up the evidence of how a pandemic, 2020’s, changed our lives.
Thank you to all of you, writers, men and women from the five continents, thank you for granting me the rights to publish and put it out at everyone’s disposal. Your words have been my stimulus. Thank you, dear Alicia Kaufmann, for sending out invitations all around the world so the most intimate diaries could reach our publishing house. Thank you, Carolina Orihuela, Estephanía Guerrero, Any Do Santos and Alicia Ojalvo for your priceless collaboration with the production and launching of this literary work.
The impressive cover illustration is by the world-renowned Chilean painter and illustrator Carmen Aldunate. The back-cover drawing is by Adam, who, at just 5-year-old and confined with his parents in the U.S., keeps drawing his life and he recreates the world as a big house with one sole roof through where the “bad bug” sneaks in.
If this were to be my last book, I would be grateful. Thank you.
FUTURE
What is happening now is different, it kills confidence
Ramón Tamames
Madrid, Spain
Economist, professor and writer
We show our surprise, we talk about how incredible this unexpected situation is, with the overused reminiscence of black swans. We don’t quite understand the fact that we are still in confinement, more or less strict, not less than 4.000 million people, half of humanity.
Frequent recollections from Bocaccio’s Decameron, and Camus’ The Plague, even if we hadn’t read them. There are, sometimes, personal feelings of freedom deprivation, but the confinement is not a prison but a passage from normal life to a path somehow oneiric.
There are a few episodes of unease induced by the “stay home”, in a society which is, to a great extent, filled with comfort. But also, the extreme situation of what we call “to live hand to mouth”, as we can’t clearly see what the future might be.
The media, obsessed with the virus; and whole families, by the millions, are draining their stocks, both mental and physical, of films and series. Using telematic resources, they try to continue working, maintaining their precious routine…
Memories re-emerge, from past and hard times: the oil crash of 1973-1974; the stock-market crisis of 1987, which was stopped dead by the central banks; the fantasy of the dot.com companies in the third millennium; the wealth loss on the real estate speculative crisis of 2008. What is happening now is different, it kills confidence and foretells harder times.
Nothing can compare to the coronavirus crisis, the viral grave for hundreds of thousands of people, entailed by the darkest premonitions. No, we will not live better tomorrow just because we showed solidarity. We will suffer greater hardships, for the lack of global governing and coherent reasoning.
But we shouldn’t sink into depression either. Jorge Manrique explained it better than anyone: “Not any time gone by was better”.
The coronavirus seen from the future
Juan Manuel Rodríguez Elizondo
México
Grandad, why do you call my dad Chato?
—Oh, my dear Ana Sophia! It’s because I couldn’t call him Juan Manuel, because it would feel like I was talking to myself. You are as nosy as I am, poor you, any old matter will make you curious and you will try to make sense of the less common things.
—Hey listen, granddad, I want you to tell me about that time when so many people got sick.
—Yes, I remember, it was in 2020, a time of much uncertainty when the way of life of people got really disrupted.
—How many people died, granddad?
—Well, I’m not sure exactly, but at that time we were about 7.700 million people in the world, and I think around 50 million died.
—That’s a lot of people…
—Most of those people were adults, elderly people. Even though they took refuge in their homes, many got infected with that disease. The biggest problem was that the symptoms didn’t show in the first days of infection, but it still could be spread to other people. It was a time when we all felt unsafe because we were not really sure who was ill and who wasn’t. A few mad ones said that it was just a smoke screen so the world economy would reset but I never believed that. It was terrible, there were many deaths in Europe, the continent with more elderly people.
» Some people blamed China for the whole problem with this pandemic, because that’s where it started. They said that they had allowed the virus to escape, that they had created the virus in a laboratory, that it was a biological bomb, like in science fiction movies. We were afraid. To kill the virus, we hid ourselves behind face masks, gloves, disinfectant products, sprays. It was a time of psychosis; it seemed a nightmare. There was a page on the internet which informed us about the daily cases of infection, the daily deaths, and the total figures.
»We didn’t have a cure for this disease. They said it was like a very strong flu, damaging the lungs and stopping people from breathing. At that time there were still many people smoking cigarettes with diabetes, which was a lethal combination for those infected. Thank God, I didn’t get infected, although I belonged to the risk group. At that time, I was a bit fat and I was suffering from high blood pressure.
»They forbid us to greet with handshakes and kissing. It was very strange, I would watch movies at home were the characters were hugging and kissing each other, and I would feel a chill down my spine watching those scenes which had been shot before the pandemic but now seemed like irresponsible actions. They put in our heads the idea that every personal contact meant a risk of infection so we would avoid any signs of affection.
» We learned a lot about health and how we could protect ourselves from this type of virus. Some politicians affirmed that it would only affect rich people because they were the ones who travelled more and therefore were more exposed, how ridiculous! In one occasion, a presenter from Spanish television mocked the Mexican president for saying that the virus could be fought with the catholic saint cards. Your great-grandfather said that Spanish people came to teach religion to the Mexicans when they colonised us, so he wouldn’t accept the mockery. Other people said that the virus had emerged from an armadillo species that the Chinese ate. There were no vaccines. A Frenchman became a hero worldwide for discovering that there were two medicines for malaria which could be used to cure patients with the virus.
»The most frequented tourist destinations like Spain, Italy and France were the most financially affected. A long time passed until visits could be resumed. Many economies collapsed, we even thought that humanity was coming to an end.
»Prince Charles, the heir to the British crown, got infected with the disease. That’s why he couldn’t become king and they mocked him saying «At last you had the crown, but the coronavirus, you fool». In Mexico there were about 100.000 deaths, not that many if you take into consideration the total population, and it was because
