A reddish clarity envelops the skyscraper skyline. It is dusk in New York and everything has changed. The skyline of this city, which is an image, trembles like a phosphorescent reflection in the waters of the East River. Towards the south the lights of the cars or the subway cars cross the bridges of Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Far in the background, almost in the shadows and more reflections, below the bridges, the tiny figure of a statue with a torch is lost when night falls. The sky of this city is always crossed by airplanes.
We all knew that Monday’s class, with Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec, could be the last in a long time. In fact, that same afternoon the University of New York notified us with the suspension of face-to-face classes, initially until March 27, then until April 19. That morning Columbia and Princeton had already done it. Then all the other universities. We may not return to the face-to-face system this semester.
With the virus recognized as a pandemic and in the face of emergency declarations in much of the West, a succession of images nuances the life of this city: the almost empty subway at rush hour, long lines in supermarkets, a certain clairvoyant desolation in the streets and the dining room tables with people on the other side of the window. There is something of cinema and literature, something of dystopia, something of disaster. I don’t know why I remember that in 1815, after the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and other romantics met in a castle on the shores of Lake Geneva to create monsters. It was a night that lasted three days. It was a year without a summer. Shelley created Frankenstein; Polidori, the vampire that Bram Stoker would later turn into Dracula.
All these are images, ruins of memories that are mixed with anxiety and the stark reality that does not end up being credible. I wonder if during this isolation I will write everything that I have never written, if I will launch myself without fear of creating monsters, if I will be able to finish my novel, some short story, something. I take in my hands Bloodline, Gabriela Ponce’s novel, and I read it almost non-stop. This story, I tell myself, is a pain in the body, a catastrophe in the memory or in the bones or in my fingers that want to touch more. Something that, in a strange way, causes me diaphanous joy. For so many years I have dedicated myself to aging prematurely and sometimes, in very intense occasions, I do not regret it.
Maybe I don’t write much more than this column these days. This virus, I tell myself, is the first planetary crisis of which many generations are hopelessly aware. Five thousand four hundred eight people have died as I write these lines, forty-one in the United States, one in my country. Leo Volcanic, a book of chronicles by Sabrina Duque, and the volcanoes of Nicaragua lead me to think about the volcanoes that surrounded and surround my life, in the Andean hills, in the height and the wind. This is the second great contingency that I live outside of Ecuador. October 2019 and its devastating images. Something is still broken.
I tell myself, in my brain, that I will live. If I get infected, I will resist. I trust my immune system. In my body. In a primary force that, I believe, I have recovered. Then I think of volcanoes and the faces of my parents, my grandparents, my uncle Alex, the other loved ones come to mind. The old bodies. The virus and its populations at risk. The virus has reached the Andes. To the home of my dearest old men. That causes me anguish and I notice that it is the same anguish that other bodies far from their Ithaca also feel. I don’t want this virus to take my loved ones. Something, like the anguish I feel, reminds me of Saramago, the blindness, the lucidity.
On Monday, after the suspension of classes and the anguish, I discovered that Washington Square was a party. Spring had come early. The weather was finally different, there was a mild wind almost Quito, an almost equinoctial sun. Music was playing in the park. People left their coats behind to wear dresses and lighter clothing. In New York there are contrasts, despite the virus. Someone, not me, will write about dystopias, about a virus that shocked humanity, collective panics, conspiracy theories, the bodies that died and those that survived. Someone will lose everything. Someone will grow immensely. Someone will ascend Cotopaxi and maybe think of me. Someone will conclude, perhaps, that we do not control anything, that life is all chaos, that the fight for tranquility is arduous and internal. Someone will take a deep breath, looking at the images behind the window. Will it be the disaster? Will it be joy? Someone will listen to salsa, far from their memory. And when all this happens, perhaps, we will return to hugs, to everyday life, to winter. (OR)
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