Day Ten

It is not easy to lock down in a small apartment with teenagers. And not for a day, or for a week, but for the forseeable future. 

Especially in the spring, teenagers are like maple trees with rising sap, and and keeping them serene, and the family sane, requires previously untapped resources. The family dog is one escape valve because walking this quadruped allows kids a brief burst of freedom onto the street, but no more than 200 meters from their home.  

This family dog has been out five times today, and is recovering. Very soon he will go out for his sixth walk. These walks are short, but they are numerous.

The communal roof or the laundry drying terrace is another place to break out with kids, a segment of the building that many Italians who live in apartment houses never considered, or visited, though somewhere they probably possessed a rusting key to a creaking door that opened into this magic land.

In tempi di coronavirus, suddenly the roof is a place of greatest desirability. A friend in Naples told me how the eight families in his 1920s palazzo have organized a WhatsApp group that coordinates roof hours in time slots for each family. Assuming the weather is fair (nearly always in Naples), from 8 to 9:30 AM the family from the third floor have their turn, taking up their six month old baby, their Moka espresso pot and cups, and a notepad on which they make their shopping list. They bring a blanket and sit on the floor so the baby can play : they also make use of the laundry line here, which no one previously knew existed, and dates (says my friend) from the period of the last war. Before they leave they make use of the large bottle of rubbing alcohol left by the door and the paper towels and disinfect the door knob (since it was they that opened the door). At 9:30 AM comes Signor Carmine and his wife, both with walkers and wearing blue face masks, and their daughter, also in a mask, who brings up folding chairs for everyone. And so it goes, one party replacing the other, everyone being respectful and fairly precise about “osservando il proprio turno” (observing your allocated hour.) Quite typically one party is leaving as another party is coming in, but that is not a problem as there is a deep indentation right next to the elevator shaft that is a perfect place to retreat (while exchanging brief pleasantries) so as not to intrude into your neighbor’s mandatory minimum 1.5 meter personal space.

My friend was so happy that he was granted the lunch hour slot, between 12:30 and 2 PM. Accordingly, at 12:29, his 18 year old daughter and 19 year old son bolt up four flights of steps for their shift, “the kids like wild rabbits”, while he takes the elevator. All three of them use a stool and the helter skelter television antennas to climb right onto the roof, where they lodge themselves against a cable TV dish on a little ledge. And my friend – with a gift for narration and oratory he said he never knew he had, and gesturing broadly across the bay of Naples for emphasis — tells his high strung teenagers stories from the Odyssey, drawing from his own grammar school education. He possesses a formidable treasure chest of information about the geography of Odysseus’s travels, and the places of his landfall, and his routes (and often he just makes them them up.) He wrote to me tonight saying “thank God Odysseus’ trip lasted ten years, I think we can last it out on the roof for at least a year.”)

He always remembers to bring up three robust sandwiches and three large bottles of beer. Yesterday his daughter, once ensconced in her usual spot among the roof tiles, stripped off jeans and hoody to reveal a very brief strawberry-studded bikini. “It would be nice to have a little tan”, she told her father, and then asked, “Papa’, are you serious, only one beer per person ?”

It has been ten days now of national lock down. Many people I know have lost track of what day it is. One friend from Florence carries around the house with her an index card which has the date, the day of the week and a brief description of what she did yesterday. (“Yesterday : Rain, made lentil soup, sewed up rip in the dog’s bed, lunch, worked on translation, nap, bought sponges and milk and dog food, sang on terrace at 18.00, news, exercise bike for 40 minutes, virtual aperitivo with office friends, more news, bed.”)

One of my mother’s oldest friends, now 86, told me tonight : “I long for when we Italians stop dying like this : dying not at home, with our loved ones, and with funerals, and burials in our cemeteries, near our parents, but dying because the death virus comes and seizes us, and takes away our last breaths, and no one is with us at all.”

She apologized for being so dramatic, and then said goodnight as she wanted to watch the news.

To remind myself of how things were – so very recently that I can reach back and touch the memory without even closing my eyes – here is one memory. A table on a summer’s evening, outside, against a terra cotta wall; the clink of forks ; tables pressed companionably close together; laughter; and the deep, sweet Italian sense of general well being.

A domani.