Every virologist story is a ghost story
“And do you think it makes you an impostor, that smallest fraction that others are given to see? Sure, you are an impostor, sure, what others see is never you. And you certainly know it, and you will certainly try to maneuver that part they see if you know it's only a part ".
David Foster Wallace, "Dear Old Neon"
He would like to tell her that he loves her, while his nose wrinkles, wrinkles and snot joins the tears, and all around is a carnival of white overalls, masks, safety devices against pandemic regulations, hygienic wipes, tendons. plasticized.
There is glass, which is not really glass, it is plexiglass to hear it well, feeling its moist and bendable consistency on which his pain-streaked face is painfully reflected, his eyes broken in this eternal uninterrupted instant, and the voices, every single voice, the blasphemies, the laughter, the suffering, the mute and less mute requests for help, hospitality, in arms that will not be there, faded into the totalitarian prohibition of hugs and human warmth.
He will be able to see her, of course, the head physician tells him, but only on the phone. He says it with the voice of the state. A Leviathan only smaller, balding and with a folder on which he has to scribble the essential data to celebrate that marriage of digital death, while behind his back nurses are recording a sarcastic video against the "deniers", and to do so they go to bang on him humming and wobbling the Macarena , without apologizing because they are too busy with their ethical mission.
He and his mother must hear and see each other and not live on the smartphone screen, two meters away, separated by the plexiglass and the bureaucracy. There is no longer any respect even for ghosts, pixelated like in a Japanese porn movie, emotions floating in the sound of oxygen machines, while nurses mimic their anti-denier karaoke.
And when he exits that aisle, clearing the pearly corridor with the silver handrails peeled from the spending review , and without anyone, patient, doctor, nurse, security guard, other patient or relative, giving him a nod, a motion, a look of sympathy , in the end it is said that she has finished suffering, but she does not believe it.
He doesn't really believe it. He is the first to know. These are those phrases that you refract by yourself to get some comfort and not feel your bones breaking under the insurmountable weight of a loss, when you gaze at the reflection of your face between timid lights and the veiled flesh of the first sunset without the person who it has been dear to us and wondering, in the depths of our soul, what we are, what we have become and if this is the cost of the new normal that we will live.
They denied the dignity of the burial. Of being able to cry freely. They dictated rules on how to masturbate. About how to sob. On how the virus expands in every environment, in sinuous and elliptical spirals of contagion between the earth and the sky, but not on public transport.
Every single day will end up reminding him of that moment, every unspoken word, every silence in the night watches. The possible and the underlying, the longed for and the evoked.
He comes out knowing that the world out there is enveloped in a pandemic. There is nothing more.
A desert of the real, cold, inhospitable and in perennial penumbra, crossed by the incursions of virologists.
The night, the night when he cuts through the street sprinkled with neon and piss, thinking about what he has lost, he does not comfort himself with the cartons of alcohol or with the prayers on the radio, and he does not challenge the curfew for a delayed sense of transgression, because God mine as Vaneigem said to transgress taboos so economic progress commands, that is the crap of emaciated drug dealers from the social center, but only for existential logic, to break the isolationist apnea of a gray and silent house, distant steps, fragmented as a hive of solitude : the halogen lamp planted towards the television on which virologists compare themselves to Galileo persecuted by the Inquisition, virologists attack politicians and throw arrows, virologists know everything about science but nothing about life, virologists say that no one is starving, virologists who soothe the belly hairy of the pandemic as if it were the sacred cow with a thousand nipples, virologists beyond the mirror of the imagination launch into catastrophic hypotheses and e they turn golden calves to the technical logic of science.
A background noise. Continuous. Inexorable. Like the nocturnal dripping of a leaking faucet, and a croaking radio tuned out of phase. Virologists even in dreams. To wedge into the slightly amber shades of its existence.
There is no other God but the virus. And it would mean that they are wrong, but there is a dog, a silent barking and screaming, hydrophobic and crazy, who spits gall against life, and concretes the temple of pandemic loneliness, preventing him from expressing that thought of his.
