“I wanted to be with my family right now, living in this moment,” Giuseppe told me at the breakfast table in Porto, Portugal, three weeks ago. Giuseppe is Italian and shares a house with me. A few days earlier, he had given up on spending his birthday with his mother, because his return flight was via Bergamo airport, near Milan. The precaution, at that moment, seemed slightly exaggerated to me. Two days later, with Italy completely shutting down, overnight, my perception changed.
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But still, when I heard Giuseppe say he wanted to be with his family, all I could think was that he’d better be safe in Portugal. He still couldn’t grasp the idea that soon we would all be in the same state of quarantine. I was still stuck with memories of carnival, of traveling as if nothing was happening, of playing with an acquaintance who returned from Milan, of strolling along the Douro and believing that the situation wasn’t that serious.
Touristing in my city during carnival
So much so that a week later I left for Marseille, France, where my flight to Brazil would leave. When I planned my trip to the country, I didn’t even imagine that I would take one of the last possible flights. I only bought a ticket during the promotion and I was happy to see a new city. When I finally boarded the flight to Brazil, the flight back to Europe had already been cancelled.
The fear came in waves. On the eve of the trip, I took the precaution of exchanging my room in a hostel for a room in an aparthotel. After arriving in the city, on a Thursday, I went out to eat with colleagues I met on another trip and saw Marseille open and functioning normally while the president made a calming statement on TV.
The tepid attempts at French isolation didn’t even last 24 hours
The next day, I decided to stay locked in the hotel. A French minister announced that museums and other closed places should no longer open. On Saturday, I thought that taking a walk in open spaces wouldn’t be so bad, I saw crowds of French people on terraces and on the beach, having lunch and celebrating the arrival of spring as if nothing was happening.
That same night, back at the hotel, I discovered that the government had sent a warning: from midnight, bars and restaurants would close their doors. Meanwhile, hundreds of young French people ran to enjoy the last few hours of drinking.
Unsure of what would happen the next day, I headed to the airport, watching a deserted city from the open car window. I found an empty airport and following the same rules as the street: closed restaurants, stacked chairs, containment strips. With every minute that my flight was delayed, the fear that I would be stuck there increased. Quarantine in France was imminent – in fact, the next day the entire country shut down. And to go out on the street since then, only with a printed justification.
Fortunately, my flight departed. I arrived in Lisbon, went through a strangely empty immigration line, but found a boarding gate full of people. My flight, I heard someone joke, was made up of half of people who had bought the same promotion as me and the other half of people who bought last minute tickets to get back to Brazil.
The couple next to me experienced this situation. They were in Spain, another country that closed overnight. They rented a car in Madrid, drove to Portugal and bought the first flight they saw – then they were going to try to get the original return ticket refunded.
I arrived in Brazil in mid-March. The country that seemed to still be a few days behind the one I had just experienced. It was a kind of pandemic version of time travel. Airport, shops, bars and restaurants in normal operation. Little by little, things closed just like in Europe. And I saw the same reactions from people: from denying the facts to clashing with reality.
After arriving in Brazil, my view of isolation
The truth is that I understand more than ever the Italian’s phrase about wanting to be with your loved ones. Right now I’m in quarantine in the south of the country, with my boyfriend’s family. Fortunately, I completed the 14 days of isolation today, without having any symptoms.
All flights we had scheduled for this season in Brazil were cancelled. I had to decide, one night, whether to take the last possible flight to BH, from the airport of a small city that was going to close, but I ended up deciding to stay. The fear of going and the need for isolation spoke louder.