El ruido de entonces

The engineer had left the central at 19:45, in his white Seat 131. He never came home. At 9:30 p.m., a call was received from the Bilbao office of the newspaper Egin: "We have Ryan, from Iberduero," they said. A slow week of anguish and hope began then, the outcome of which would become part of the history of infamy. Since that time my mother, waking up on Saturday mornings, heard the noise of a mower. The machinery of the world went into motion with a chilling purr, speaking to him of annihilation and desolation as no elaborate sonnet or speech could. But it only existed inside her head: José Mari had stopped cutting the grass in his garden for years.