They are the virus groupies , the anti-life watchdogs, those who are buried inside the house and can stay there because they have a guaranteed salary or pension, those who have not been out for fourteen months, those who go to vaccinate, pretending to be what they don't it is, boasting the right of the new aristocracy of blood and pandemic, who refreshes on the screen to follow, even if they were the road works, all the data of the infections, of the dead, and perhaps of the healed, but these are less important: outside from the window, only omens, chimeras and announcements from virologists.
Virologists in the press.
Radio Virologists.
Virologists on television.
Virologists in the political forums.
X-Factor Virologists.
Virologists on the Island of the Famous.
Virologists and Fedez.
Virologists in porn magazines.
Virologists on the dark web.
Those trucks in the Bergamo night were not exaggerations. Neither the coffins stacked and abandoned, it was not the bat from which it all started, nor the moon that accompanies him as he knows that that video recorded on his cellphone is all that remains of his mother's memory. But the exaggeration is this epiphany of people in shirts, when they remember to wear it, who complain about journalists spending their time being interviewed by journalists.
Virologists don't care. Virologists impose sacrifices, invoke more meat matured under the weight of despair, virologists indicate aperitifs as if they were projections of death camps and funerary smashans whose ashes flood the cities, virologists without feelings and without any form of empathy, virologists who they break love, pity, compassion, virologists who mock the pain of the young and the loneliness of the elderly.
It is not the world that we have lost that matters but the idea of what could have been and what virologists have imposed could not be, because it reopened, they say, too soon.
After fourteen months.
Too soon.
Too much.
Soon.
And now there is the virologist who yells at the president of a region, accusing him of doing politics when in reality he has been doing politics for months, heated up with the sophisms and lexical acrobatics of a gnostic magazine ' Death to the World' , guest of any pulpit and any audience, and he is sure of it, even the poster, the greatest hits , the best hits, the 'blastas' as they say with a neologism for people of very good mouth, and the virologist promises new variants, new sufferings, new disasters, new glassy flames in which the flesh torn by loneliness will burn, he says that the vaccines may not be enough, that we will have to suffer again and remain silent. Maybe on your knees.
A religion. With these know-it-all fortune tellers. They have occupied all the space and the horizon, and they speak, indeed pontificate of everything.
There is no solution that can lead to a timid sunrise after the storm. And if anyone hints at a hypothesis, they attack him, because it is not the pandemic that has created the sensationalism of virologists but it is they who have become prisoners of these streams of words, like ghosts imprisoned in the earthly and earthly dimension of a castle.
"I don't see anyone starving."
Suicidal restaurateur in Florence, hanged in the restaurant he had recently taken over to carry on the dreams of a lifetime and to feed his family, and soon became the scene of dreams shattered by pandemic fury and virological dogma and by a state capable only of mirroring itself in direct Facebook between a Whatsapp message and a clutch bag .
"Risk calculated … badly".
The girl, sideways along the bed, in the desperation of a fetal position, opens her arm with a blade and sees that ruby-colored trickle of pain and life flooding her belly and the sheet, while the parents in the other room look hypnotized at the virologist. And like her hundreds of other young people, condemned to be the plague victims and the infectors of the nightlife , under the accusing finger of a weak, useless, evanescent, and ghostly politics. Deprived of love and first sex, of the comfort of a hug, of fights and concerts, and in a nutshell of life.
"I foresee many deaths'".
He could not bury or accompany his mother to church, and remembers her only with that video, in the silence of evenings all the same, but at least he, unlike virologists, knows that the dead are not statistics, behind every dead there is a existence, of affections and a story that perhaps no one will ever tell but that does not mean that it never existed.
The post Every virologist story is a ghost story appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/ogni-storia-di-virologi-e-una-storia-di-fantasmi/ on Mon, 03 May 2021 03:51:00 +0000.