In Spain, confinement began on 15 March, 2020. At first, everyone was very upbeat about staying at home and forwarded humorous memes to their friends. (I used to receive 35 a day.) It was a way of saying that we were cool with what was happening and that we could cope with the disaster. Quarantine was going to be like a strange sort of vacation.
People made videos of themselves as they kneaded homemade bread or as they meticulously fashioned origami figures. Many participated in strenuous workout sessions in front of the television screen. If they were not worried about staying in shape, they engaged in Zen meditation on their terrace. The objective was to demonstrate one’s ability to creatively use spare time.
Those that were more musically inclined gave balcony shows that made their neighbors enthusiastically applaud or collectively shudder. Others of us wrote down our thoughts and posted them on Internet as a way to record these moments for posterity, and also to preserve our sanity.
We thought that it would be fun to work from home. Confinement would also allow us to spend more time with our partner and even show teachers that we could teach our children just as well or better at home than they could in the classroom.
Two months ago, we were fearless warriors engaged in a life-or-death combat on our living room sofas. By doing nothing, we were doing something, and it did not even require a great deal of effort. It was a like using those machines that promise instant weight loss in exchange for only attaching a few electrodes to thighs and abdomen.
If confinement had only lasted a month, we could have made it. However, that did not happen. Confinement dragged on and on until we finally had to look at our cell phone to remember which day it was. Time became an endless continuum that resembled the stream-of-consciousness writing in Virginia Woolf novels.
Our glorious home vacation turned into an enforced incarceration in a carnival Hall of Mirrors, where everything became distorted out of all recognition.
We discovered that being 24/7 with our partners was not all that it was cracked up to be. Confinement inexplicably transfigured our children into little monsters. Instead of a rewarding experience of self-fulfillment, working at home turned out to be twenty times more arduous and stressful than working at the office.
We gradually lost interest in creating culinary delights and began calling out for fast food delivery. Eventually, it even became a chore to go out on our balconies to clap for healthcare workers.
Finally, we realized that we had been deceived. This was not a race of 100 meters, but rather one of 10,000 meters. Instead of being sprinters like Usain Bolt, we were suddenly expected to be long-distance runners like Haile Gebrselassie.
It wasn’t fair. No one had told us that confinement would last until the end of June. If we had known, we might have had second thoughts about wasting so much bubbly energy and enthusiasm at the beginning of the race. Now our stamina had dwindled.
This state of affairs was reflected in the grocery line today. The people whom I usually talked to had begun to grumble. The topic of the morning was the possible arrival of a ‘second wave’ of Covid-19. After warning us for weeks that a second wave could inevitably crash on our shores, now the government was saying that a second wave might not happen at all.
Various opinions were expressed. The grocery social club was divided between those who believed the government’s optimistic predictions and those who thought that the government was lying.
This polarized division of opinion in our discussion group is nothing new. The people who believed the government were a retired cleaning lady and her caregiver daughter, who think that Pedro Sánchez walks on water because he is so handsome and wears aviator sunglasses as he surveys the country from the window of his private jet.
Those who did not believe him included a hotel receptionist, now living on unemployment checks, and a taxi driver wearing a mask embroidered with the Spanish flag, both of whom vote at the other end of the political spectrum.
However, this time there was a third group. There were three people who were simply sick of this whole mess and were not worried about a second wave. They argued that the country should open up, whatever happened. Let the chips fall where they may…. coronavirus be damned.
They said that we should forget about social distance and just carry on the same as before. The people that were vulnerable should simply stay at home, and if some of them happened to die, well…that was just their bad luck. They were collateral damage.
I was surprised. This was the first time that I had ever heard this opinion expressed in my neighborhood, and I found it troubling. Until now I had thought that this view only thrived across the ocean among certain sectors of the American public.
Nevertheless, there was still a difference. Here, this opinion seemed to have little relation with any deep-seated (possibly skewed) beliefs regarding personal freedom and independence. Unlike the protestors in America with Confederate flags and misspelled signs, these grocery-line people were simply exhausted. Covid-19 had suddenly appeared out of the sky, like a lightning bolt, and had shattered their lives. Not knowing how to deal with reality, they wanted to switch channels and tune in to another more agreeable reality.
They sincerely believed that we could just ignore Covid-19. If we continued on as before, the virus would simply go off in a huff and disappear. They thought that by lifting confinement, it would be possible to turn back the clock, and that their old lives would reappear…like magic. Some people might die, but a few lives would be worth the price.
I asked them whether they had lost any family, friends, or acquaintances, if they knew anybody among the coronavirus dead. They said no. And then we all understood. Their Hall of Mirrors had no reflections of ghosts.
