Cristina Durán finds it easy to talk. Nine days after DANA broke out in Valencia, he spoke by phone with elDiario.es. Unburden is a particular verb in these circumstances. It’s part metaphor and part water coming out of places where it shouldn’t be.
We tried to contact her two days after the disaster, but it was too soon. Communications were not good and there was a lot of essential work to be done, before speaking. Now it’s easier, and Cristina finds it useful.
Cristina Durán, 54, is a cartoonist and was awarded the National Comic Award in 2019 for On day 3, a work about the Valencia metro accident in 2006, in which 43 people died. Now, everyone is waiting for Cristina to take the pencil and draw what she is experiencing these days, from her razed house in Benetùsser. A catastrophe in which 223 deaths are already counted. But first you have to finish cleaning, and someday buy paper again.
The losses of Cristina, her family and her co-workers have sparked a wave of solidarity in the world of comics. They have received spontaneous bizums and many purchases of prints with a delocalized service, thanks to an online store that was providentially set up this summer. In fact, its history is full of providences that help ensure that its losses have been only material. But it is best to start this story from the beginning.
One day before the disaster, on Monday, Cristina was already angry. That day, in the afternoon, classes at the University of Valencia were suspended, so her little daughter stayed at home. It’s not strange. But the oldest, who has cerebral palsy and goes to a day center in Torrent every day, also stayed at home because the City Council decreed that there would be no activities in the afternoon. “The fact that they close everything at three is a bit… like it’s coming on strong. In October we always have the cold drop, several days of very heavy rain. That’s why it is always said that it rains badly here, instead of falling normally. We are used to it but if they close everything, it puts you on alert,” he says.
What made his strangeness grow was looking at the sky and seeing no rain. The Valencians watch them fall and are controlling. But Benetùsser, although dark and windy, was dry. Suddenly, the power went out in the neighborhood. The people from the nearby supermarket took to the street. And an hour later, someone shouted: the water is coming.
Cristina Durán, Miguel Ángel Giner and their two daughters live in a ground floor. Four years ago they converted the adjacent premises into their work studio and coworking for other creators, the Grúa Studio: Fernando Autumn, who does exhibition design, and Musilla Studio, formed by Fran and Elena to make wedding stationery. The premises have a loft and the house has an elevated floor. And several heights above, in addition, live Miguel Ángel’s parents. Lots of family and friends live around. It is the quiet, affectionate, warm life of a town near Valencia. And then Fernando, who was in the supermarket waiting for the power to return, heard how people warned that water was coming, but not from the sky but from other towns, and he ran back to the studio to pick up the computers from the floor.
They looked at the huge new copier he had just bought, what to do with it? They wrapped her up. Then they hurried up to Cristina’s house and grabbed the blankets and quilts and pressed them against the door threshold. There was no internet, no WhatsApp, no telephone. Cristina, Miguel Ángel, Fran, the daughters and a friend of the little girl, who was leaving English class and could no longer return to Massanassa, just two kilometers further south, locked themselves inside the house.
And then, the water. “But one thing, come on, incredible. Imagine four duvets plus all the towels in the house, plus all the blankets, and the water was pouring in. It was an impressive thing. It also began to come out through the shower drain. There came a time when we saw that he was unstoppable,” he recalls.
And it is at that moment when Cristina reacts and almost without thinking she goes to a closet and grabs the Treasury papers, those of the house. Papers to save. Only fire and water destroy paper. What else? You have to think quickly. Something to eat. Water. Her oldest daughter’s medication. Diapers. Food for the cat. The cat From there, they could only watch.
From the floor above they watched the brown water rising, from eight o’clock until after midnight. Up, up, up. Looking out the window they saw the water eating the car. “Everything was Dantesque,” he says. Dantesque comes from Dante. In the hell that describes in the divine comedy, The condemned who pass through the third circle of the underworld crawl through smelly mud under an endless storm of rain and hail. For seven centuries, Dantesque is the best word we found to get an idea of what hell on earth is like.
At dawn, the water began to go down. In the street it reached the ankles, but inside the house, where a pool of mud had formed, it reached the knees. When they dared to go down, they found the comics from their library floating around the dining room. “The library of a lifetime. The comics that Michelangelo bought when he was 14 years old. My collection from the 80s that I had since I was 15. We will have lost about 70% of everything,” Cristina assesses. Specifically, Miguel Ángel had caught the fever this summer, like many comics fans lately, for Whakoom, an app to keep track of the collection. Cristina was already tired of the ringing of the bell every time her husband added one, with his cell phone in his hand. The day he has the strength to look at it, Giner will know exactly how many he has lost.
