Writings from the heart

      I started this collective literary work on March 12th 2020, I was full of curiosity but I also did it out of my own fears. The World Health Organization (WHO) had just declared the coronavirus or COVID-19 a pandemic, the death toll was alerting of an unknown danger with unpredictable consequences which was spreading from country to country, causing death and misery. The book shops were closing, the crisis was affecting every economic sector and the continuity of my own publishing label was unknown.

      If this were to be my last book, I would be grateful.

      While scientists were desperately searching for a vaccine to save humanity, I found refuge in these intimate chronicles of the 2020 pandemic.

      While world leaders were declaring the state of emergency and ordering their citizens to stay home to fight the unknown and highly contagious virus, I knew that my passion for the written word would be my only confinement. The lockdown, the closing of borders, airports, schools and companies was pointing to a recession and in my heart, there was a growing need to tell the story, to leave a testimony for humanity.

      These pages have been written by authors from across the five continents during the convulsive spring of 2020 and they make up an emotional radiography of what they were thinking and feeling while facing a threat to their own lives. All of them appear with their real names, without any position or titles. There are town mayors, ambassadors, diplomats, artists, writers, teachers, housekeepers, unemployed, pensioners, nurses, of all ages and backgrounds, they all put together their words to write about love, fear, family, context, fortune and future. Some express themselves with a poem, others choose an illustration or a photograph. All of them together make 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

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