More than three and a half years of life says the calendar. I arrived in Italy (to live was the first time) in January 2019, I'm leaving in August 2022. I didn't want to leave Mexico, where he came from living four years, and return to Europe. A bad start of not wanting to be where you are and yes where you have been. Life is lived in present and first person, the rest are excuses, except major cause, to recognize yourself incapable or guilty of not knowing how to have fun. Cities don't wait, it is you who must join them, but I did not have breakfast on the plane to get used to the idea that it was time to return. One day I was with my friend Carlos walking through Tlaxcala deciphering how a crucifix and a fighting bull got there., and a week later I was in Rome contemplating if the Pantheon still floated.
Now I am leaving to live in Bangkok and I feel that I am owed, at least, two of the almost four years I spent here. When I was a teenager I sang a song by Joaquín Sabina called "Who has stolen the month of April from me?"?”. In my agenda I have underlined that I have two springs and two winters left. Then I read that I specified that this is "at least". I was shocked to read that detail, "at least", but I remembered that there are two Junes, two joules and three quarters and a half of August also in debt because I would get into the sea water being careful not to sneeze and cause the entire Mediterranean to shut down.
The pandemic changed everything. These three and a half years of living in my second country are influenced by that "theft" of time (necessary). We planted trenches in the gorge, we turn flower pots into parks and we become suspicious of dog walkers and generous people who don't know how to lock the door from the outside without giving a hug. So we decided to lower the blinds for fear that a virus would arrive from the outside and from the inside the only thing we wanted was to throw ourselves.
when i got in 2019 to Rome I told my wife, Francesca, that I was going to get up to walk around Rome at five in the morning in winter to try to photograph the monumental city without people. We were then in the crowded Piazza Navona and it occurred to me if there would be the possibility of taking a photo of that place without a single human being there. It seemed impossible to me. In the historical center of Rome, tourism is exercised in herds and the statues end up getting off the pedestals, fed up that in the photos they are the background behind two faces and not, as they were before, the front in the foreground.
they are afraid of empty cities like the rest of us are afraid of returning home and finding a note that says that there is and will be no one
One year later, a 13 March 2020, I walked through that open-air museum that is the center of Rome almost without anyone. I love deserts and that city was suddenly a desert of cement and marble. It was weird, because it was all beautiful and you felt it was horrendous. We had been totally prohibited from going out on the street for two days. We journalists were one of the few professionals who were exempt from confinement. I went out to do a report on homeless people. I talked to many of them and I understood that they are afraid of empty cities like the rest of us are afraid of returning home and finding a note that says that there is no one and there will be no one..
I spent that day in front of the Vatican, Piazza Navona, Pantheon, The Trevi Fountain, Piazza Spagna and all the streets of the historic center listening to the rumble of my footsteps. I saw an Italian flag made from three shirts hanging on a clothesline.. From there we all hung, dripping, held by tweezers. Rome cannot be silent, it doesn't hit. Rome is a cry from before colds were invented.
And so weeks and months passed. And we got used to talking to each other on a screen and greeting each other with a nudge. Life behind a window is the life of a prisoner and in my professional life I have spoken with a few prisoners and I have always felt in them the desperation of knowing that they die faster than the rest. Not because nothing happens fast in there, but because everything happens quickly out there without waiting for them. "When I get out of here my mother may already be dead", a young prisoner told me, in the prison of El Parral, who had smashed the head of a guy with a baseball bat on the stairs of a church in the mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico. cried during the interview, much. For his mother and for him, not for the busted.
I have managed to travel during this pandemic. The most impressive of all those trips was for work and pleasure to Namibia and South Africa.. It was March of 2021. In Italy there was a curfew and I went to the airport, night, between empty roads. I entered a huge useless terminal, With the shops closed and the planes parked, where at the end there was a scattered group of travelers who carried gel as luggage, mask and medical insurance.
I spent a month traveling through Namibia and South Africa with some amazing friends who are excited to get excited
Africa heals me all. i lived there, between Mozambique and South Africa, five years. I had a fucking good time. nothing was perfect. There were also problems, sorrows and disappointments, fears, anger and all those things that are living outside of social networks. But the other won out. and there he returned. I spent a month traveling through Namibia and South Africa with some amazing friends who are excited to get excited. Our WhatsApp group is called Nadalismo. The mantra is "you have to live how Nadal plays". With people who think like this you can travel anywhere.
And yes, in Africa there was more freedom than in Europe, but a mask always appeared around, a gesture, a call home that reminded you that those times were different. At Epupa Falls, one of my favorite places on this continent, on the border between Namibia and Angola, we interviewed some himbas.
the conversation went like this:
-“We have heard something about a disease that spreads and kills people. Some people came to explain to us. That is why tourists no longer come to visit this place and that has made us even more impoverished.. We need people to come".
-Do you know someone who has gotten sick from the coronavirus??
-“No, No one here has had that disease”, answer to ask later: where do you come from is the disease dangerous?”.
-I come from Italy, a far country, and many people have died there, Yeah".
-Y cuando les traducen la respuesta exclaman todos un “ahh” y el más viejo replica: "Well then maybe you can bring the virus here".
and in that answer, quite logical, you realized that the pandemic one way or another was chasing you to that dry, uninhabited corner of the globe where the sun rises from a well and the beasts die of thirst.
“The secret is the people”. And every country I live in, every trip i make, I have it clearer
In Italy the feeling was always similar. Most of the interviews were by phone and in the few reports that he did face-to-face, sufficient safety distance was kept to make it difficult to tell if the interviewee was laughing or yawning.. So for almost two years I had little interaction with strangers and I like strangers.. This was influenced by the medical study that we all carried in our heads that affirmed that family and very close friends spread the virus less than strangers.
It's been this past May and June, that I have worked on a series of reports in Rome with a photographer, Fabio, that I have had close contact with someone from my non-environment. We hit it off really well from the start.. We spent several days working together. Then we have seen each other personally. And then I understood that the pandemic has stolen that from me, some strangers. Italy would have been another Italy without the pandemic, like Mexico, South Africa or Mozambique would have been another experience with her. The first time I lived outside of Spain, in Malta, When my friend Juancho returned, he asked me, what have you learned?? and I answered: “The secret is the people”. And every country I live in, every trip i make, I have it clearer.
