I have seen the video again where the Polish tenor Leszek Swidzinski sings Nessun Dorma in a courtyard surrounded by the buildings of a Warsaw hospital, from whose windows doctors, nurses, patients wearing masks peek out, while the choir members, dressed in any way, and as if they happened through the patio by mere chance, they are gathering their voices.
In the end, the cloistered spectators applaud, throwing the tenor alive. They are remote voices, like from another world. The world of confinement. I feel like I could watch the scene from one of those windows. Puccini’s aria, ascending towards the well of light above the gray buildings, sounds sadder than ever. No one sleeps. No one will know my name. A ghostly kiss that no one will ever know anything about. Unfortunately we must die. Let the night go. Let the stars go down. Dawn will be a triumph. Will the dawn come?
I have been fascinated by these videos to promote a taste for opera, where singers walk through squares, cafes, shopping malls, markets, disguised as walkers, employees and buyers, and suddenly the tenor, or soprano, they break into singing, the choir joins them, the musicians arrive one by one with their instruments, and the people stop first, surprised, then begin to pay attention, until they sit at the concert.
What other splendid setting than the Iruña café in Pamplona for the La Traviata toast choir. At the San Ambrosio market in Florence, the mezzo-soprano disguised as a meat vendor takes off her apron and starts singing one of Carmen’s arias. A celist plays solo at the Crystal Court, a Minneapolis shopping mall, people put bills in the hat at her feet; More musicians are coming, more and more, we begin to identify the chords of the Ode to joy, then the full orchestra; It is the Wayzata Symphony Orchestra, and now we are within the rising whirlwind of voices that demand hope and contentment for humanity.
All these concerts, which have ever been on the screen of my cell phone, are from a long time ago, ten years at least. It is too remote a past, now that time has broken into splinters and it is harder for us to put together the picture of the past, what it was like, what we were like, and we only have a blurred vision of the future and full of incomprehensible abstract signs, like on screens Snowfall full of black scratches from old televisions when the transmission was gone.
Until yesterday we had a more or less reasonable idea of the time elapsed and to elapse. At the bottom of our minds rested that silent idea that progress is inevitable; and with nothing else to add other than exclamations of admiration, we saw how systems and objects, the result of technological desire, and the capacity for invention, succeeded each other.
And, not surprisingly, we were seeing how inventions, so disconcerting when they came to us as novelties, became obsolete at a surprising speed; and, as in no other stage of civilization, we each had a quarter overrun with prematurely aged junk because others, even more novel, came to replace them.
And progress gave us assurances. Travel faster, communicate better, solve all our daily life needs with a single small handheld device. And the prolongation of life, above all. Guess in advance the steps of death. Smart drugs. Supernatural surgeries. The increasing age level of aging. Healthy old age, without deficiencies, starting with sexual vigor. A benefactor fetish called quality of life. And suddenly what we have is uncertainty. From the security of progress that flies in the wings of the angel of history, we have come to listen to the noise of the hurricane that drags those wings backwards, to remember the reflection of Walter Benjamin in front of the Klee painting.
We know, also suddenly, that we are living the beginning of something still unknown. We do not know what will be, but we do know that it will not be the same.
And we despair of a miraculous vaccine. It is not known how long it will take to discover and then manufacture. Because years can pass, and in the meantime, insecurity will continue, and distancing will not be possible as a rule of life. It is another world. The world that is scary. People come out of their confinements, anxious to leave the nightmare behind. Life is outside, waiting. But the dark hand stops you. Bad news. Pollution flares up, the curve doesn’t flatten, it moves up again, with relentless whip movement. The indices are growing again in the United States. Latin America is the new world center for the pandemic.
Will the world be as safe again as before, in the sense that we were not afraid of others? To the writer friend that you had time not to see, next to which you sit at the table where they are going to present a book together, to discuss literature. The cashier to whom you pay for the books you have purchased. The driver of the taxi that takes you to the fairgrounds from the hotel, I like to sit in the front and entertain myself and instruct me in the conversation with the taxi drivers, who know everything and tell their mother to the government on duty.
Certainties are gone. Because there will come a time when the pandemic will no longer be a constant threat to the majority, who will have to return to daily life in any way. But there will be those who must be more cautious. The most vulnerable. Those of us in the strip of the elderly.
Or, in any case, if we want to survive, we must accept the cloister rules, like the old medieval monks
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