Love in the time of corona

The coronavirus has forever altered the way we live, reminding us that we don’t know what we’ve got until we lose it, writes SIMON BEVILACQUA

“IT was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.

THE Tasmanian capital, 1200m below the mountain summit, gently flows with the roll and tuck of the river, its bays and estuaries.

The bricks, mortar and bitumen of homes, roads and businesses appear from the summit like gems on a brooch, humanity follows the grain of the terrain, indistinguishable from nature’s ancient story.

White beaches reflect the sunlight and glisten like jewels, fuel-reduction burns send smoke trails into the blue expanse, and the Tasman Bridge arches over the Derwent like an awakening cat stretching in morning rays.

From kunanyi’s summit this week, Hobart looked as it always has in our lifetime, the landscape below seemingly warmed by the burn of home fires. But atop the mountain it was a different story; silent apart from a blustering wind so bitter it sliced through clothes, threatening to instantly freeze one’s bones.

There were no buses, no Chinese tourists, no cars in the car park, no shrill laughter of red-faced children exhilarated by the chill, no cuddling couples with hands in each other’s pockets, nothing but an ominous foreboding and an eerie, godforsaken bleakness. The peak seemed haunted by a miserable spirit that wanted nothing but its own company.

I felt unwelcome and when I saw the police-style tape across the doors of the viewing shelter warning “do not enter” and advising it was closed due to the coronavirus, I walked to my car and left in haste.

“Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.

HALF way down the mountain at The Springs, the cars are many as locals in thermal walking gear march with gleeful enthusiasm and daypacks under tree-ferns and gums on soggy alpine trails.

If there is concern about the coronavirus pandemic, it isn’t to be seen here. Walkers aged in their 50s, 60s and 70s gather in festive chattering groups. Perhaps they believe the revitalising power of crisp mountain air will stand them in good stead against COVID-19, just like it does every winter against the colds and coughs that infect less robust types.

As I drive through the city, it is the same. Despite the closed pubs and restaurants and decrees of personal distancing, hundreds wander the streets without obvious apprehension. Outside the Royal Hobart Hospital, patients puff religiously on cigarettes, perhaps unaware of reports from China that smokers are significantly over-represented in those with severe or critical COVID-19.

Inside the Royal it’s a different story. Hospital staff, like so many of us, have kept informed about how this virus hit northern Italy like a bomb, killing thousands and leaving one of the world’s most advanced and resourced health systems in ruin. Royal staff are also aware that the reporting of cases of COVID-19 in Australia is following the trajectory of that in Italy and, extrapolating from its current course, puts us about two or three weeks away from the first in a series of waves of life-threatening cases.

Staff are also aware that once this foul disease becomes critical the lungs drown in mucous and are unable to get oxygen to the rest of the body. The only thing to keep such a patient alive and breathing is a ventilator and there are only about 50 in Tasmania.

The other thing Royal staff are all too aware of is that the state’s major hospital has been in crisis for years. They live and work with ramping in the Emergency Department, the elective surgery delays, the lack of beds, staff shortages, failure to attract specialists, departments short of the latest equipment and the fact K-block is not open or staffed.

I am told the sense of apprehension in hospital staff is palpable but also strangely hard to fathom because, much like when the Titanic first hit the iceberg, things initially appear normal, the orchestra plays on, and, after all, the Royal is yet to experience a critical case of COVID-19.

There is hope Tasmania will be spared the worst. So far, the mortality rate in Australia is nothing like Italy’s.

“All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.

I MISS Mum. I haven’t seen her or my dad, who I miss just as much, in weeks because as elderly people prone to developing life-threatening cases of the disease, they’re in lockdown.

Mum has a huge vocabulary and a way of loading words with meaning that is beyond mere mortals. When she says what she thinks, hold on to your hat. With a gentle kindness she can deliver a cryptic line that can rattle a mind for weeks. Mum’s also a proud pessimist, telling me since I was a boy that if you expect the worst, you are always delighted when it doesn’t happen. I have never had the discipline to maintain this method of avoiding disappointment, I fall too easily into optimism, but I admire the resolve to bring a consistent mood to life’s smorgasbord.

I tried to explain to Mum on the phone this week how I felt a level of anxiety about the coronavirus beyond anything I have experienced before and that this angst was diminishing most of my other feelings.

“It’s because the worst is to come,” she responds with her familiar deft poignancy.

Mum lived through the bombing of London in World War II. She knows when the wolf is at the door.

It hit me that for Mum and other elderly people this horrid pandemic not only poses a deadly personal threat but, through the necessity of self-isolation, steals one’s family and friends from what are potentially their dying days.

“It is life more than death that has no limits.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.

A FRIEND who just returned from South America texted me this week to say he was quarantined at home, and that he had come back to Tassie to find he had lost his job and was now “on the dole”.

His text arrived as I stood in a Sorell shop marvelling at a pumpkin that weighed more than half a tonne. I wanted so much to touch the veritable vegie, its voluptuous creamy brown mass squatting bulbously on an apple crate like a buddha on a chocolate box, but feared it may be dripping with the dreaded virus and reluctantly kept my distance.

The gigantic pumpkin was, paradoxically, a matter of jaw-dropping awe but also little more than folly because big vegies like this, which compete each year at the Bream Creek Country Show, are usually too woody to eat.

But the whole point is that there is no point, just the joy of doing. There is something peculiarly human, weirdly Zen or strangely Dada in a gardener spending months earnestly encouraging his vegetable to grow to its maximum volume for no reason other than the wow it elicits from deep within himself and most everyone else who gazes upon it. Each day that the monster vegetable grows a little bigger brings a private smile and the tantalising thrill of expectation for the gardener. The day its umbilical cord is severed and the whopper is hoisted on the back of the truck bound for the showgrounds is one of pride and joy. But is the transcendental art of giant pumpkins to be found in the showing or the growing?

“I’m trying to make the most of it,” my mate texted about his quarantine as I admired the sumoesque veg. “Maybe it will force us to re-evaluate things in our lives.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe some good can come of this. After all, you don’t know what you’ve got until you lose it.

“Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.”

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera.