Alone in the pandemic and in the final hour | Madrid

One.

Ana Conde inhabited for decades a world to which she no longer belonged. He spent the days completing sudokus in his old living room decorated with furniture from the fifties. The television, always on, was the background to their lonely existence. She wore a flowered gown of guatiné with which she made brief forays into the pharmacy or supermarket. When natural gas arrived at her building, she was the only neighbor who did not want to install it. The old woman managed a stove with two resistors that connected to a bare plug.

If the lawyer who managed the inheritance after the death of her parents and her brother, her only direct relatives, wanted to contact her, she would phone the bar downstairs to leave the message. Antonio, the owner, warned her on the phone. When the old and heavy device, almost a relic, sounded at home, Ana picked up the receiver knowing who was going to find the other side: “Tell me?” That was one of the few contacts he had with the outside.

The neighbors, who knew his routines, were surprised. On the fourth day of silence they called the police

During this month of March, his shy hustle was silent forever. The neighbors, who knew her routines, were surprised that the woman disappeared overnight. They stuck their ears on the door and on the walls, but they heard nothing. Neither the television, nor its short, dragging steps, nor the pot in which it heated water to make soup. On the fourth day of silence, the neighbors called the police. Firefighters entered the house forcing a window onto the street. Inside they found the body of Ana Conde fallen in the middle of the hall. During the pandemic, the firefighters of the Madrid City Council have already rescued the bodies of 62 elderly people who died alone. Across the region, 847 people have died in their homes.

The woman was born, lived and died in this same place. Decades ago, this old building in Tetuán, a popular neighborhood in Madrid, did not exist. In the 1940s, a single-height tavern was built on the ground. Alberto Conde, Ana’s father, started working as a teenager. He showed that he was smart and enterprising. The owners rented the business to him when he was a few years older, and later sold it to him. The man placed a poster on the facade that must have filled him with pride: “Casa Alberto”.

He turned the old cellar into a ballroom. The history of the neighborhood tells that post-war Spain danced, drank and flirted at Casa Alberto. In the late 1950s, the owner received an offer that he considered generous from a builder. The businessman would demolish the business and build a four-story building from scratch. In exchange, he would give Alberto a bar set up at street level and a floor to choose from among the six built. Developmentalism was on the doorstep. Cities grew vertically.

Alberto and his family chose the 1st left out of common sense. The building, completed in 1960 according to the cadastre, had no elevator. In that apartment with two rooms and a small interior patio where clothesline was installed, the husband, his wife Ángeles and the two children of the couple, Alberto and Ana, settled in. The kitchen, tiled to medium height, the furniture and the bathroom with green tiles that premiered that year will remain identical, without reform or style changes, until firefighters enter the window 60 years later.

The family went from running a spacious ballroom to a tiny 40-square-meter bar at the foot of the building.

The bar never achieved the notoriety of the first Casa Alberto, although it was alive.

Sometime in the 1970s the history of this family began to crack. The sudden death of Alberto, the father, opened a gap. The witness was picked up by his son. They called him Titus. She took care of the bar and the box with the help of Ángeles and Ana. The rest of the time, they used to run errands and take cloth to the dressmaker on that street, Luisa Castro, to make them custom-made flowered dresses. Titus fell ill and died.

Ana and her mother lived on the pension and the bar rental. They ate there often, they hardly cooked. His social life was narrowing. His circle was limited to the lawyer who took care of his papers and the cousin who ran the tobacconist. Ángeles died in 2011 and was buried in a niche in the southern Carabanchel cemetery.

After her mother’s death, Ana barricaded herself at home. He went down to the bar once a day for the menu that Antonio prepared for him. Then he stopped doing it, and the waiters were the ones who brought it home.

– Anita, woman, go to the cinema, go for a walk, go shopping. Don’t spend your life locked up here, Antonio told him.

– I don’t feel like it, my son.

Its whiteness became proverbial. It was almost transparent. The sun’s rays did not caress that skin in years. Before the whole of Spain shut herself up at home, Anita had already experienced it. She invented quarantine.

Meanwhile, the bar became too small for Antonio. His intention was to buy the place next door and join it. Before, he had to convince Anita to sell him hers. She only trusted one person in this world: the lawyer, whose father advised hers. As expected, the lawyer drafted the bar’s sale contract, advised Anita on her bails and left everything in order. Thereafter, you should not worry about your assets. I could ride through old age without trouble.

Death found Anita one day in early March. His body was one of the first that firefighters rescued by forcing doors and windows throughout the city when the covid-19 was already a reality in Spain. Anita invented confinement and later was a pioneer in dying alone, collapsed in a hallway, in the eyes of no one. Antonio from the bar, dressmaker Luisa Castro and neighbor Carlos Martínez, the boy impressed by a dead Sunday dress, now an adult, tried to find out where Anita Conde’s funeral was going to take place. But they did not manage to contact the nieces of her cousin the estanquera, the only heirs.

Two.

-Hello? Anyone there?

The firefighter had just entered the kitchen through the window. The autoscale had elevated it to the third floor of this flattened and popular building in the San Blas neighborhood. He had two screwdrivers and a hammer with him in case the glass had to be broken, but he didn’t need them. It was enough to bend the aluminum carpentry to remove the two leaves from the window. Suspended in midair for a few seconds, he finally entered the dark house. He repeated:

– Someone?

There was no reply.

Her only nephew, who worked outside Madrid, had been calling her for several days. Alarmed, he appeared at the door of the building and alerted the authorities

I walk the two meters long from the kitchen. There were dishes in the sink and utensils on the counter. He opened the door and saw the entrance to the street with the keys inside, the trap that made it impossible to remove the lock from the outside. He kept talking out loud just in case. Often, she enters houses at night of people who live alone, like the elderly who receive telecare and do not answer the communicator, and they meet the tenants in the middle of the corridor, after waking up from a deep sleep. They both get a good scare.

