Short Story
The Flu
Memories from the 2009’s swine flu pandemic
I’m at the physical therapist’s waiting room, I wait my father to get out of his appointment. Lower back problems — probably worsened by the fact that he travels back and forth, every day, from the capital (where he works) to our hometown (where we live).
I watch the news on television. They show pictures of people walking on the street as the anchors talk about a new virus discovered in Mexico that is contaminating all its population. They explain that the infection was nicknamed “Swine Flu” as they show pictures of a pig slaughterhouse.
The classes are suspended until the epidemic goes away. We’re in the middle of the semesters and we are communicating with our teacher through our virtual teaching channels: its like a blog where they post messages with activities instructions for us to do at home, and where they publish some learning materials.
It doesn’t take long. When classes resume, we have to go to school during Saturday mornings to make up for the time at home. We also lost some days of winter break.
It’s a Sunny Saturday morning as Verena, our eldest teacher, is sitting at a desk in a classroom that we don’t usually go. She explains to us the differences between Latitude and Longitude. Talks about North, South, East, West and teaches a trick to us, so we can remember where to place the cardinal points in a map: “Wesley Eager”.
Soap dispensers filled with alcohol gel throughout all the school’s corridor. Hundreds of kids smudging their hands with a transparent goo of nauseating odor. I have aversion to alcohol gel — even the way people pronounce the name of this product makes me want to barf:
- Alcoholdgel…
“It may kill the virus. But your hand is still dirty”, I think. “There’s dead virus in your hands.” So, I’d rather wash my hands with soap and dry them with paper.
We are learning the properties of water at our school lab. We are challenged to transport water from one tank to another using a loose pipe. From the start, we know that we need to use the principle of communicating vessels; but it seems impossible to make the transfer without the water flowing underneath the tanks.
My friends try everything they can to transfer the liquid. I notice that its becoming blurry: their hands coated with ‘coholdgel transport the viscous product to the vat, dissolving it in the water.
- Do you wanna try? — they ask me, handing the materials.
- No. I’m fine. Thanks.
This flu’s greatest legacy was ‘coholdgel; which quickly gained versions with different aromas. It’s tough when I go to lunch with someone, and they take one of this plastic bottles out of their bag: the smell of lavender mixed with the goo’s odor makes my throat to violently spasm.
At my godmother’s home. The virtual game Club Penguin is a huge thing among kids. Basically, you create an avatar, a penguin, to explore an island in the middle of the ocean where other penguins live. My cousin and I spend the whole afternoon playing and we decide to create a penguin for out mothers. My godmother suggests her penguin to be named: “H1N1”, and laughs. We try it, but another user already has that name.
The infection is caused by the H1N1 virus. It all began march 2009 at Mexico — from there, the virus got up to the United States and Canada, crossed the Atlantic and went over to Europe, soon after it arrived at Oceania. A decade later, we forgot that pandemic. Enough time for a new one to start.
As soon as Covid-19 arrived in Brazil I remembered the Swine Flu Pandemic. I immediately felt the nauseating smell from alcohol gel, but this time I was calm. We would spend only a few days at home (two weeks, tops) and in a very short time we’d get back to our college’s campus — we’d probably have to take some classes Saturday morning to make up for the days at home. It’d be quick. We’d forgot it two years later.
The quarantine exceeded its forty days, foreseen by its very definition. The classes were taught remotely by videocall for nearly two years. During a meeting for “History of Journalism” class, our professor, a scholar of the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s, stated that a pandemic of similar magnitude to Covid-19 had only happened at the beginning of the 20th century: the Spanish Flu.
Comparing it to Sars-Cov-2, maybe H1N1 was just a “harmless flu”. But only a heterosexual man could forget HIV pandemic and the holocaust caused by Aids during the 1980s — a decade in which that professor lived. I wasn’t surprised. Years before, I had attended the class of “Comparative Cultural Studies”, in which that same professor thoroughly examines counterculture movements — he spoke only once about homosexuals during that class. When he explained how the hippie’s utopia dismantled, when the “dream was over”, he took a long time discoursing over John Lennon’s death, and then added: “And during the 1980’s there was Aids.”
And changed the slide.
NOTE: This short story was originally written in Portuguese for “A Memória como Matéria Prima da Literatura”, a creative-writing workshop taught by Ingrid Fagundez at A Escrevedeira; and also for the class on Cultural Journalism taught Sérgio Rizzo, at the Journalism program at FAAP.
You can read the original story in Portuguese here:
