We took out a candle, lit it and finished our dinner. In darkness. In complete silence.
On April 28, the so-called Great Blackout, one of the strangest days of our lives, left all of the Iberian Peninsula in the dark. For over 10 hours we were completely cut off, unable to make phone calls or connect to the internet. Later I learned the luckiest among us had found an old transistor radio with batteries to hear the news. The three of us — my partner, my 6-month-old daughter and me — had no such luck. Now it was nighttime. Fear and all its ghosts might have lurked.
Occasionally, a random car or a few pedestrians with flashlights passed by our window. One might imagine the other things that were quiet. How the burglar alarms — the big business of keeping fear at bay — were not working. How the security cameras had gone blind. That no one was able to call the police. This, then, might have been a night dreamed of by thieves. A night when the evil-minded would seize the cover of darkness and all that silence to break into factories, businesses, shops, isolated villages, country houses or urban dwellings. But they did not.
This was no nightmare. Indeed, the Great Blackout was the opposite. It was like a dream — a world populated only by the kindest among us, evil intentions quashed. Average citizens directed traffic at intersections without working lights. Others brought water and food to passengers stranded on trains that had stopped in the middle of nowhere. Taxi drivers, unable to process credit cards, gave out their cellphone numbers so customers could pay their fares when the electricity returned.
In the transportation chaos — the trains that stalled, the buses that didn’t come, the subways idled — some schools stayed open late that afternoon so no children would be left alone waiting for someone to pick them up. Hospitals, always free in Spain, operated with generators and continued to care for the ill. Without working cellphones, children and teens gathered in ways more typical of decades past than of today. Strangers came together in the streets to talk or drink beer. Improvised signs advised everyone to “chug it before it gets warm.”
All around, everything I saw underscored how the world carried on peacefully. It seemed everyone embraced the day with a good dose of humor and — dare I say? — even joy. Somehow we knew that everything would be fine. That there would be no muggings, no threatening disorder. Somehow we knew that no one would pull out a gun. This was not one of Hollywood’s apocalyptic films. Quite to the contrary: Calm, generosity and dedication among public servants and workers prevailed.
Perhaps that is the great difference between the forces of the far right — in America, in parts of Europe, now insisting the only true path is one of individualism, each man for himself — and the trust that the European welfare state that I was raised with builds in the minds of a community. Here we found we had trust in others and in our country, in the sense of community. Is there a more powerful weapon than that? Is there a greater shield than that? Knowing that others are there to help you, not to harm you, that we each need one another. That is the key.
That is not to say we are invincible. We in Spain have lived again and again through moments that show us our very vulnerability. During the floods that washed out Valencia last autumn, during the Covid pandemic five years ago. This week it was the blackout of Spain and Portugal and even, briefly, Andorra and parts of France, hours in which nothing moved forward.
But accepting we are vulnerable, each of us, should mean we rely on one another more, not less, that individualism and isolationism are not the path forward. In fact, what I saw this week is how much we are strengthened as a society and as individuals when we choose joy and mutual support rather than fear in the face of adversity. That choice allows us the privilege of feeling safe at home and in the streets.
It was not until the wee hours that night, after the day of darkness, long after the three of us had tucked ourselves into bed, that we noticed a few house lights flickering back on. My partner and I smiled. What a relief. Everything was fine. Our baby girl was sleeping blissfully. We plugged in our phones and our computers. And we went back to sleep.
Paco Cerdà is a Spanish journalist and writer. This article was translated from the Spanish by Cristina De La Torre.
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