But that afternoon of March 23, Emilio Buale, a firefighter from the Madrid City Council for 26 years, did not meet anyone. He advanced like an astronaut in space, embedded in the EPI that they had to put on when entering homes during the pandemic. He came to a small sitting room dominated by an armchair, a sideboard, and a turned off television. There was still no one. Then he faced the hall, where he found something. It was the corpse of a woman, wedged between the corridor and the room in a strange posture. He deduced that the woman had fallen and trying to crawl had been trapped in that position. He warned the companion who was waiting outside by radio: “Possible Code 6. Presents rigor mortis.”

The 51-year-old tenant has lived alone since her sister, who occupied the apartment across the street, died. She was a telemarketer. Her only nephew, who worked outside Madrid, had been calling her for several days with no luck. Alarmed, he appeared at the door of the building and notified the authorities. Since her aunt was taken away, she has stopped by the house once a day for fear that some squatters will keep her.

Three.

During those weeks, the body of a 58-year-old man was found in a building in Alcorcón. He had been dead for more than 20 days. He lived almost destitute. Ten years ago, a brother of his fell asleep smoking and burned the mattress. The walls of the house were filled with soot. The man settled there without making any arrangements for the house. Dinner was prepared with the help of the flashlight. The neighbors took pity on him because they had known him since he was a child. He did social life in a bar next door, whose owner ran errands. He had a reputation for being a good messenger boy.

Four.

When firefighters entered the house through a window, they heard the sound of a radio on. The noise led them to a closed room. Inside they found the corpse of a man lying on the bed, as if death had caught him in the middle of his nap. He still had his glasses on and a Sony transistor on his shoulder.

The next day he had scheduled an appointment with his GP. He had been at home for a week with symptoms of covid-19

Chema Candela, dead about six hours before his body was found, was a sports journalist. He was 59 years old. The next day he had scheduled an appointment with his GP. He had been confined at home for a week with clear symptoms of covid-19. Those who spoke to him on those days on the phone say that he wheezed and coughed with difficulty. It took so much effort for him to speak that he sometimes cut conversations at once. His cell phone appeared full of missed calls.

Chema devoted his life to the trade. For two decades it was Atlético de Madrid’s wireless microphone for Radio Nacional de España, that is, the journalist who reports on the field, who interviews the players at the end of the game. That which José María García turned into art with his verbiage.

A follower of Atlético by inheritance from his father, behind the advertising billboards of soccer fields he found his natural territory. Nowhere was she happier than there. Her wedding to another younger journalist was officiated by Father Daniel, the club’s priest. That day he is dressed in a dark suit. His tie is gray. She is wearing a plain white two-piece wedding dress. In front of a five-story cake they hold a Toledo sword with their hands clasped.

– Antic, Goikoetxea … came to our wedding, remembers his ex-partner, Cristina.

– The one who broke Maradona’s knee?

– That.

Three years later her only son, Javier, was born. While the mother was resting in the room, Chema walked the corridors with the phone to her ear. It gave the exclusive that a player suffered from cancer. He was the first to tell it. The teacher of journalists Miguel Ángel Bastenier called that hitting the moving target, an occasion that professionals were presented with once or twice during their career. To some, never. However, that day Chema had it in his hands. That glory will fade with the news of the next day, it will be ephemeral. But right now it was hers and no one could take it away from her.

The little boy was born with a health problem. At four months, she underwent a complicated head operation. A believer without pacatería, the journalist promised that if the boy survived the intervention, he would not go to Vicente Calderón, the old Atlético stadium, for a full year. There was no greater sacrifice than that. The operation went well, and he kept the promise. The players looked at the band and did not see Chema, the fireproof. It seemed strange to them. The team president, Jesús Gil, sent a bouquet of flowers to his home.

With Atlético he lived a few troubles. He cried with the footballers in the locker room of the Oviedo field, in 2000, when the club dropped to the second division. They remind him of the fetal position, with his hands on his head and fogged glasses. That afternoon he went on the air with a broken voice. In 2014, when Atlético lost the European Cup final in Lisbon, where he went in search of his team’s holy grail, he cried like a child. Two years later, when the scene was repeated in Milan, he hardly spoke a word. He went to sleep early.

Divorce in the late 2000s fell like molten lead in his life. The situation did not fit into his traditional man schemes. He became more taciturn. He fell into a state of melancholy that, according to his brother Germán, would accompany him until his last days, with more or less intensity depending on the time. He moved into his parents’ house in Carabanchel, a drink for someone in his fifties, and later saved enough to live alone in the Boadilla del Monte apartment where he was found dead on March 19.

He sought refuge at work. Producer Rodrigo Vivar, one of his best friends, used to arrive at the radio parking lot in Prado del Rey at around 7.30. Chema’s car was already there. When Vivar left at 17:30, Chema’s was still in the same place. So one day after another.

It was very generous. Detached as only a simple man can be. Charo Montecelo, a friend who had the last stage of her life, always received a wonderful bouquet of flowers by courier on her birthday. Not long ago a close friend lost his job and he went to Hipercor every week to do his shopping for him. He did not have expensive objects, nor did he collect all the shirts that Atlético players gave him. He in turn gave it all away. He had that gift.

The family will divide their ashes. Half will go to the family pantheon of Torrejón de Velasco, the town of its origins. The other half will be kept by your child in an urn. One morning, closed night, the boy will approach what remains of the Vicente Calderón stadium and, when no one sees him, he will remove the cover and scatter his father’s remains on the old soccer field. Ashes on ashes.

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