How can I convince my wife that I am working while looking out the window? – Joseph Conrad asked himself at the beginning of the last century. Instead, I ask myself: how can I explain to my daughter that, when I look out the window, I see the end of an era? The era in which she was born but not known, the era of the longest and most distracted period of peace and prosperity enjoyed by the history of humanity. I live in Milan, until yesterday the most advanced, rich and brilliant city in Italy, one of the most desirable in the world. The city of fashion, design and Expo. The city of the aperitif, which gave the world the wrong Negroni and happy hour and which today is the world capital of Covid-19, the capital of the region which alone has thirty thousand confirmed infections and three thousand dead. A lethality rate of 10 percent, the coffins stacked in front of the hospital pavilions, a vaporous pestilence that hovers over the spiers of its Cathedral as well as over the cursed cities of ancient Greek tragedies. Ambulance sirens have become the soundtrack of our day; our nights are tormented by adult men frying in their sleep: What is it, are you feeling well ?; Nothing, not nothing, go back to sleep. Thousands of their friends, relatives, acquaintances cough up to spit blood, alone, out of any statistics and any assistance, in the beds of their studios furnished by famous architects.
Coronavirus, the night with the ambulance volunteers: the photos
If, at this moment, I look out the window, I see a poor convenience store managed with admirable industriousness by Sinhalese immigrants. Until yesterday it was a singular anomaly in this semi-central district, and in its elegant way, a discordant note. Today a place of pilgrimage. THEIn the queue for bread in front of his bare shop windows, I see men and women who until yesterday disdained him because they lack their favorite brand of bran. They stand, supported by the discipline of discouragement, at a distance of one from the other, at the same time threatening and threatened, with makeshift masks, made from scraps of fabric with which, until yesterday, they protected the exotic plants of the their terraces, frayed gauze hanging from their faces with the limp melancholy of remnants of a finite era.
I see these sad men and women, incongruous to themselves. I look at them. I have no intention of diminishing or deriding them. They are adult men and women, yet on the masks they show the dismayed gaze of deprived children. They arrived completely unprepared for the appointment with their history and yet, precisely for this reason, they are brave women and men. They were part of the most affluent, protected, long-lived, best dressed, nourished and cared for piece of humanity that has ever trodden the face of the earth and, now in their fifties, they are queuing for bread. Their apprenticeship in life was a long apprenticeship in television unreality. They were in their twenties when they witnessed the first live television war in human history from their living room, thirty when they were targeted on television screens by media terror, forty when the odyssey of the damned of the land landed on the beaches of their holidays. All fateful appointments that could not miss. The great scenes of their existence have been consumed in media events, they have been warriors in the living room, bathers on the beaches of migrants, veterans traumatized by evenings spent in front of the TV. And now I’m in line for bread.
Their childhood was a Japanese manga, their youth a pool party – remember? It was Saturday evening and we went to a party; it was always Saturday evening and we always went to a party – their adulthood is a tribute to a bland and ferocious trinity: work frenzy, ecstasy of the outlet, sublime from the spa. They lived well, better than anyone else, but the more they lived, the more inexperienced they were in life: never known the bite of war, never touched by the tragic feeling of existence, never a question about their place in the universe. And now, at fifty years old, with already white hair, prolapsing abdomen and anxiety that hinders their lungs, they are queuing for bread. Compulsive tourists, have traveled the world without ever leaving home and now their home marks the boundaries of the world for them; they have suffered almost only internal dramas and now the drama of history catapults them on the firing line of a global pandemic; they have a beach house and the latest generation mobile phone yet they are now in line for bread; they had more dogs than children and now risk their lives to take their poodle to piss.
I look at them from my study window as I write. I watch them as deaths rise to four thousand, while the abscissa of contagion grows exponentially, while I hold my breath so as not to inhale the air of time. I look at them and I feel sorry for them because they were the luckiest generation in human history but, then, touched them to live the end of their world just when they started to get too old to hope for a world to come. Yet they will have to do it, they will, I’m sure. They will have to imagine the world they have been forced to experience in these days: a world that questions itself on how to educate their children, on how to preserve a breathable air, on how to take care of themselves and others. An era ended, another will begin. Tomorrow. Today we are queuing for bread. Today the newspapers headline: hold on Milan! And Milan resists. I glance one last look out the window at my 50-year-old peers, my Milanese fellow citizens, my suddenly aged boys: how big and pathetic they are with their runner shoes and their surgical masks! I feel pity, I understand them, I pity them. In a few seconds he will be in the queue with them.
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