Notes from a lock-down

Monday 9 March
I’m sitting in a bar in Tuoro. Tuoro is an unexciting town by the shores of Lake Trasimeno. There are lots of people in here, working people who have probably been having lunch here daily for decades and aren’t about to stop. But they’re standing far away from each other, even further than the one metre stipulated in the ordinanza taped to the walls and bar counter.

In comes a policeman to make sure we are being coronavirus-conscious. There’s a family at one table, kids sitting on knees and everyone squashed together. The policeman asks them to move further apart or leave. The bar lights up. “But it’s a family!” “What do you mean?” “What difference does it make?” But the policeman is adamant. That’s the rule, and it’s for everyone.

And so the family leaves – perhaps a little shaken but not, it appears, with ill-will. Because those are the rules, and Italy is – on the whole – abiding by them.

Because – on the whole – Italians do.

Wednesday 11 March
When the sindaco (mayor) of CdP put his first coronavirus bulletin on the town council website last week (one case, since risen to six), there were negative comments: the ones screaming that if he admitted there were cases here we’d never have another tourist; the ones attacking him for jumping on the hysterical bandwagon. Has the town council been monitoring and sifting? I couldn’t say, but the comments since have been praising, accepting, grateful. Until yesterday, that is, when the mood shifted.

Since the whole of Italy was put on lockdown on Monday night, voices have been raised again. “What do you mean we can go to work? Lock us in our houses! Don’t let us out!” People are begging for more clamp-downs, not fewer.

You probably have to know this country well to believe that that was the only response to expect; but it was. Not happy-go-lucky, not che sarà sarà. Iron-clad rules give structure, reassurance and solace to most. And it gives something to undermine to those few who prefer to take that path.

It feels like the enormity of the thing has been creeping up on us slowly but… was it only last Sunday that we actually went out to dinner? With friends, in a restaurant? We were cautious: we didn’t kiss cheeks or touch, and we sat as far away from each other as we could. And there was room to do so, because in this oh-so-popular local place where getting a booking is usually a chore, only five tables were occupied.

The owner, a friend, almost wept when he came to thank us for showing solidarity. He said few of his faithful following had even bothered to call to find out how things were going. But yesterday when he and I were standing in front of a CdP supermarket, waiting for our turns to be let in (the number of shoppers allowed inside is limited) he told me he’d closed his place. Under the new rules he could only do lunch anyway. Better at that point to take forced holidays. “And the ragazzi were scared,” he said of his staff. Waiting on people who have been who-knows-where, in contact with who-knows-whom: I don’t blame them.”

Thursday 12 March
And now we’ve taken another stride down lock-down road. Food shops are open, chemists’ shops are open, tobacconists are there to steady you with a nicotine hit if the whole situation becomes too surreal to cope with. Because with just about every other commercial activity imaginable now shuttered, it is kind of surreal, like living in suspended animation. But it’s also serene somehow, like a never-ending Sunday.

Though not for me. I’m working. I consulted a friend who’s a nurse. She told me that being in the open air, moving earth to shape a new garden away from the rest of mankind save for my colleague Giuseppe with his diggers was the best kind of place to be. And so we press on. This gives me time to muse as we conjure planting banks and meadows out of the aftermath of a building site.

To move about – even, now, on foot – you must carry an auto-certificazione – an official form stating where you’re going and why you are not safely at home. If you don’t meet an official requirement (work, food shopping, medical or other emergency), or if you can’t stand up your claim, it will cost you €206 if you’re caught.

You can’t stand and chat with a group of people in the street, you can’t visit friends, you can’t go for anything but the shortest of walks (unless you have a dog with you, and there are rumours – probably unfounded – that people are renting out their dogs), you can’t go for anything except the quickest bike ride around your neighbourhood, alone.

This is, of course, a shocking reversal of everything we have ever considered our right as members of a free, liberal, capitalist society. We’re being told we can’t earn, we can’t shop except for basics, we have no access to services (if your hair needed cutting when the measures came in, get used to your over-long locks: they’re here to stay), we can’t assemble, we can’t make our way around as free citizens. But we don’t mind. Well, on the whole we don’t. The vast majority embraces these draconian regulations. They wonder why it took so long for them to be introduced. We’re happy and willing to waive everything we hold dearest to flatten the bell curve of new cases.

I’ve been thinking of the native peoples of south America when the Spanish and Portuguese arrived, of the smallpox and syphilis and typhoid and indeed the common cold that swept through those people without defences and all but annihilated them. I’ve been thinking of the Spanish flu in 1918 which perhaps killed 100 million war-ravaged people – in pain and terror, without our ICUs and ventilators and palliative care. But also perhaps with greater resignation, not having our 21st-century expectations that there should be a cure for everything, and without mass media making our heads throb with information which is often bewildering and even more often half-digested by an emotionally overwhelmed public.

