Anxiety runs through the veins of Tuquelia Gómez, 39. The windows in your house have shaken so many times that you can’t get that sound out of your head. The pictures on the wall bounce like in a horror movie and the volcano’s explosions, especially at night, have made him sleepy. It does not rest. As he shows one of the rooms from which the lava is seen descending, the anguish comes out of his mouth. “I’m not well, you can’t live like that, I don’t want to leave because this is my house, but I don’t want it like that.” As he speaks, he does not look directly into your eyes, they are fixed on the volcano. He watches over him while he bites his nails. “It is taking our lives, I have cried many times seeing how it ate houses that I do not even know whose they are,” he says from the porch, at the top of one of the hills of Tacande, in the municipality of El Paso, where they lived. almost 20% of the 7,000 evacuees from La Palma.
The surrounding houses and streets are silent. The closest exclusion zone is less than a kilometer away. Many of the neighbors preventedly left their homes because they no longer felt safe. Tuquelia, her husband Jorge Calero (40 years old) and their daughter, who is almost four, resist. The desolation of the place is palpable from its terrace. A sprawling landscape of black mountains smoke in what was once a valley full of pine trees. Jorge shows a photo of his wife in the place that now occupies one of the volcanic mouths. It was in July. She wore sportswear and posed with a funny grin. In that place there is now a lava mountain that already reaches 200 meters in height. “We are not going to live to see these fertile lands again, what we have left is this, the only thing I ask is that you do not take it away,” says Tuquelia about the house.
It is almost time to eat, but everything is dark, the sky is covered by clouds of black ash and as the day progresses the roars intensify. “It has me pissed off, I had been very calm for a few days, it’s like a beast that deceives you and then destroys everything again,” says Tuquelia. What the senses perceive, the noise, the lack of clarity, and a smell similar to that of burnt rubber push the body to run. The feeling of threat is constant.
Driving up the road, Hartmut Boog, a 70-year-old German who has lived on the island for six months a year for 23 years, listens to the radio while sorting tools in a garage-turned-workshop. The views of the volcano from the outside and inside are impressive, it seems that with just a few steps you can get very close. He has everything in an uproar, but as a forward-thinking person he has two suitcases ready by the door. “At any moment they give us the warning,” he says while holding a cigar, which is placed back to his lips. He is not afraid of living so close, he only had a little nervous the first days due to the continuous earthquakes.
In the lower part of the house, there is the kitchen and the bedroom in a kind of semi-basement. “I see the volcano lying on the bed.” He has kidney metastases and shows a backpack full of drugs. “Morphine helps me a lot,” he says, mixing a few words in Spanish and English. He spends a lot of time in that room, in which there is also a kitchen and a table. Have breakfast, lunch and dinner overlooking the lava and the continuous explosions. He shows many videos that he has recorded at night and that he sends to his relatives in Hannover. “I’m not in a rush to leave, but I don’t want to see lava coming through the window.”
Ash has started to rain. It is not a light substance, but small stones that are embedded in the scalp and stick to the skin. It is impossible to walk without plastic protective glasses. A few meters from a police checkpoint that blocks the way, David Barrios and Nieves Castro, his wife, shovel the ash off their roof. It is a modern construction, with a white facade and wooden beam parts. A few weeks ago they got some friends to lend them a house in Garafía, in the north of the island. “The air quality does not seem adequate for our two young daughters, we have changed schools and we have moved, forgive the disaster,” says David. The living room is half dismantled with a mattress resting on the sofa. The girls, who slept downstairs, were afraid, they did not want to be alone and had to be installed in the living room, next to the double room. The little girl had started having nightmares.
“Living here is impossible, my wife started with symptoms of stress, the whole house was moving, we have it very close,” he says while looking at the volcano. It begins to count and when it reaches seven a loud explosion is heard. “This is how the distance of the shock wave is measured.” Nieves, who is an astrophysicist, knows the science behind the phenomenon. Perhaps that is why they have decided to leave. It is unpredictable and that did not allow them to live calmly. Every two days they return to the house to remove the ashes; from six centimeters in height there is a danger of the ceilings collapsing. “We have a bit of a nomadic life lately,” David says, wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. They act fast, they want to leave as soon as possible. They do not let one of their daughters go out on the terraces. The situation is tense, it seems that a tornado is approaching.
The nights are no longer pleasant for Juan Rodríguez, 67 years old. He gets out of bed an average of three times “to see how it goes.” Contradictory messages have reached his cell phone, that if they are about to be evacuated, that if the lava from the new mouth that emerged this week will go to his street … His house was an old school that his grandfather left in 1905, when he went to Cuba. In the eighties, Juan reformed it and found a blackboard with words written in chalk. “It has a lot of sentimental value for us, we do not want to lose this one,” he says. The lava has taken away another house they had in Tazacorte and a field of banana trees.
Carmen, his wife, smells sulfur every morning when she opens the door. “It is not that rotten egg smell that they say, it is something else more chemical.” They have had to get used to living with continuous shaking and roaring. “What are we going to do? We have nowhere else to go, let it not kill our nerves ”.
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