THE GREAT NEW YORK BLACKOUT OF '77

It's been 48 years, but I remember it as if it happened now. That hot summer in New York. That day, July 13, was a clear day, and early in the morning I rode the subway.

On a lonely platform I met a Russian monk, dressed in black, with a long Byzantine beard and Merovingian hair falling on his cassock. He looked at me with such intensity that I had to lower my head.

Suddenly he disappeared, and I took the train to one of the stations on First Avenue, to get closer to my office at the UN. I sent my wife to Spain to give birth, because the medical expenses in America would have cost me a pretty penny. I felt a little lonely and depressed.

My son Tonin had been born in Oviedo a month earlier, and I was alone in that Manhattan apartment, a forty-story tower in Waterside Plaza that cost me a fortune because it took up almost half my salary.

For me, a European with medieval roots, New York was a strange city where very strange things could happen.

So the vision of that black monk on the platform of one of the downtown stations could have been a figment of my overactive imagination.

That summer I read Chekhov, who wrote a story by the same name, “The Black Monk,” and Julio Camba, whose “Automatic City” takes us to the edges of chaos and predicts what might happen in the Big Apple if the power went out. Well, on July 13, 1977, the power went out.

In my office at the UN, I was unable to get my report through the cameraman.

Confusion reigned. The elevators and escalators were out of order. One of my colleagues, I think it was Valverde from YA, who had a pocket transistor radio, made us form a group to listen to the news on the local station.

“Leave immediately. This could be a nuclear attack.” I looked confidently at Jose Maria Carrascal, who had rushed in from his home in Queens, suffocating in his Volkswagen, imported from Germany.

“Oh, my God.”

“I don’t think it’s the Russians. Carrascal said it looked like a high-alert exercise.”

We had to take the punishment, but it took us almost a quarter of an hour to leave the blue building (their name for the United Nations headquarters). The officials, the legations, the translators, even the cleaning ladies were crowded around the flower beds by the exit gate, and they had to leave one by one. I must remember that such nuclear alert drills were common in New York at a time when the Cold War intrigues were still in effect.

There were several nuclear shelters in the city, as I reported in my report (see old collections of state newspapers). First Avenue was also in disarray. Hordes had descended from the upper city and were looting stores.

They looted everything they could find. I saw tall, strong black men, like Hottentots, carrying televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners and all sorts of household appliances on their backs. This is what happens when the power goes out, as Julio Camba already predicted in The Automatic City. We are very fragile, and if a black hand cuts the string of the grand puppet show, the dance will begin.

But was it an attack by the Russians or not? Almost half a century later, I do not know what to answer or which card to choose.

There was no Internet at the time. America really felt threatened by the Russians, and that phrase wasn’t just a movie title.

Finally, in the middle of fishing, I managed to get to Waterside Plaza. There, the doorman, a very friendly Puerto Rican, to whom you spoke in Spanish and he answered you in English and vice versa, told me that the elevators were out of order.

I had to walk up the 24th floor to my apartment. There I was able to tell my story over the phone, and it worked.

You can read the ARRIBA issue of July 14, 1977, which, as I said, chronicles the circumstances without wasting words. I was depressed. I had just had a son. My family was far away, and I felt alone in the middle of a huge city with a view of the Empire State Building and the Twin Towers. There were no lights in the skyscrapers.

New York was like a ghost town. I was thinking about the horizon. The Big Apple offers stunning sunsets. A sunset that tends to be much faster and more lightning-fast, like in the tropics, than in Madrid or Oviedo, since the New York meridian is marked on maps almost a quarter lower than the Sicilian one.

I went to bed in the dark. At midnight the phone rang; I received a pleasant transoceanic call from Oviedo. My father-in-law Gabriel Tuya was worried about the news of the power outage. I was on the line:

─Antonio, are you okay after the power outage?

─Did the baby survive?