As I write these lines, the children begin to go outside. The famous curve is flattening out, the dying death toll is dwindling, people are beginning to look out the window with a surveyor's eye, like someone taking measurements of a landscape that they will soon conquer. Okay, well, all right, things seem to be getting better, but let's not forget that we are still helpless from the contagion and that the virus is here to stay, at least as long as fulminant treatment or an effective vaccine does not dislodge it. The former at the moment seems unlikely; the second is underway, but it may take a year and a half. And during all that time we will have to live an abnormal life. A cautious reality and different from everything we have known so far.
This, then, is the bad news: we still have a lot of mili ahead of us. But the good news, which there is also, is that the human being is one of the most tenacious and adaptive bugs that exist on the planet. Our ability to accommodate what we play is absolutely legendary. As an old saying goes: May God not send you everything you can bear. Because, in effect, we can endure unheard of things.
Years ago I interviewed the photographer Christine Spengler, of French origin but resident in our country. Christine, who has been a magnificent war correspondent, recounted a memory of the Lebanese civil war that impressed me. Bombs fell on Beirut, death rained on the popular Nijmeh square, but as soon as the explosions ended, before the smoke and dust had dissipated, the vendors of tuberose sticks were already appearing in the square. Life always insists on living. Life makes a place for itself even if it has to be contested to death. Lebanon's endless war lasted 15 and a half years, but the people of Beirut continued to buy sticks of tuberose and learned to shake the dust off the flowers.
There is an exciting paragraph from the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész, Nobel Prize for Literature, who has been hammering my head since I read it. Kertész was interned at the age of 15 in the Auschwitz death camp; A long time later, recalling that terrible experience, he wrote: “Despite reflection and common sense, I could not ignore a deaf desire that had crept into me, shamefully foolish and yet so obstinate: I wanted to live a little longer. in that beautiful concentration camp. " A boring, illuminating phrase: that teenager was so eager to live that he got used to hell.
As I have grown older I have become more aware of the incredible capacity for survival that human beings have. I have seen it a thousand times: individuals who lose everything and become a snot on the ground, and who, nevertheless, manage to breathe a skeleton into that emotionally viscous mass, stand up and, to make matters worse, return to be happy. This adaptive capacity has made us succeed as a species in such a way that we have become a kind of virus for the planet. All you have to do is look at the images of the other animals, happily recovering the space that humans had taken from them (there is a video of a wild boar walking around in Alcobendas, Madrid) to realize how far we are a tyrannical and invasive species. for the others. Poor critters: our return is going to be a trauma for them.
Adaptability, in short, also has its downside in the short distance. It is already said that we get used to everything, and sometimes that everything is too much. I am not referring at all to Kertész: he was risking his life. I mean tolerating dire romantic relationships, or abuse of toxic friends, or workplace abuse. We have a silly tendency to become a long-suffering ball bug that should not be encouraged. But outside of that, being able to bear it all, lifting your head and pulling forward, is a formidable test of endurance. Let's trust ourselves: in a few months we will have got used to this pandemic and we will be much better. We will even be able to talk about something else. Life always makes its way and is bright.