"This is torture, sometimes I wish the lava would take my house away now"

The Santaella brothers were proud of their house in Los Campitos: it was a gleaming three-story villa with a hectare of gardens and fruit trees around it, which their parents built like so many others in La Palma, almost room by room, floor by floor, over 40 years of effort.

Those who still reside on the island come daily to see it from the LP-2 road, to be moved by the miracle that it is still standing after two weeks of siege by a lava flow that seems not to move, but that has already embraced the building on three of its four sides for five days and is beginning to break its walls. Although the house appears to resist, the cracks are visible, it has lost the battle against the tons of basalt that push it on the east flank.

"It still resists, the champion, Mom!". Francisco Santaella does not want his parents to lose hope: they are both in their eighties and have moved in with another brother in Tenerife, because living in those circumstances in Los Llanos de Aridane was too bitter for them. Despite the distance, they have seen how the home of their best years is, it has been on television, also in the EFE photos, so Francisco tries not to instill false hopes in them.

It all started on October 19, at 3:14 p.m., when the volcano erupted a few kilometers up the slope, in the Cabeza de Vaca area, in Cumbre Vieja. Francisco recalls that he spoke on the phone with his brothers, they commented on the tremendous force of nature, but, like many other residents of Los Llanos, they never thought it would affect them. If there were lava flows, which there were and soon, they would run quickly to the sea. That's what they thought they heard.

But in this eruption, the lava flows do not descend through the channel of a steep ravine, but through a plain. And, instead of advancing, they have opened like a fan. The Santaella's house is now on the edge of a three-kilometer-wide badlands, which has filled 50-meter-deep hollows without stopping. And it continues to grow, fed relentlessly by the tongues of lava from the cone.

Dozens of families lost their homes in the El Paraíso neighborhood in the first hours of the eruption. Other homes in the surrounding area were buried in a matter of two days. In the first week, the lava flows began to swallow an entire town, Todoque, of which nothing remains. But hundreds of people in the Aridane Valley have lived, are living, a slow-motion torture that has lasted five weeks. It is not that they fear losing their house, they know they are going to lose it; it is the volcano that sets the pace and is unpredictable.

This is the case of the Santaella family. "This is torture: some mornings I think 'look, let it take it now'. It's been many days watching it, seeing what happens to it," Francisco confesses.

The man is grateful to vent, confesses that he wants the lava to finish the demolition once and for all, but, in reality, he still harbors the hope that something will remain. "Perhaps, if it stops, the damage will not be irreparable. It's a matter of finding an engineer...", he conjectures, because, memories get the better of him, like his parents: Christmases, baptisms, some weddings, summers with the family... all there.

"We never thought we'd see ourselves like this," he continues. However, the truth is that they have already been "like this" for a little over two weeks. Or expressed in another way: they have already counted four lava flows since they were ordered to evacuate and have seen the houses of all their neighbors fall.

Francisco gets up early every day to go see the house from the intersection of the LP-2 with the access road to La Laguna. Like him, there are many affected people on the shoulders of the road. It is easy to distinguish them from the rest of the people who populate the edges of the road to contemplate the sea of basalt with that attitude of someone who looks at it in the third person, as if with distance. Among those who have their house down there, none of them smile, few photos, no one is up for selfies.

Every time he leaves, Francisco thinks "tomorrow it won't be there anymore" and feels "relief". However, another day dawns and the lava flow and the house remain the same. "It's suffering. That's why I say to myself: let it fall now."

The afternoon they received the evacuation order was another drama, because they had very little time to take out their belongings. It was thought that the advance of the lava flow was going to be very rapid, immediate. With anguish, Francisco and his brothers hurriedly filled three vans with some tea wood furniture, some of their mother's things and the paintings that their grandmother painted; memories, almost everything.

Then they have had opportunities to return to continue emptying the house, although they have only done so to dismantle the most recent improvement they had added, some photovoltaic panels. "Everything else was left there. You lose the desire to return, the truth is," he says.

The authorities are striving these days to ask the people of La Palma not to lose hope, to think that the volcano will go out and life will go on. Francisco is one of those who think so, but he stops for a second, looks at the 900 hectares of lava that stretch before his eyes and blurts out his question: "Where do we put the house afterwards? Where? That remains to be seen right now, that's what I tell my mother."

The woman retains the illusion that something will be saved, to rebuild what can be, preferably in the same area, if they allow it. While she tells it, the imposing lava front that engulfs her house in Los Campitos disappears for an instant from Francisco's sight and some plans begin to take shape. "My mother's illusion would be that, we are all going to push in what she decides."