You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is March 2020 and I am watching a video showing the Covid-19 version of a funeral procession, the most terrifying thing Italians have ever seen in the wealthy North, at least since World War II. Military trucks are transporting dozens of dead bodies from the city of Bergamo to other cremation sites, because the local morgues are no longer able to cope with an unimaginable amount of coffins. Families will not have the chance to come together to honour the dead. Their loved ones died alone. This is inhumane, but we have been asked to accept it, and so we did.
The virus attacks our relationships and our certainties, as exemplified by these two brief clinical vignettes. B just said goodbye to her father. He has high fever and respiratory problems, and an ambulance has arrived to rush him to the hospital. In a couple of days, things get worse and he is moved to intensive care to be intubated. His daughter is now emotionally devastated by an unbearable sense of guilt. She thinks she might have infected her father, because she remembers she had the symptoms of a cold at the end of February. G has been suffering from a ferocious insomnia since the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak. He feels his reality has collapsed like a paper castle. The dystopic world created by the virus reminds him of the famous novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. For G, the familiar has become uncanny and horrific after the eruption of a real that science named Covid-19, with a traumatic disconnection between the past and the future.
From the steps of St Peter's Basilica, in an empty, rain-soaked Square, the Pope reminds us that we are all in the same boat, frightened like the disciples who wake Jesus up and say, ‘Teacher, do you not care if we perish?’ (Mark 4:38). The storm brought by the virus reveals our helplessness and uncovers the false, superfluous convictions around which we have constructed our world.
Work and consume, again and again. Get what you want. Enjoy. These superego imperatives f