Each couple, when they fall in love, invents a private language.
A language of two speakers, wrote Jordi Carrión.
Iván Vaquero and Diana, boyfriends from Velilla de San Antonio, a small town in Madrid, created their own during their happy days.
That love was expressed through the acronym TQMT, I Love You My Everything.
To give it an eternal character, Ivan tattooed them on his chest.
When they started the relationship five years ago, they went to live outside of town.
Their intention was to also build an exclusive kingdom where no one would know them.
They were united by their love for dogs and nature.
He, a worker in a fire extinguisher company, took care of her three children from a previous marriage as a second father.
It was an intense time.
Their eternal love story, however, also came with an expiration date.
They recently broke up.
Iván returned to Velilla at the age of 39.
He settled in his mother's house.
Diana still lived abroad, but went to town to work every day in the office of a locksmith company.
The two returned separately to the starting point, to the place where they met.
So the acronym became a throwing weapon.
At the beginning of the month, Iván began to write “No longer TQMT” in the building where she worked.
The red ink graffiti spread throughout the town.
In the auditorium, the cultural center, the garbage cans.
It was a plague.
No one understood what it meant or to whom it was addressed.
Something must have changed in the following days because Iván tried to turn the writing around, this time in blue: "Yes TQMT."
He was backing up.
Although next door, he also wrote insults directed at Diana's ex-partner.
The reason is not very well known.
Velilla became the canvas of a love soap opera.
The denouement was about to fall.
Little more than a week passes between the first graffiti and the murder.
On Friday the 13th, Iván went to buy dinner at a Japanese restaurant, coincidentally next to the building where Diana works.
According to a source familiar with the Civil Guard investigation, as he passed by, he saw some teenagers painting over what he had written.
Ivan caught their attention.
The boys, rebellious young men known in town for doing their thing, stealing a bicycle or burning a palm tree, confronted him.
The anger increased in tone.
Investigators believe that Alberto J., a 26-year-old supermarket stockman, owner of an Argentine bulldog, heard the commotion from his home, the first floor of the building, just above the locksmith company, the target of graffiti.
It is not clear if Alberto got involved in the discussion because he knew the teenagers or because he was fed up with them painting on the front door of his house.
Or both things.
The fact is that he came down and faced Ivan.
The discussion ended in blows.
Alberto, who according to some acquaintances is an expert in martial arts (the investigators have no record), gave Iván a brutal beating.
The blows he inflicted on the head were fatal.
Ivan was lying on the ground.
The teens and the attacker vanished.
An ambulance took him very seriously to the hospital.
He wouldn't die until two days later, on Sunday.
His family donated the organs, as they think he would have liked.
The day after what happened, Alberto took his dog for a walk in the same place where hours before he had killed a man.
A neighbor told him what had happened.
"I had no idea," he replied.
The Civil Guard, however, already knew that it had supposedly been him.
They arrested him on Monday at his work, the logistics center of AhorraMas, the supermarket chain.
The day before, on Sunday, Ivan's funeral was celebrated.
“They are two families from Velilla who have known each other for a lifetime.
In the mortuary there were colleagues of the two.
What explanation do we see for this?
None, ”says Antonia Alcázar, mayor of Velilla.
On social media the murder was blamed on the teenagers, the gang of thugs from the institute.
The Internet was filled with their faces, their names and their addresses.
Some hoax-spreading media falsely claimed that they were unaccompanied immigrant minors, the so-called menas.
The investigation has not found that young people participated directly in the crime.
For now they have only been questioned as witnesses.
In a commendable gesture, Iván's mother and brother called on the people to avoid parallel trials.
"They killed my cousin for writing some love messages," laments José Carlos, Iván's relative.
After the crime, people began to speculate on the meaning of the initials.
There are those who wanted to see a case of harassment of their ex-partner and concluded that the graffiti meant You No longer have much time left.
Diana settled the matter by inscribing its true meaning on a wreath that adorned the coffin during the burial.
“My children and I are lost, without light.
I have to guide them on their way because Iván's death will always mark our lives, ”says Diana.
It was also speculated that Alberto's mother, the alleged murderer, had left town after receiving threats.
However, at night she walks her son's dog.
On his night walk, he comes across the altar built in memory of Ivan and, impossible to avoid, with the graffiti.
No one has deleted them for now.
After the beating, Ivan was taken to hospital. I was awake. The Civil Protection volunteer wanted to keep him conscious until a doctor saw him. Suddenly, he started talking about his mother and how much he loved her. After so many years they were living under the same roof again. At that moment, Iván took a photo of her and showed it to the volunteer: "What is she beautiful about?" He also remembered Diana and the three children. TQMT, he must have thought. His cousin believes that his ending is a true reflection of his personality: "That's how he was, all love."