“Having left everything in Argentina for this to happen to us”

Laura doesn’t dare to enter. Look from the outside but no. It doesn’t come in. She is clinging to an aluminum ladder, the only thing she rescued from the cafeteria she opened just six months ago with her sister, Bárbara, in the Plaza de Xúquer, one of the most vital corners of Paiporta, the Valencian municipality where, until Now, 62 residents have died due to the overflow of the ravine brought by DANA.

“In May we started the cafeteria, which was a family project, so that we would all have work,” says Laura Santoro, a woman from Rosario who came to Spain a year and a half ago and, little by little, brought the rest of the family with her sister. .

In August their children, ages 19 and 14, arrived. The youngest goes to school, which was also destroyed. It is not yet known when classes will be able to resume.

But since Tuesday the 29th, since the deluge, merciless and voracious, devoured the coffee machine, the counters and the decoration, shattered the blindex and rolled up the metal blind as if it were made of paper, Laura has not set foot again. on the premises.

“It’s not safe. Below the cafeteria there are two floors of parking,” he says. Fear a collapse.

“Now it is urgent to remove the water from the underground garages,” asks Laura along with the rest of her neighbors. “They have been flooded for three days, there may be a risk of cracks in the foundations due to the action of humidity,” he says. In some of the other towns devastated by the storm, some residents were evicted for fear that the structures of their homes would give way and collapse.

At the door of the Jijonenca cafeteria that Laura and Bárbara owned, water gushes out of a sewer. There are people who claim that in those basements there are still bodies of neighbors who were locked in their cars.

“I know that the State, the government, the insurance consortium are going to take care of a lot of things but it is a lot of sacrifice to have left everything for this to happen to us. It is a natural cause, unthinkable,” says Laura with a broken voice.

With muddy feet, she and her sister are surprised as they discover where the tables, chairs and plants they had in the cafeteria went. Everything is muddy. Unrecognizable.

Laura looks around the cafeteria where she The only thing left is the schedule stuck in a column at the entrance. He looks for that flowerpot that had been given to him as a sign of good omen for the inauguration.

“We had two freezers, for ice cream, that appeared floating four blocks from here,” they say. Barbara approaches one of the freezers. “Look, the ice cream and churros were left inside,” she says, more dejected than surprised.

The Santoros had bought a little car with which they worked overtime. “We barely recognized the license plate among a pile of cars that were destroyed where we parked it,” they say.

“My daughter and her father were working at the time the river started to rise,” recalls Laura, who on Tuesday the 29th was in the city of Valencia and could not return to Paiporta.

Bárbara shows, on her cell phone, timed videos of how the water advanced in less than two hours. And the alert that the regional government sent by cell phone to all the neighbors? “It was a shame,” laments Bárbara. “The alert came when there was already two meters of water.”

The Argentine community in Valencia is mobilizing. There are Facebook and WhatsApp groups that usually organize outings and plans for nostalgic people and that, in these tragic days, they become closer than ever.

This Friday, five friends from Valencia came to visit the Santoros and bring them food, who walked for more than an hour, and another compatriot from Mar del Plata, Mariana de Avila, from Picanya, a town next to Paiporta that was also devastated by the flood. .

“They bring us everything. Tonight we eat Milanese”says Laura.