Corona in Cortona… Isolation in Italy…..Covid Chronicles…. part 8
Sunday 5th — Wednesday 8th April… Days 26–29 — Springing Forth, Green Shoots?
Sunday 5th April
There was a bit of a drama this morning. One of my cats, Gizi, got into a fight with another cat, and came off the worse.
He was obviously in pain, and growled when I picked him up, in fact he was even growling at himself. I am so lucky with my vet, Grazia, she helps local school children with their homework, supports a colony of cats up in Cortona, and helps out at the local cat home in Arezzo. She also works in Arezzo, which means she drives past my house almost every day, and thus is happy to call if necessary.
And with Gizi it is all too frequently necessary. He seems to regard the road as his own private domain. Grazia has had to treat him for a broken lower jaw, a dislocated hind hip, and numerous bumps, bites and abscesses. She says he has used up all of his nine lives and more.
She first started coming when three kittens were born to a feral mother, even before I lived her full time, in my back garden, fifteen years ago. Sadly, Giz is the only one remaining, but, a few years later, pretty little Fiorellina, (little flower), was dumped, only about 3 weeks old, on my doorstep. She only has one fully working eye, and just half a tail, but is undoubtedly the most perfect little creature I know.
Since then, Grazia has been adopted, or, maybe, she has adopted, three of my local neighbours and their pets, and is commonly known as Santa Grazia.
She came round a few hours after I had phoned her, and we met in the hall in masks and gloves. She gave him two injections, anti-pain and antibiotic, and she is coming again tomorrow morning. He is now feeling sorry for himself, but much better than he was; and he is in lockdown in the bathroom.
Monday 6th April
Every afternoon the garden is thrumming with the sound of the ‘big buzzers’. Poor Italy (and the rest of the world), may be suffering but nature goes on, unabashed. The Rosa banksiae is now covering one wall of the house, and the bright pink oxalis line the path up the garden.
Most glorious of all, is the wisteria, which is in full bloom — and that’s where the ‘big buzzers’ come into the picture. They are iridescent blue-black bee-like creatures, as big as a ping pong ball sometimes, and as far as I know completely harmless. There must be about 40 or 50 of them, buzzing contentedly and very loudly around the lovely lilac blossoms. Sometimes I find dead ones on the terrace, and I collect them, with the idea of using their wings in some kind of painting.
Occasionally they bumble into the limonia, and hopefully pollinate the very last remaining flowers of the lemon tree. Normally someone would have carried it outside before now, but it is way too heavy for me, so it has stayed in. I may, or may not, get lemons, but the important things is that, for a month, I had the wonderful scent of the flowers, and that is much more important.
I can’t quite decide, but I think it’s time that I took the fleece off my pots and started to water them only a few nights ago it went down to zero but I think we are now heading into much warmer days. Basically, spring is bursting forth, and to quote Winnie the Pooh, ‘the violets are a blowing in the green’.
Most mornings, I look at the graphs and tables relating to Italy and coronavirus. A month or more back, the projections, based on how it went in Wuhan, seemed to imply that we would reach a peak of numbers of new cases here, towards the end of March. It now looks like the peak has finally been reached, and the downturn is starting.
Maybe some good news… some green shoots of recovery. In that famous Churchillian phrase… ‘now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’ Or maybe even slightly better than that?
That would be really good news. Recently, I read that 66 doctors had already died here, which is tragic, and that number has probably increased by now. What about all the nurses, care workers etc? How brave they are, I am in awe.
The mayor of Cortona makes a daily broadcast on Facebook, telling us the number of confirmed cases in our community, and the measures that are being taken.
There is also a daily program for children from the museum. One of the funniest things, doing the rounds on WhatsApp, is a selection of clips One funeral director rages at the idea of a mobile hairdresser, and he is not short of expletives, when he ridicules the idea of doing a person’s hair, who will be after all in a closed coffin.
That is a sad mental image, but there are so many of those at the moment. There was, notably, the horrifying footage of the coffins in northern Italy — really incredibly upsetting. Amazingly, Italy has benefited from doctors and nurses coming in to help, from both Russia and Cuba. How truly awe inspiring is that? It’s one thing two to risk your life for the benefit of others in your own country; it’s entirely another, to volunteer to fly into an area where the risk of illness or death is so high.
Weds 8th April
Apart from the sound of birds and insects, I can actually hear the sounds of children playing and adults chatting nearby. Currently, our normally busy road is more or less traffic free, and is becoming more like a piazza. There is the woman who owns the B&B over the road, and there is Raffaella, my next-door neighbour. At the moment she has her son, his girlfriend and her two youngsters with her, and between them they have acquired a dog. They don’t really have a proper garden but sort of hang out in the back alley and the corner area that their house makes with mine; spilling out onto the road occasionally. We talk daily — in the early days of lockdown it was by phone, but with the arrival of Spring, we chat from my house to hers, across our balconies.
This reminds me of the time, many years ago when I first came here, when we went to visit a tailor, as we both needed to have outfits adjusted for her daughter’s wedding. The old lady asked, ‘how do you to know each other?’ Raffaella replied, ‘we are neighbours’. So as to be friendly, I added, ‘yes, we chat from my bathroom window to her balcony.’ At least that’s what I meant to say. However, instead of saying we chat, ‘chiacchieriamo’ , I said something similar, ’cachiamo’, but meaning something wildly different. I basically announced, ‘we shit from my bathroom to her balcony’. The tailor’s face gave nothing away, but Raffaella’s horrified expression told its own story. We laughed, and the ice was most definitely broken.
A well-known apocryphal story around here, is the lady, let’s say that maybe she is American, who goes into the butcher’s shop. There are two or three old ladies already in there, but they are chatting away happily, and not in a hurry, so they politely wave her up to the counter. Mustering her best, but newly acquired, Italian, she asks if he uses preservatives in his sausages. ‘Usate preservativi nei salsicce?’ she enquired. A shocked silence. She had just asked him if he used condoms!! The perils of trying to speak in a foreign language!