I’ve been thinking too about the brilliance of those through history who got it, despite the fact that they couldn’t have had any conception of a thing so minuscule or lethal as a virus or a bacteria or a microbe. Like the Venetians who in the 15th century realised ships should stand off their shores for 40 days (quaranta giorni, hence the term quarantine) before docking to check the Black Death didn’t break out on board. (Earlier, in the 14th century, the Serene Republic had imposed a 30-day wait off their port-city of Ragusa but the term trentina never stuck.) How long would that great trading Republic have survived without this flash of genius?

Seventeenth-century Florence has been on my mind too, with its extraordinary measures to keep the death rate from plague to 12 percent, as opposed to 61 percent in Verona. What will it take for local authorities to start sending us food parcels? “Each quarantined person received a daily allowance of two loaves of bread and half a boccale (around a pint) of wine. On Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, they were given meat. On Tuesdays, they got a sausage seasoned with pepper, fennel and rosemary. On Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, rice and cheese were delivered; on Friday, a salad of sweet and bitter herbs.” I could isolate on that. A salad of sweet and bitter herbs sounds comforting.

Saturday 14 March
We were steady at eight cases when the CdP town council put out its bulletin yesterday afternoon. Apart from the first couple of cases, the others had already been in isolation for days. There’s an impressive amount of work being put into tracing and quarantining anyone who might have come within contagion range of positives. If the quarantining job has really been done well, the infection curve should flatten. As far as I know only two of our positives are severe enough to have been taken to hospital.

In the mean time, in our suspended animation, we’re fast developing new habits and attitudes. Who said that the evolution of behaviour moves at glacial speed?

First I noticed the odd strolling formations, the groups of two or three who would usually have taken their country walks arm in arm or at the very least side by side. Suddenly they were spread across the whole width of lanes as they walked, conversation flying at top volume. But we’re well past that now. Walking is out. One dog-owning friend told me that a woman in an isolated house yelled at her to stay far away yesterday as she walked her dog along a country track. That’s the only incident of intolerance I’ve heard of. Yesterday our lane – one that goes from nowhere to nowhere through nothing but the utmost beauty, and thus is unlikely to have any kind of patrols along it – was positively humming with walkers. I mean… at least five people appeared as I weeded my vegetable garden. When they spotted me, they smiled wanly and about-turned.

What we’re developing is a remarkable shared sense of understanding, accompanied by a wonder at those who just don’t get it. “Come to Paris! It’s extraordinary!” a friend in that city posted on Facebook over photos of empty streets. “No don’t,” I wrote back. “Stay at home.”

“You writing from Italy? Because no one else understands,” shot back a complete stranger. And it’s true.

One of the travel editors at the Telegraph asked me to write a piece on the situation. “It’s amazing that basically half the world is now telling Italians they can’t travel there. What do people think about this?” was the brief. “Really?” was my reply. “Really? You honestly think that’s what we’re worried about?”

A friend in the UK wrote to say that she was undecided about whether she should go on her planned skiing holiday next week. Holiday? Why would you even dream such a thing was possible? It seems so unthinkable now, something you did in another life. But try to explain that to someone who’s not inside this thing and they suspect panic might be setting in, that you might have lost it slightly.

Have we? Honestly, I don’t think so. Among the people I know (obviously, my friend-demographic contains a limited selection of society but I don’t think, from listening to the radio etc, that in this case things vary all that much) there’s a placidly mild acceptance that everything has to be looked at with new eyes. Who touched that object before me? How long would the virus last on that surface? Who else has that person over there come into contact with? It’s not panic, or at least in my case it isn’t – it’s just a new way of assessing the things around you, and taking adequate measures as a consequence.

The idea that you might opt to venture out among even further challenges just seems ridiculous. The idea that you too could be infected and be at the root of further contagion niggles at the back of your mind. (I have been introduced to a new favourite word: paucisintomatico, displaying a paucity of symptoms.)

But people who aren’t in it simply can’t put themselves into our shoes. I think you have to be already on lock-down-think to feel the full impact of stories like the man who emerged from his time on the ventilator to find that he had missed the funerals of his parents, infected – and to all intents and purposes killed – by him when he went round to check they were doing all right.

Or of my friend whom I talked to yesterday, a doctor in charge of gynecology at a medium-sized hospital in Umbria – and Umbria, remember, is only marginally affected by Covid-19 so far. She is practically alone in her department now: her nurses and paramedic staff have been seconded to virus operations. Her wards, too, are on the list of emergency spillover facilities: if the thing blows up here, her patients will have to travel far to have their babies (this Lancet article – only tangentially related – is fascinating on gendered virus responses) and she will no longer be an experienced gynecologist, but a simple life-safer. Each morning she dons gloves, mask, full-body suit, second gloves, second mask. She spends her days trying to explain to whole family groups who turn up spontaneously with minor queries why they simply can’t behave in that way any more (“but why can’t I come to the hospital? “what’s wrong with bringing the children along with me? look at them, they’re so healthy…”) Then she returns in the evening to a husband who has been severely ill recently, knowing that he is unlikely to survive any contagion she might accidentally carry home with her. And here, as I say, the peak has yet to come.