anew.

“My life has changed,” said Rodriguez, 39, a father of two who finally returned to work in late February -- but not at the train station. “Before, I only worked, nothing else, 12, 14, 16 hours a day. But now I realize that what I earn at the end of the month is not as important as spending more time with my family.”

The Spanish government says it has spent more than $60 million on the survivors and families of the dead. More broadly, the Spanish citizenry, no stranger to guerrilla-style attacks after decades of conflict with Basque separatists, has resigned itself to a new level of threat and decided to move on, analysts say.

“Spanish society has assumed, processed, understood and rejected what happened,” said Cristobal Torres, a sociologist with the Autonomous University of Madrid. “For the most part, they’ve experienced a catharsis and will move forward.”

Among political factions, however, a persistent divide continues to roil all debate.

Three days after the bombings, Spanish voters went to the polls and, defying the predictions of pollsters, dumped the incumbent right-wing government and chose the Socialist Party to lead the country.

Anger about the bombings, about the government’s decision to involve Spain in the U.S. mission in Iraq contrary to public sentiment and, most important, over the government’s actions after the train attack all contributed to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s upset victory.

Although the left says the bombings were a wake-up call that encouraged the public to vote its mind, the ousted right contends that the election was stolen because voters were intimidated.

A year later, the factions are no closer. A parliamentary commission appointed to investigate the bombings, for example, frequently degenerated into partisan bickering. When the government went before parliament this week to present a 130-point plan of security and victim-assistance measures, the right refused to join in approving it, saying the document implicitly criticized the previous government.

Discord has also been on display in the planning for anniversary commemorations Friday. King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia will inaugurate the Forest of the Absent, a grove of olive and cypress trees planted in memory of the dead, with Zapatero in attendance.

At the exact time the bombings erupted -- 7:37 a.m. -- the bells of about 650 churches in and around Madrid will toll for five minutes.

Yet this gesture, as well as a number of other memorials, has drawn criticism from some of the victims. Pilar Manjon, whose 21-year-old son was killed on one of the trains, heads a victims association and has requested that observances be “austere” to avoid exacerbating the suffering of survivors and relatives.

She has accused politicians of neglecting victims and using them for political gain; politicians have accused her of grandstanding. Government officials, opposition lawmakers, journalists and others have traded recriminations, leaving those seeking a way to mourn and honor the dead with a bad taste.

“Spanish society can neither understand nor accept that we have arrived at such deterioration” on the eve of the March 11 anniversary, commentator Ignacio Camacho wrote in the newspaper ABC. “Every one of us should ask ourselves, what can be said of a country that cannot even unite to cry for its dead?”

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Special correspondent Mateo reported from Madrid and staff writer Wilkinson from Rome.