How ugly people are, how ignorant. How nice, too.Or so I think, examining the faces of those who come to vote at this school. Many voters show compassion toward the members of the polling station (“hope it goes easy on you,” “what a pain, poor things,” “they pay you something, right?” etc.), and I try to reject it categorically without scorning that kindness of spirit. Given how specifically relevant these elections are, and how smoothly their date fit into my calendar, the fact that I was selected as a polling officer genuinely feels like a prize won by lottery.

The Greeks considered this kind of civic participation a morally honorable act—that shared honorability which gave meaning to that first democracy. It is also true that slaves relieved them of the burden of daily labor. I do not wish to be petty when thinking about “the people.” And by “the people” I mean the people as such: that entity which sublimates itself from the clump of individuals who, taken one by one, grant access to empathy, but who, in the condition of a crowd, display the mediocrity of one custom or another.

Out of my love for the human species, I judge the aesthetic whole of the electorate, which offers me a new nuance with every voter who approaches our Table 30-A. Many do not know which table is theirs. Many confuse one table for another. Many do not practice any concept of a table at all. Some wander around disoriented for a while, going in circles. Mr. Granada does not appear in any of the voter rolls. Has he gone to the wrong polling station? Is this an omission in an administrative system riddled with holes like a block of Swiss cheese? I am struck by the neighborly atmosphere that prevails; at none of the polling tables do I notice any trace of partisanship, but rather a polite willingness to fulfill the task and remain steadily courteous toward one’s fellow citizens.

About a month ago, forty-six people died. What will the ballot boxes say about Spain having lost its High-Speed Rail? Or is it precisely a confused indolence that casts its vote? The act of voting, suspended over magical pretensions, is no less esoteric than a Voodoo ritual. No less charged with reality. With striking frequency, voters leave their ID cards behind after handing them to us for certification and registration, politely saying goodbye before I have finished copying their name (it turns out some women have three given names, some with very long surnames!). If we did not stop their distraction, by the end of the day we would have a stack of ID cards large enough to sell for a good price. That level of attention is precisely what the disgraceful game of political discourse targets. A fly passes by and distracts us from the tragedy of Adamuz.

The broken weld, as an inescapable physical reality, punctures one by one the mystical bubble of the PSOE—that speculative membrane under which Spaniards live. The denial of responsibility flows alongside the increasingly evident connections between the party’s mafia-like practices and accidental death: forty-five in one day, an additional train driver the next. This time, it seems, physical reality offers a truth that admits no cosmetic cover-ups. They try to apply them anyway, only to further expose the picture of a country that spends twice as much on bribing young voters by gifting them travel as it does on maintaining infrastructure—because infrastructure is invisible, prosaic work that wins no votes. Overnight, we discover—like a naked lunch—that our rail network carries multiple risks of death. That train drivers had been warning about it for months. That videos had been compiled showing trains violently shaking along certain stretches. That they have been playing Russian roulette with us for a long time now. In a country whose regions are interconnected daily, anyone could have died.

Pain transcends the left–right axis—how have we normalized this universe of propaganda? The most common reaction to the double derailment was: “we saw it coming.”