"My In-Laws Died Downstairs and I Couldn't Do Anything"

Josefa Castro (80 years old) spends the afternoon sewing in front of the TV. She has just started an episode of 'Cold Case' when a noise pulls her out of the plot and pushes her to the window. As she looks out, she sees "the flood" crossing Paiporta and rushes to call her sister-in-law Emilieta (80 years old), who lives - lived - downstairs with her husband, Salvador (81 years old). "I try by phone, and when she doesn't answer, I start calling her out loud," she recalls.

It isn't even raining, but when Josefa returns to the window, just seconds later, the water is "already jumping" from the riverbed and invading the street. "I call her again by phone and she still doesn't answer [later she would find out that Emilieta was talking on the mobile with a neighbor]." Josefa looks out into the common courtyard, where they greeted each other every morning, or from where they informed each other about what they were going to eat, and shouts Emilieta's name with all her might. Her sister-in-law doesn't hear her. The only response is the murmur of the "flood," which continues to grow.

Josefa married Miguel, Emilieta's brother, in 1970, who walked down the aisle the following year with Salvador. "My in-laws built us the house that year," recalls the only survivor of the four (Miguel died in 2015 from cancer). The two couples settled at number 13 on Sant Jordi Street. Josefa and Miguel occupied the upper floor. Emilieta and Salvador, the lower one. "We have gotten along well all our lives. My sister-in-law was operated on many times and always had me by her bedside in the hospital," she adds.

Josefa continues to search for her, desperately, in all the common areas. She even considers the possibility that they were outside the house, but the idea quickly leaves her mind. "They used to go in the afternoons to a warehouse where they had a dog - no one has heard from 'Maradona' again and he is not heard barking either - but it didn't make sense to me because my brother-in-law had cataract surgery that same day. If it hadn't been for the operation, they might have gone out and would be alive."

It seems like minutes, but the scene unfolds in seconds. Josefa runs back to the window. She sees a boy about 12 years old, with water already reaching his knees. The child goes up the street and in the blink of an eye, the water reaches his waist and drags him. Some neighbors shout for him to grab onto a door, and he does. But the current tears it off the frame. "I think he managed to get into a doorway and was saved."

The "sea" of water that Josefa saw from her window is now entering her house, despite the height. When the alert sounds on her mobile, it is "too late," she says. The staircase floods and the steps disappear under the mud. Only four remain dry; then it will reach her living room. "I thought of my children, that I wouldn't see them again (she has two, he was on vacation in Canada and she lives in La Rioja). At night, alone, without light, water, or phone. I felt very bad."

The clear water announces that the "flood" is subsiding. No one knows anything about Emilieta and Salvador. The couple has no children, but they are well-loved in the neighborhood, and the grandson of the neighbor across the street, who is around 18, keeps searching for them. The water in their house has reached the ceiling. The young man breaks a window and finds the bodies floating in the kitchen. "I can't stop thinking that they died downstairs and I couldn't do anything. They didn't deserve that death," laments Josefa, who dwells on the last conversation she had with them that same noon. "We were joking because Salvador was very thin. And now look."