Tales of the pandemic based on real stories from around the world with a touch of fiction. Ongoing literary work.
Learn more about the project.
Idyll
Chiyo needs some time to herself now. She’ll get a drink at one of Kyoto’s tiny family-run cafes, forget about the whole thing, and write in her journal while in the city’s timeless embrace. Then she’ll be able to rejoin her father.
Pseudonym
Lana solicitously offers Vladimir some of her edamame guacamole to soothe his throat. He claimed to be a vegetarian who loves spicy food, but she has learned never to take white people’s word for it on spice tolerance. A scant few minutes after his bold claims, the old man is practically heaving over a tiny slice of red chili.
Enigma
Kawa yowls mantras from outside the screen door, and Akiko weaves in these meows bestowed upon her by the Eternal Now, kan-ze-on, na-mu-butsu, and intones the chants that she has recited every morning before dawn for more than thirty years, yo-butsu-u-in, yo-butsu-u-en, with deep concentration rooted in practice, bup-po-so-en, jo-raku-ga-jo, strict discipline, cho-nen-kan-ze-on, bon-nen-kan-ze-on…
Euphony
This house. The one next door. Doh-ba-doo-ba-doo. The curly hair in the wind. The communal garden. A timeless ballad by John Coltrane. The beauty of chaos. Doo-ba. The beauty in chaos. Dream companions who come and go depending on the season and love. Love. Doo-ba-doo. A voice. That voice. Doo-doo.
Diatribe
By now, the odor of abandon and decaying food has almost dissipated from Mischi’s apartment in Queens. She has been paying rent for a vacant apartment since her death, and now Ruth and her son, Mark, have come all the way from California to dust it off, to expel the mustiness, to empty it of history and the tangible void of the last few months so that it can be returned to its owner.
Genealogy
In all of Navarrevisca, only Aunt Tomasa still retains memories of memories of the 1918 flu, and, until now, they had always seemed to her like tales of ghosts or distant worlds.
Idiosyncrasy
Overwhelmed by her cilantro’s stubborn insistence on turning yellow, Angélica imagines her own death with shattering clairvoyance, as she has countless times before. And that’s even though she quit smoking.
Aesthetics
Every time Giselle sees her own image, Alfonsina Storni appears to her to whisper a platitude. «Upon seeing my cheeks, which were red yesterday,» she sings to her, leaving Giselle wondering if she’s referring to her makeup or her hives.
Oneirism
After all, Keza has been exercising omnipresence for some time: why should one more city be a problem? Saturday kicks off with a job interview over Zoom that she’d told Ganza would finish by 12 at the absolute latest; three quarters of an hour past noon, she’s still there…
Kaleidoscope
Everything is paused. And so what? It will start again. She never thought that she was going to experience a revolution, to live to see the streets full of the unanimous chanting, the graffiti, the pot-banging from the balconies, the euphoric thirst for struggle.
Atmosphere
A storm like this is unheard of at Kilstonia during the dry Oregon summer. Strange to see the pounding rain; only this morning, the baked cloudless sky had set off in stark shadows a beaver brazenly gorging himself on the willow tree on the island. Vera’s willow tree. She jumped out of bed, 81 years and recent foot surgery at once forgotten, grabbed her .22…
Gastronomy
It was all caused by that fateful office durian party and his resulting binge. And the worst thing is that Ong himself had come up with the idea, inspired by the arrival of June and hoping to cheer up his coworkers, their palates plunged in sorrow and longing for vanished flavors.
Peripeteia
The first arrival will be early riser Manoli, the baker, an untroubled pond in an undiscovered forest, from whose tongue words must be ripped; next up is Juan, the one who just bought a little house in the new development, a parrot particularly proud of his ability to speak who leaves one’s head feeling like a drum; later he will have the two sisters, the older ladies who live a little bit up the street, beams of sunlight who always compliment him on the striking contrast of his eyes, one amber and one green…
Melomania
Andrei dreams that once again his hands are a blur as he plays Rachmaninov’s preludes to an adoring crowd, the frenzy creates a gale that rips the socks off the pot-bellied, mustachioed man in the front row, and the performance ends with the piano bursting into flames from the hammers’ unrelenting assault on the strings.
Geography
Strawberry and cream tarts, lemon bundt cake, artisan tiramisu, blueberry muffins, Dutch apple pie, chocolate eclairs, cherry cobbler, cinnamon rolls, and bread, bread, and more bread. All expired, but it’s better than nothing.
