Javier Rupérez and his Pandemic Log

"This need to go out of our homes to buy supplies was largely the routine of the whole city (...). The buyer always carried change to reach any amount without having to turn around. They carried bottles of essences and perfumes in their hands, and all the means that could be used were used, but the poor could not even do these things and were against all risks". These lines describe the routines that for more than two months we Spaniards had - and still have - to carry out to avoid catching COVID-19.

The quotation is from Daniel Defoe's 'Diary of the Year of the Plague', a novel published in 1722 which tells in first person, the day-to-day life of "H.F.", as Defoe signed the manuscript, during the Great Plague that struck London in 1665.

The diary format is really appropriate if one wants to make a detailed analysis of what happens and, therefore, Javier Rupérez's (Madrid, 1941) book, 'Las crónicas de la pandemia' (Chronicles of the Pandemic) (Sial Pigmalión, pp.274) is even more valuable. 

The day-to-day commentary from 8 March, when he arrived in Spain from Washington, his usual residence, until the end of the state of alarm and consequent "disaffection", enables the reader to recall data and events which he had forgotten because of the enormous amount of information, and to provide a calm analysis of what was happening in Spain and the rest of the world.

Rupérez's precise and meticulous information, accompanied by an extraordinary prologue by Vicente Vallés and an introduction by Nicolás Pascual de la Parte, covers passages from his daily and personal life: his estrangement, forced by circumstances, from his wife and daughters; the walks with Baloo, his sister Paloma's dog; the telematic conversations via WhatsApp ("what would we do without WhatsApp", asks the diplomat), with his colleagues and friends, or the memory of his small town in Cuenca, La Puebla de Almenara; and he also carries out an analysis of international geopolitics: the role of Donald Trump during the pandemic, the massive demonstrations in the United States calling for racial justice, the policies of the European Union and the recovery fund or China's responsibility in the pandemic.

Chapter by chapter, the count of deaths close to the spolitician and diplomat (he was Spain's ambassador to the United States, to NATO and to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe), beginning with Count de Griñón and ending in a few emotional pages with the death of Consuelo Ruipérez of Cuenca, give names and surnames to the thousands of losses suffered in Spain as a result of the virus.

Rupérez does not mince his words. Criticism of the "social-communist" government is strong and constant. Nietzsche said: "There are no facts, only interpretations" and for the former senator and deputy for Cuenca, the deprivation of liberty during the toughest months of the pandemic was a kidnapping. 

"This is how I am. This is how we are. And in view of this I cannot resist claiming the oddity of having been the only Spanish citizen twice in his life, with this one it would be three times, a victim of a kidnapping. Calvo Sotelo reminded me of this on the fateful night of the coup on 23 February," when the man who was being voted in as president of the government that day told him that he was the only man to have been kidnapped twice: first by the left-wing abertzale and then by the right-wing coup leaders.

Making this daily diary of his chores, sports and film sessions accompanied by Allen, Hitchcock or Welles, and his thoughts may be an attempt to achieve certainties at a time when uncertainty overshadows the future.

"Before the beginning of the crisis, but when the possibility of its arrival was already in sight, and certainly before the confinement arrived and we could chat with friends and acquaintances without fear of contagion or various other misfortunes, the next people asked me if there was anything in my memory comparable to what had happened in China and was about to explode in Spain. My answer was, and still is, strictly negative.

We will not know what will happen in a few months. The pandemic has dismantled the political, economic and social reality and the future is in the air. But 'The Chronicles of the Pandemic' will allow us to return to the valuable testimony that marks an unprecedented period in the memory of citizens.