Monday 25 May 2020

While the future hides behind a mask

Allow me to contemplate the past few weeks, as I sit out on the balcony on a pleasant Roman evening. Down below, people go past, every few minutes, in masks, jogging or walking a dog, or talking on a phone, or a family on bikes. Slightly less often, a screaming ambulance passes on the main road. They do that all day long. In the cool of the evening, less pollen floats past than in the afternoon. Less trash, too.

On May the 4th, Italy exploded out of lockdown. In Rome, crowds sang in the streets. Cars honked to the tune of "Volare". Yesterday it was cold winter. Today it is scorching summer.


Perhaps I exaggerate. The ability to step outside in the morning, cross the road to the neighbourhood bar, greet for the first time in months the barista delighted to be back in operation, and return home with a takeaway coffee, passing shops that yesterday were only shutters, and people moving with a spring in their step, even if you can't see the smile under their masks -- that experience produces euphoria that distorts reality.

What is the reality? Are all these people busy spitting the virus at each other? Are all those Roman noses hanging over the tops of masks hoovering up droplets of disease, and powering up a devastating second wave? Isn't that what all those ambulance sirens mean? Or do they merely reflect an excess of car accidents because the locals are out of practice gesticulating while steering? Either way, the sirens are mere anecdotal evidence. Perhaps the numbers will continue to drift gently downwards. Perhaps it is enough to wear a mask -- properly! -- and veer around strangers as if they smell like they just lost their balance over a seatless public toilet.

Are Bruno's months of peace nearly over?
If I have correctly misread the Wikipedia page on 20th century philosophy, reality is irrelevant: perceptions are everything. And don't forget Chomsky, yabbering that perceptions are plugged directly into the pronouncements of governments and the media. Deliberate all you want about the best and safest way to behave, in the end it makes little difference. When people are allowed outside, they will go outside. When everyone you meet out there is wearing a mask, you will wear a mask, too.

Back in February, it was only the paranoid ignorant dolts who wore masks. Hadn't they heard that they offered no protection at all? In March masks were only for assholes who snatched them directly off the faces of selfless doctors. As April progressed, the pharmacies stocked up, and we could go back to agonising over the sort of ethical dilemmas we were more familiar with: which mask is best for the environment?

Now we are accustomed to them. It used to take half an hour to prepare to leave the apartment. Now the mask goes on instinctively.

I am eager to see the city again, amid the uncertainty of just what is safe.

One day I took the bus into central Rome, for the first time since lockdown began. Only a few of the seats were available to sit on; the rest had signs labelling them as forbidden. The front section of the bus was sealed off with a chain, to keep passengers away from the driver. Whenever someone got on the bus, they looked around, realised that there was nowhere to sit, and all of the standing passengers -- there were never more than four on my journey -- would quietly move to be equidistant from each other. Somewhere just inside the city walls a seat became free. When we reached Via Nazionale, everyone got off, and I was so surprised that I got off, too. From there I was on foot.

The centre of Rome turns out to be the safest place to go. There is no-one there. Shops are slowly opening, but the shops are all for tourists, and the only tourist is me. The litter has come back, too, although now it is mostly discarded surgical masks and gloves, either blue rubber, or those dreaded supermarket plastic bags.

Translation: who's afraid of pickpockets?
On another occasion I took the 64 from Piazza Venezia, through the city and across the Tiber to the Vatican. Tourist guidebooks refer to this route as the "pickpocket express". Picking my pocket would be quite a feat on a bus with six passengers. This summer the pickpockets are going to have nothing to do but commiserate with the prostitutes. Perhaps over Zoom.

One evening I drive the family into the city for a walk. Traffic is almost non-existent, and parking is surreal. I can park within 30 seconds' walk of the Colosseum; the only other car is a disconsolate taxi. We walk up the Palatine Hill. It probably hasn't been this quiet since Clement VI took a stroll up here, also pondering plague.

It is hard to believe that the number of new cases will continue to fall. They didn't just open up parks, and restaurants for takeaway -- they also opened factories. As a privileged academic, I have never been inside a factory, but my collection of Industrial-Revolution-era lithographs assure me that factories are dirty, crowded places with poor ventilation, and each of the miserable men who work in them lives with his wife, grandparents, and seven children, in one basement room. If the factories are open, the numbers must shoot up.

And yet they do not. On the 18th more shops open, including restaurants and hairdressers. The restaurants are empty -- we are not sure if we are patronising them to offer support, or just because this is our only chance before they all close down -- but the hairdressers are packed. And yet, another week later, the seemingly inevitable surge has not yet arrived.

Could it be that masks, and keeping our distance, and liberal application of hand sanitiser -- and the other myriad means to be careful and diligent -- really are enough?

It is difficult to dare to hope.


Previously in Rome

B.C. (Before Coronavirus)
A Letter from Rome
Certified Mail
All Roads

A.D. (After Doomsday)
March 10, 2020: Rome Goes Viral
March 18, 2020: Locked down, and going out
March 27, 2020: Lockdown for Dummies
April 7, 2020: The Water Carrier
April 17, 2020: Numbers
April 30, 2020: Liberation Day

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