A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future
The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown
in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a
letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions
people are likely to go through over the coming weeks. I am writing to you from
Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be
in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance.
We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a
few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the
same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s
only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood.
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we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were
told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But
soon you’ll be too busy for that. First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it
will be one of the few last things that you can still do. You’ll find dozens of
social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in
fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few
days. You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon
find you don’t really feel like reading any of it. You’ll eat again. You will
not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy. You’ll
have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom…
Advertisement You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the
realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you
like a punch in the chest. Old resentments and falling-outs will seem
irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so
as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes.
You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they
don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted
streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how
societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these
thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again. You will put on weight.
You’ll look for online fitness training. You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot.
You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always
taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the
universe and of it all. You will make appointments in the supermarket queues
with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while
abiding by the social distancing rules. You will count all the things you do not
need. The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total
clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises. Literati who had been
omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some
will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy
that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked,
instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and
clairvoyant. Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for
planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will
also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because
of the halved CO2 emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month? You
will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose
or a miserable affair. You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you
saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But
we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I
Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of
Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.#Many
of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as
lockdown is over is file for divorce. Many children will be conceived. Your
children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give
you joy. Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to
fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.
You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU. You’ll want to
cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps. You will be told that society
is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be
true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an
individual part of a larger whole.#italyItaly
