Happy Easter (despite everything)
Happy Easter from Diana Zuncheddu
When I was fifteen – sixteen in a month – I said study, you have to stay indoors a little longer, at least in the summer you will be free. He looked at me genuinely surprised and then replied: “What are you saying. In the summer we will all be dead ”.
He said that Leopardi was not the only one affected by cosmic pessimism, how this cultured quote came to him I don't know, he has never had books in his hand for years, when I propose them to him again, and without any hope, he tells me that "in 2021 the books are no longer used, mom ”.
Then he resumed wandering around Instagram and I don't know what other illegal social networks he has on that mobile and making intercontinental calls via wapp with his friend who managed to leave for six months of exchange in the United States.
"Are you asleep? Oh no, I'm on the phone with Nico ”.
"But it's 2 in the morning!"
"Eh but there it is 6 in the afternoon".
I read and hear about many mothers in these conditions, nothing serious, apparently, just children in depression, or in total apathy. It is the second Easter that is done indoors.
The teenage brothers, at least from Lombardy, at the same time inside the house, are just barely explosive, just a crooked look is enough and time goes somehow busy.
The only other real occupation, apart from remote schooling or quarrels, online games, endless showers, is to eat, “what do you eat for dinner tonight ?, and for lunch tomorrow?”. The only important topic, the only one shared among all family members of any age, the only one that really stirs everyone's interests: what to eat.
It is becoming not a war, it never has been, but a test of physical endurance: we have been resisting for more than a year, it is more than a year that after the marathon with pizzas and bread at home, after taking the Covid and having claimed others who took him, after praying, after cursing him, after going out feeling like thieves, only for the fact that he went out on a bicycle in the red zone without really having to go to the pharmacy, after all this we are still here. To repeat it all over again, with less desire, with less enthusiasm, with not too much conviction in saying that no, in the summer we will not all be dead.
Vaccines now run and will run, you have to trust a logistics expert, a practical government, and in the summer no, we will not all be dead: all vaccinated no, but not even dead. We will have definitively sanctioned, if ever it were needed, that we are a society of old and old, that children, young people, and their parents who are not old enough, basically nobody cares. We do not complain enough, we are not unionized, we are not represented and we do not represent.
Perhaps there would be no other ways, perhaps it was not possible not to close the schools, perhaps the gymnastics, basketball and karate courses could not be left open. Maybe it was impossible not to get fat.
Maybe. Or maybe yes. We will never know why it went like this, with the invisible minors who do not count, with the over eighty year olds who want to be able to leave the house, with us dejected and resigned parents, by now.
Even the strike in Dad, they made up: almost worse than the idea of the transport strike.
He turns the painting of Leonardo's Last Supper, where Jesus, in front of a screen, asks the disciples connected via zoom: can you all see me? We laugh at least, with respect, for a last armored dinner, let's hope really last, a bit really like that.
We will have time to recover everything: the line, the physical health, the mental one. Minors have great resources. We parents as well, even if we don't see them now.
Best wishes for a Happy Easter, therefore, of gargantuan lunches at home, at least. What else.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/buona-pasqua-la-seconda-blindata/ on Sat, 03 Apr 2021 18:05:02 +0000.