[D66] A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future

[Antid Oto]

A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future
By
Francesca Melandri
theguardian.com
5 min
View Original


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.

As 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…

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.

Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house 
with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be 
the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your 
job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat 
the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the 
same for everyone: it never was.

At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will 
share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves 
so as not to burden them with it too.

You will eat again.

We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s 
just small-scale fortune-telling. We are very low-key seers.

If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is 
unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all 
of this is over, the world won’t be the same.

© Francesca Melandri 2020