In Italy we’re in the third week of lockdown now. People are still friendly, patient, polite, considerate, but tempers are fraying. For children and adolescents, this is the fourth week without school. The fourth week of patchy online teaching, clueless parents, absent grandparents – the latter being the ones who have to be protected from the mythical beast of spring 2020. The empty streets, the silence, even the absence of traffic – all this is beginning to feel leaden and bleak. I look at the village in this dove grey dusk in March and wonder – shall we ever return to thinking first and foremost of Paul Celan’s poem when we read or hear the C-word?
Nevertheless, it’s good to be in the country. The deserted streets of a city must be even harder to bear. People have their gardens here. There’s chatting across the fence. My eighty-year-old neighbour is worried about his potatoes. They should’ve been planted during the last lunar phase – potato planting only under waning moon – but his field is three kilometres away. He’s worried about running into a control officer. Potatoes wouldn’t be a good enough reason for the ‘Autocertificazione’, the form one has to fill out and carry for every errand now, in case of a police control. ‘We’ll have to wait’, my neighbour says, with some sadness. ‘Perhaps we’ll just plant them under the luna giovane’ – the young moon. What a beautiful expression, pronounced with such melancholy. Meanwhile, a cold wind has descended from the north. The light is very bright, and the mountains seem so near, very blue, every crag and rocky excrescence visible. The patches of snow on the peaks glistening. A world beyond reach for lack of a good enough reason.
Esther Kinsky is the author of River and Grove, a novel of grief, love and landscape, published in April 2020.
