I ordered dinner by tele-delivery. It will have to be like that, in these infectious times. No picnics, no get-togethers, no creamy beers, unless you install a barrel at home, which is not a bad idea.

But, as I was saying, I ordered dinner and the deliveryman arrived with the cardboard box in one arm and the credit card machine in the other. As I approached him, with my card in hand, I thought: This guy spends the whole day offering this machine to other people to type in their passwords.

There are dozens of index fingers a day, hundreds a week, maybe thousands a month. The chance that one of these fingers is contaminated is great, it is immense, and I, here, am about to press that filthy keyboard with my aseptic indicator, which has just been sanitised with alcohol gel.

The deliveryman was smiling when I stopped in front of him. He was a nice guy. I smiled back, but with apprehension twisting the corners of my mouth. I looked at the machine again. The keyboard was worn out from use. In the spaces between the numbers, I could see what my grandmother would contemptuously call "speck".

And in the midst of all the white numbers, I could almost see the corona balls on top of one another, little killer meatballs waiting for yet another host.

We exchange "good nights", my eyes on the machine. Then, without hesitation, he took my credit card and, fast as a rattlesnake, inserted it into the machine. I quietly exclaimed, "Oh, Jesus!" He typed in the amount and held his arm out to me, the machine between his fingers. I looked from it to him and from him to it. It was time for a decision.

What should I do? I had no cash to pay for the food. Besides, even if I did, my card was already inside that damned virus colony and the deliveryman had held it with the same fingers that all day pressed the horror keyboard. There was no way out. Not now.

If I had been an American, I would have been wearing rubber gloves. Americans are like that, 100 per cent security. I don't blame them, even though they sometimes exaggerate. But it is better to exaggerate than to take risks, isn't it?

I decided that I would buy rubber gloves and wear them for the next order. Now, however, there was no way out. I would have to press at least six of the feared numbers on the keyboard.

I took a deep breath. I concentrated.

And I went. I did. I typed.

The deliveryman took the machine back, then checked. I think you typed the wrong password, he said, and stuck the machine out again for me. No! NO!

I typed again. This time, correctly. He handed me the cardboard box and the credit card, we said goodbye and I headed straight for a big tube of alcohol gel in the kitchen. The food was good, but I didn't forget the machine. No dinner is perfect when we live in infectious times.

I don't know how Gabriel Garcia Marquez managed to love in times of cholera.