MADRID, Spain — Aurora Baeza Ramirez reached a trembling hand into her purse and pulled out an old newspaper clipping with a photo of her son, one of 191 people killed in the Madrid train bombings four years ago yesterday.

“Look. Look at my son, look how handsome he was,” she said, holding the paper as if it were something sacred, then broke down sobbing.

Baeza Ramirez pointed proudly to a small pendant around her neck, also with a photo of her son Jose Maria — an earnest-looking man with dark, closely cropped hair, his life cut short at age 39. “My other children made it for me to wear,” she said.

Her outpouring of grief came after a memorial ceremony at which King Juan Carlos laid a laurel wreath at a towering glass memorial to the victims of the terror attack.

He and Queen Sofia, other dignitaries and a crowd of several thousand observed two minutes of silence at the stroke of noon to remember those killed and the more than 1,800 wounded four years ago.

A choir dressed in black sang a Gregorian chant-like piece meant as a tribute to peace. There were no speeches.

The ceremony took place outside Atocha station, the destination of each of four commuter trains that were ripped apart by backpack bombs on March 11, 2004.

Like many commuters that day, Baeza Ramirez’s son was on his way to work — in his case as a doorman in Madrid.

“They took away my son,” she said. “He never bothered anybody.”

The king and queen were flanked by guards with 18th-century uniforms and plumed helmets as they stepped up to the monument: a three-story tower of opaque bricks.

Inside, a transparent roof bears messages of condolence that Spaniards and others wrote on computers set up at Atocha after the bombings.