Cristina is sad, but just. Despite the misfortunes that have occurred, she can feel lucky. “In perspective, we have been very lucky,” he says. They have lost appliances, furniture, the sofa, the first originals of her career as an illustrator, but not the last ones, not the pages of her award-winning comics, which were in a filing cabinet on the upper floor. The comics world has turned to them and many publishers have offered to replace their lost copies. “Wait, first we will have to paint and put shelves back up,” he told them. And a new floor in the studio, which has been destroyed. We don’t even talk about the new photocopier.
Let’s go back to the night without light, with the six people waiting at home. What to light yourself with? Cristina looked for all the birthday candles she had and lit them. There was nothing else. Sometimes they managed to send an SMS, but almost always they got the “not sent” message. What saved them from total isolation was having a battery-powered radio. They began to bail out water and that would be their life for the first three hours in which the river of mud began to slowly descend from the walls of Benetùssar, and that would continue for the next three days. No water, no light, no gas, no electricity.
“Everything, everything, everything, everything full of water and mud. When we went to the toilet, we cleaned it with water we got from the house. A tremendous thing. “An outrage.” But on the third day there was electricity, a supply, an energy resource that suddenly turned on and began to work: solidarity. “From the third day onwards the flood of people began to come. “They arrived through the Solidarity Walkway.” Someone knocked on the door. “I open and I meet my nephew, 22 years old, who has been walking from Valencia, an hour and a half. He came with two friends who helped us a lot. But, from that moment on, there have been days of rivers and rivers of people, loaded with brooms, with food, with backpacks, with shoes, with boots. I mean, it was the people. The people. Because no other help has arrived here,” says Cristina.
The artist is angry with the politicians in charge. He gets nervous when he talks about it. “The management of the Generalitat has been disastrous, that is to say disastrous, disastrous and disastrous,” he reiterates, and points to an image that has been explained by so many people that it is now a symbol: “I got the alarm on my cell phone when I already had the water in the feet. It reaches you and you even get offended. Are you sending me an alarm that DANA is coming and for me to stay home when I already have water at home?” “I just don’t understand it. Many lives could have been saved if it had been managed differently,” he says.
The neighbors of Benetùsser passed water to each other, exchanged food, accepted the help that strangers brought them. The military trucks appeared there a week later. Before the soldiers, the journalists appeared. A reporter told Cristina that, on television, catastrophes are magnified, “that then you go to the field and it’s not that much” but in Valencia, it has been the other way around: upon arrival it was worse. “There are people who are still locked up at home because six or seven cars have piled up blocking the entrances, the neighbors bring them food,” he says. Or the Somnis de Paper bookstore by Benetùsser, whose moon crashed into a car and a waterspout destroyed everything.
On Wednesday morning, while they were removing mud, they relived the scare at Cristina’s house. Someone was walking through the streets shouting, in the name of the City Council, to be careful because some reservoir gates were going to be opened to prevent them from breaking, and that could make the water rise again. “There I was really scared because since we had already spent a night of horror, we said: again.” This time, they went for the computers and took them to the in-laws’ house. He grabbed a couple of bags and thought: “Whatever I can fit in them.” He walked over to his originals cabinet and grabbed three of them. On day 3, two of Mary the Javelin and some caricatures of his grandfather that he drew very well. “I did like a symbolic collection,” he says. The Treasury papers, the studio license, the negatives of his photographs. Luckily, she is an organized woman, she knew where those things were. And he took all of that as high as he could. Finally, the second wave did not arrive.
Cristina and Miguel Ángel’s eldest daughter communicates with gestures and pictograms on a tablet. His parents were worried that he would be scared. “The first days we had to hold on so he wouldn’t see us cry. We played down the issue. Look, we told him, we have to scrub, because water has entered. We explained with a pictogram that the car had broken down. We told him things little by little and he understood them.” But the tablet ran out of battery and she, used to going out daily, didn’t understand.
“The first day she put up with it well, but the second she was already complaining, crying every now and then, clinging to me.” They decided to take her to Cristina’s sister’s house, who had not been affected by the flood. Without telecare, without means of transportation, they simply took to the street to walk a journey that could take an hour but would probably take them three. On the way, luckily, a Civil Protection van picked them up and took them to the riverbed. Since then, the young woman remains with her aunt, waiting for her house to become minimally habitable again. In addition, she can go every day to a special day center that the Generalitat has improvised in her old school. “The little girl is happy now,” says Cristina.
Many Valencians, survivors of this catastrophe, have acquired a new skill: preparing to live in the possibility of an emergency. There are several things that Cristina Durán knows what she will do: install airtight doors, always have a radio with batteries, flashlights, a Campingaz, a safety kit in the car to cut the belt and break the glass, more purees and diapers for her daughter in the pantry, wellies for everyone, batteries to recharge the cell phone… and an Italian coffee maker: “We’ve spent three fucking days without drinking coffee because of having an electric coffee maker,” says Cristina, with a tired, bitter but consoling laugh. . “It doesn’t give me life, but I talk to journalists, it relieves me a lot, I need to let it go,” he says goodbye.
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