2020 · Christian Ives Solis
RECORD IV — 2020: the contract appears
I turned on my phone. The white light blinded me for a second. At first, I did not read anything. I felt the weight of the device in my hand first, as if before bringing news it wanted to remind me that it, too, was an object.
Then the pandemic arrived.
The world entered that strange mode where the days seemed to repeat themselves with varying degrees of confinement. Fear sanitized into numbers and hand gel. I was still working in kitchens, which in those months was a strange form of essentiality: the planet suspended and, even so, someone still had to keep chopping, cleaning, setting up, sending out service. I was not exactly comfortable, but I had cash flow.
In June 2020, Claudio asked me for financial help.
There was no drama. No excessive justification. It was a brief, contained request, made with that sobriety that sometimes weighs more than crying. I understood what it meant to ask for help like that, especially from someone accustomed to holding himself up alone.
—Give me a few days, I said.
Within a week, the money was in his account.
Seven hundred euros.
The figure stuck to his name.
Months later, during a birthday gathering on Zoom, the transfer changed texture.
Aracely stepped away for a moment, and Claudio and I were left alone on two screens: me in the United States, him in Spain. The blue light of the monitor gave his face an almost clinical tone. You could hear the laptop humming. Every so often, a notification cut through the air with that brief, clinical sound machines make when they remind you they are still on.
We talked about lockdown, about work, about that life reduced to interiors and blurred schedules. And at some point, the money came up.
I said it without raising my voice: