JB Rodríguez Aguilar has written a lyrical novella about the 2020 pandemic, Canyonlands: A Quarantine Ballad, and María Martínez Moreno and I translated it into English. It goes on sale today at Olympia Publishers and at Amazon.

It tells the story of an American photojournalist on his way home in March 2020 to his family in Chicago. Instead, the Covid-19 pandemic spreads, and he finds himself quarantined in a hotel room in Madrid, Spain. As he watches the statistics of illness and death rise, he retreats into memories of a trip years ago to a North American landscape that was a milestone in his career: Canyonlands National Park in Utah. This leads to a philosophic and personal chronicle of isolation.

JB is a talented photographer, and the book includes a photo essay of Canyonlands, a wilderness carved through layers of stone by the Colorado River and its tributaries.

An excerpt from the first section, in the hotel in Madrid:

…The sun set shortly after, forming a halo of crimsons, oranges, pinks and purples stenciled on the clouds. It was as if those cotton threads were suddenly splattered by the palette of an impressionist painter. He was used to reporting on such luminous landscapes, but the truth was he did not remember such intense sunsets in almost any other big city he had visited. At the same time, the afternoon was both an end and a beginning. It was the confirmation of the end of certain freedoms — for him and everyone in Spain — as well as the start of a new, vital next phase. Their new lives would be nourished by new rituals, like looking out from a balcony and clapping. Windows and balconies were called on to become the main elements of contact with the outside world and, because of that, they imposed a new order as well. They offered access to light and this, in turn, ordered the passage of time. The sunset came to symbolize the completion of each of the coming days.…