On Wednesday, 2 April, the number of Covid-19 cases in France as a whole, formally diagnosed in an institution or with symptoms serious enough to get them taken into care, stands at 59,105. At a total of 4,503 deaths so far, Covid 19-related mortality is reported as 10% every 24 hours. In Ile de France, the region of Paris and its suburbs, there are 10,273 people hospitalized, up 63% since 28 March. Of these, 2,301, about 23%, are in intensive care.
Government strategy has assumed that the population had already been largely exposed to the virus by the time it began to take action. It has depended on mandatory confinement to slow rates of infection in the general public. Confinement has now been extended to 15 April. The ministry for health also announced plans to make testing widely available, linking it to a gradual wind down of general confinement. As for a possible end-date, the prime minister told parliament not to hold its breath.
A Decameron to call my own
Call me Boccaccio.
As in 1348, I just have to hunker down and wait it out, hoping I won’t be too poor to buy food and shelter when I can finally come out.
I am lonely, too.
WhatsApp and Facebook, Skype, jet planes, virus tests, free hospitals, big armies, on-line shopping, rational government, drones, shared posts, tech billionaires and free money don’t unmake the one any more than the science behind them has been able to undo the need for confinement.
Sometime after Tuesday, 17 March, morning – I can’t really say how much time after because I was so wrapped up in a time-gobbling scramble to put “on-line” the classes I teach – the everyday economy stopped and most of the usual noises off stopped along with it.
It was in that undefinable time between Tuesday morning, then, that I, they, he, she, you, we began living ce moment bizarre, this weird time.
“This”. As if pointing toward an ineffably complicated dream that hangs on and hangs on just out of the reach of sense, well after sleep has gone.
“Us”. In the stairwells and on the stoops, the neighbors and I realized we were hunkered down together. We wondered on the landings and in the little kid play area how best to social distance. Some unexplored magic transfigured the guy downstairs, the Bulgarian ex-dancer, the lady on the landing the-one-with the-lap-dog-you-know, the couple on the second floor, the bus driver … Monsieur Barre de là-bas, en haut, and more that I have not yet come to suspect, became “us”.
“Them”. We closed ourselves to étrangers à la residence for the duration of the health emergency. Somebody made up some bureaucratic-looking signs that tell them so. Now we have the view of our Atlas mountain conifers and root-knotted greensward all for our own eyes. Still, in the night, I sometimes hear rumors of music muffled, of warm, of heroic, talk, of giggles, of grunts, of the unmistakable clinks of crystal glasses refilled, of surreptitious feet, of sudden sharp midnight creaks on the stairs.
Somehow we decided to do like the Italians and Spaniards: Make some noise. So, at 8pm the us I’ve described go to the windows and onto balconies and applaud into the expanding twilight. It feels good to me. I’m stuck here. I look forward to it.
So, thinking that since he lives in Iran, where I imagine a body might need more cheering up than in less beset locations, it might cheer him up too, I suggested applauding to Sina Saberi. Sina is an admirable singer, actor and choreographer of contemporary performance as well as a person I like a lot.
Sina naturally asked me, What exactly we were applauding? To tell you the truth, the question once asked, I was flummoxed. All the same, I quickly tapped back: “Life”.
Applauding at my window, I see people and they see me. A figure who lives up high in B1 and I have recently begun waving. “Life”, apparently, (also) means showing I am, we are, alive.
At some point in the time since Tuesday, they closed the frontiers, canceled my train and now want papers I can’t get if I want to travel anyway. And were I to walk, as I swear to Karine I shall if, that would be bootless too. They have put armed police, big ruffians, most of them, at all the major crossroads.
I am not a miss-you, miss-you sort of person and I prefer, on the whole, being alone. But I do miss Karine now, after more than two weeks.
Every time I wake, it seems there is some new obstacle to seeing her again.
A dram of Grief has somehow distilled in the simple of Absence. There comes of this an alchemical solvent of despair and defiance, that, in contact with confinement here, boils up into desperation.
I wonder what other alchemies are fizzing and popping in all those figures I am sure to glimpse only once a day?
From the windows and balconies, on the landings, on the playgrounds, we say that things have now changed forever. So when ce moment bizarre moment finally sloughs off, what shape will the new world have, what shall we do about what is to be done there? What story will we then tell?
Hang on to your hats.
Be well. Stay safe.
Wonderful. Thank you. This is a fine time to recollect the Decameron.
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | April 05, 2020 at 12:03 PM