Mnemonics
The idea of actually calling the police occurred to the Daughter. By no means did she want him to be arrested and spend the night in lock-up — which no doubt nowadays served more as a breeding ground for the virus than anything else — but it couldn’t be denied that, in a way, he had brought it on himself; driving all the way to Zhuanghe was truly a preposterous idea.
Prolepsis
When he goes to get fresh air on the balcony, Phil is immersed in the everlasting dance of the treetops that strain to mask the urban reality of cement and brick. His light red hair may not take any more walks than is fair and necessary; but his mind knows no such restrictions: this greenery hypnotizes him once more, and his imagination runs wild until he sees —feels— the eternally-damp soil of London under his shoes…
Philosophy
Immensity stretches before their eyes: the infinite orange melts into the blue, which then turns pink, purple, yellow, until the tea-scented darkness begins to make inroads, a darkness that is flooded with soup and yogurt and dates and honeyed sweets and milk; and they eat for the first time all day, with restraint more than greed, grateful for another day of learning.
Trichophagia
There is nothing like the luxurious sensation of cat fur on her taste buds. With Isis, it can get quite complicated to harvest those hairy delicacies, but Nut acquiesces to more shenanigans, and so Abril yanks her fur out and turns it into haute cuisine and enjoys its touch and spits it out and swallows it, and it dances and dances through her mouth.
Chromatics
Hilda looks at her daughter through the window and fills her with light. She’s been regular as clockwork over the last couple of weeks, splendid, a mirror of the universe, without missing a single day. Yazmin experiences it differently every day —with skin flooded, with vermilion fury, with harsh calm, with her spirit in bloom— but she always, always, always comes to the window at around six o’clock to receive the maternal twilight.
Autarchy
Beyoncé is trapped in her gel nails. Well, not Beyoncé Beyoncé, it’s just that Maria refuses to allow her real name to be used, because it’s simply too distinctive, and she prefers not to be recognized in the street. So we’ll have to turn to her idol for a pseudonym (surely, there must be more Beyoncé fans than Marias in the world).
Theophany
The neo-ancient emergence of the phrase «streaming mass» had launched her into delight tinged with relief. She has stoically resigned herself to renouncing her walks to the Dish, her jazzercise classes, her meandering bike rides, no matter how much she longs for them. All for the common good. And, well, she has a big backyard, where she can run, dance, or do flips on the trampoline if she wants. She never actually has, but why shouldn’t she?
About the project
Love in the Time of Coronavirus was forged in the confluence of the desire to create, too much free time, and a sometimes unhealthy obsession with COVID-19. Although pandemics have stalked humanity across the pages of history, we are now witnessing an unprecedented phenomenon because the digital era allows instant communication across any distance, bringing us face-to-face with the differences and similarities in our experience of this global scourge.
The first stories in this series took shape on their own, as friends across the world recounted their experiences to me, and those verbal narratives became literature. Adapting naturally to the wide range of situations that they capture, each story took on a different tone and rhythm, swimming in the endless sea of human experience, from first-world problems, to learning and growth spurred to the pandemic, to broken dreams and heartrending plights. Each story has some touch of fiction: some are almost completely true, others give more room to the imagination and some are washed in magical realism.
Now, the project has matured and become more structured. To write each story, I interview the protagonist and craft a tale based on my notes. Then, out of respect for the personal experience of someone who has been generous enough to share their vision of reality with me and with the world, I share the draft with them and allow them to propose changes to better reflect what they want to convey. Sometimes, the person interviewed does not speak Spanish, so the story goes through a longer process of translation and editing. Since this is such an international project, stories have already been translated into multiple languages.
The word «pandemic» comes from the Greek — παν («everything») and δημία («people») — as do the titles of all the stories in this series, some more cryptic, others more literal, but all of them full of meaning richened by their etymology.
I am personally acquainted with the protagonists of most of these stories, which showcase the infinite varieties of love — self-love, romantic love, neighborly love… — and take place in cities as wide-ranging as New York, Dalian, St. Petersburg, Madrid and Santiago.
Love in the Time of Coronavirus is still alive and kicking, so new stories will continue to be published regularly on this page with dreams of one day becoming ink on paper.
Patricia Martín Rivas 