She tells us about her doings in the last year. It is one more of those encounters of the Venezuelan diaspora, those that happen when visiting friends abroad. You go for your friends and then you hear about this one and that other one, and “did you know that Ines is in a town close by too?” and eventually you end up in unknown bars, updating and being updated by people that you have not seen in couple of decades.
Now, I suppose that conversations of this kind are as old as humans had two legs to travel away. But our conversations evolve. Few years back it was about how to transfer money. Venezuelans seemed to have developed a sharp sense of international triangular transactions, portable internet to be activated on demand at venezuelan locations and diverse forms of valuation trade. Now the conversation has moved onwards in time, with our own age. Now it is about care, and the ways we all handle aging parents, familiar responsibilities and feelings, when spread throughout the world. My memory register a shade of this, when my nuclear family was in Venezuela and my grandmothers shuttle between caracas and Buenos Aires, at least for few years. But now it seems to me that everybody has somebody in some other country that needs care, or that wants to provide care. If we were experts in valuta transfers, now we are studying the transferring of care across complex networks of friends and family spread in the world.
And all this in the end, or perhaps the middle, of a pandemic.
So I asked her, after sharing some of our stories, how is she herself doing. And then again, I hear that for the ones spared from COVID19, things are on and upwards. Here in Spain the first confinements were much stricter than in The Netherlands, but also here there is much more nature to be in, much nature that has rebound in the time that it was left alone. After seeing weird videos of boars taking over the night life of Barcelona, or the ones with wild sheep running amok in the streets, I hear tales of friendly foxes, night hiking trails shared with stars and perhaps one companion, long times for reflexion and contemplation. Many relationships were broken in these times of isolation and confinement, and yet we might be rebounding, changed but stronger, perhaps even with a renewed sense of our place in nature
Never mind that the COP26 has been a fracas without clear results.