Mariana Kirilova, Stefko's girlfriend, in the surroundings of his house.MV
It was the last time they spoke.
A boyfriend calls his girlfriend from Calle de Toledo number 98 in Madrid at 2:54 p.m. last Wednesday.
The conversation lasts 33 seconds:
- They told me that all the papers are fine.
- How good!
- I have delivered them and I'm going home.
Where are you?
- I'm charging my mobile at the Burger King in the Opera Square, where always.
- Where we eat?
- At home.
There is a deafening crack of glass.
"Hello? Stefko? Stefko? Are you okay?"
Stefko Ivanov Kocev, a Bulgarian about to turn 47, has just been killed by a gas explosion in a seven-story building.
I was leaving a social services center.
He had applied for the Minimum Living Income.
The firecracker took him ahead while he was walking and talking to his girlfriend on his mobile.
At that same time, dozens of residents in the area began to call 112. A white cloud of smoke began to climb through the sky of Madrid.
Nobody knows what happened.
The uncertainty can be summed up in contacting the authorities.
Millions of Madrid people are beginning to receive photos and videos in their WhatsApp groups.
"Are you okay?", "Do you live there, right?", "What happens at the Puerta de Toledo?".
The sirens of dozens of ambulances, fire trucks and police cars begin to sound and go through the center of the capital of Spain at full speed.
A seven-story building next to a charter school and a nursing home has just been left to the bone.
The street of Toledo smells of gas.
It is full of rubble.
The main televisions in Spain cut the signal.
They connect live.
A helicopter of the National Police begins to fly over the area.
Meanwhile, and less than a kilometer from there, Stefko's girlfriend still doesn't know anything about her partner.
Also Bulgarian Mariana Kirilova, 46, calls him again at 2:56 p.m.
At 2:58 p.m.
At 15.05.
At 15.09.
At 15.20.
At 3:22 p.m.
At 3:32 p.m.
At 15.58.
At 16.10.
At 4:37 p.m.
And at 5:14 p.m.
Eleven calls of despair.
They all run out of waiting time.
Nobody responds.
Kirilova decides to go home to wait for him.
It must have been nothing, he thought.
Upon arriving, a gloomy fourth floor inside a three-minute walk from the central Plaza de Antón Martín, poverty returns to its sofa.
It has no light, no heating, no television, and, of course, the Internet.
The rent of the apartment has not been paid for a year.
The front door has a loft: it's a broken window.
The hours pass.
Kirilova is neither hungry nor thirsty.
She is alone, sitting on the sofa, staring at the broken screen of her mobile in her hand, waiting for a signal.
At 1.47 in the morning of Thursday, all of Spain learns that the explosion has left four dead and 10 injured.
Among the deceased are a priest of the building - owned by the parish of La Paloma -, a parishioner who came to supervise the boilers, a bricklayer who was walking there and Stefko.
She, however, has not yet found out.
You do not receive any calls.
Not a WhatsApp either.
The whole of Madrid was numb and in a room without light less than a kilometer from the explosion there was a Bulgarian woman waiting for the news that everyone knew.
“I cried all night because I didn't know what had happened.
I didn't know where Stefko was! ”, She now tells through tears with a photo of her boyfriend on her mobile in a cafeteria near her house.
The next morning, Kirilova walks out the door.
In his head follows the mystery of a call cut short.
He goes to the Mercadona de Lavapiés to beg, as always.
A routine that allows you, in the best of cases, to raise six or seven euros a day to cook something solid at home on a gas stove.
He says they had been like this for over a year.
"I can't find a job," he laments.
The pandemic is even harsher on the invisible.
Suddenly, two plainclothes policemen stop her dead in the middle of the street, just as she was going to the supermarket:
- Do you know Stefko?
- Yes, what happened?!, What happened ?!
- Come here a moment.
We are police.
The agents go home with her again, where she ruled out asking for psychological help.
"I want nothing.
I don't want anything, ”he insists now.
During these nine days he has continued to beg at Mercadona.
Meanwhile, Stefko's body remains at the Valdebebas Institute of Legal Medicine, north of Madrid.
Kirilova told the police that she wanted to see her boyfriend as he was.
The police did not recommend it due to the severity of the explosion.
And another legal and judicial mess began.
Kirilova could not certify to investigators that he was a close relative.
Nobody teaches the bureaucracy of death.
They were boyfriends, but they weren't married.
There are folios that weigh more than three years together.
The police began a search for Stefko's relatives in Bulgaria.
The procedure to follow in these cases is always the same, according to a spokesman for the Institute of Legal Medicine of Madrid.
When something similar happens, the scientific police or Interpol are in charge of locating the relatives of the deceased after a court order, either to report the death or to check if they can take charge of the burial.
What if they don't have the financial means for a dignified funeral?
The City Council will be the one who assumes the expenses in that case.
This last goodbye is called a charitable burial.
But before reaching that point, the police have two weeks to locate the relatives.
14 days of paperwork between countries and administrations.
The search for Stefko's family has been frantic.
"We could not locate the mother," says Petya Paulova, spokesperson for the Bulgarian Embassy in Spain.
Thanks to the friends that Stefko had forged in Madrid they succeeded.
These, who distance themselves from the girlfriend they did not know much, contacted the mother, a 64-year-old woman who had been widowed for the second time for 40 days.
After communicating the tragedy, they began to raise money so that he could get to Madrid.
They then went to the embassy.
And they managed to speed up the process.
Stefko has no living brothers, uncles, or grandparents.
The only family line he had left was his mother, who was not located until almost five days later.
"She cannot take care of the funeral because she does not have the financial means," says a friend of Stefko's from the capital who prefers not to be identified.
He was one of the 20,000 Bulgarians living in Madrid.
A portly man, not very tall, who arrived in Spain 20 years ago from Sliven - the eighth most populous city in the country - located three hours by car from Sofia, the capital.
From there he left, like so many others, to find a better life before he turned 30.
Youth, sometimes, is just that.
In the Las Letras neighborhood and around the central square of Antón Martín he was well known.
"He painted houses when they called him," recalls his girlfriend.
Little botches that allowed him to survive on a daily basis since he arrived in Madrid.
"For us he was a very good friend, helpful, with a sense of humor, cheerful," wrote his friends in the Bulgarian digital newspaper Bulletin.bg.
"He had a big heart!"
He was a Manchester United fan and was a great dancer of the Tropanka dance, a type of folk dance from northeastern Bulgaria characterized by trotting movements of the feet.
He got something from here and something from there.
A little more than three and a half years ago, his life crossed with a Bulgarian woman in the middle of a central Madrid street.
It was not an appointment to use.
It was a simple crossing of glances.
"It was seeing us and he was for me and I for him," she sums up.
At that time, she lived in Barcelona and worked washing dishes in a restaurant next to La Barceloneta beach.
They shared a long distance relationship for a year.
At the time, she herself decided to take the suitcases and go to the Las Letras neighborhood to start living together.
"It was very good, very, very good," he remembers in broken Spanish.
On the day of the explosion, Stefko had met with a social worker to request the application for the Minimum Living Income.
The couple's situation was reaching the limit.
His body will be cremated in the next few days in Parla.
The mother will arrive in Madrid this Friday after 72 hours on a bus.
His ticket and burial have been paid for by his son's friends.
Together they have raised 1,800 euros.
The affected school looks for alternatives
The parents of the 215 students at La Salle-La Paloma school had the scare of their lives a week ago.
Fortunately, the children were in the classroom because they had not had time to clean the patio, still with traces of the storm
Filomena
.
The images distributed afterwards gave them the creeps.
The storm saved them.
Now, the return to normality is resisting.
The damage to the building is summarized in three broken windows and the displaced patio door.
But the blast building, right next door, has not yet been demolished.
"We fear that this is going to take a long time," says Roberto Prada, a member of Ampa.
The school has met with Education and the City Council to assess options and has sent a survey to parents to find out their preferences: continue with
online
classes
or look for an alternative.
"The result is very tight," says Prado.
“But we have to organize.
We are waiting ”.