A year as survivors, for those who have made it
. A year in which the heartbeat of the world seemed to slow down at times, almost to a stop. The greeting of the planet to 2020 is a farewell to 12 months in which human events have followed one another and news has not been lacking, as always; but - on all continents - under the compact and dark shadow of "an invisible enemy": Covid. Word unknown to the vocabularies of any language still in 2019 and today repeated with the accents of all languages as a curse.
It is January 4, we have just finished celebrating for the new year, when ANSA beats this news in a few lines: "The Chinese authorities have launched an investigation into the spread of a mysterious viral pneumonia with dozens of people affected in the city of Wuhan in central China.
Fears have spread online that the virus could be linked to SARS, which between 2002 and 2003 caused the death of 700 people.
Wuhan police said eight people have been sanctioned for spreading false information via the Internet. "Little is known about it yet, but all the elements of the storm are already filigree. Of a nightmare about to become - from simple epidemic - global pandemic. "The first ever generated by a coronavirus", as the director general of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will dramatically and officially declare on 11 March: an unprecedented tragedy in the modern world, marked by a death counter that still has not stopped.
The first snapshots of what is being prepared still appear remote in Europe, in January: they are the images of faces covered by masks, of public places emptied of lockdowns (another term destined to spread in 'common use), of health workers or emergency services worn out and harnessed as in the face of a biological warfare that initially bounce from Wuhan, the
China, where a capillary security apparatus materializes behind the precautions of mass social isolation.
But soon the same visions become familiar all over the planet.
And Italy finds itself having to deal with a first wave of cases that precedes that of other European countries: starting with the outbreaks that at first are concentrated above all in Lombardy.
Among the clicks that remain in the memory of those days of dismay, one cannot miss the atrocious procession of coffins lined up on the bodies of a row of military trucks in Bergamo.
Or the face unmade by the fatigue and pain of one of the nurses overwhelmed by the emergency among the intensive care units.
Flash of a battle fought with courage by many, including ordinary people who try to give that courage by singing from the balconies in the first weeks of confinement at home;
but which leaves victims and more victims on the ground at every latitude, as the months pass.
There are the dead in white coats, fallen in hospital wards and perhaps belatedly rediscovered as "heroes";
and the many grandparents who died in solitude, mowed down by a virus that affects above all (not only) the oldest and most vulnerable.
Universal then stands the profile of Pope Francis, standing in a deserted St. Peter's Square, shining with rain and covered by leaden clouds, begging the Most High to free us from evil.
A prophetic moment, capable of shaking everyone or almost everyone - those who believe, those who do not believe, those who do not know - in the doubt and despondency of uncertainty.
As if we had returned to the centuries of the black death, to the symbols of places such as the Madonna della Salute, an imposing white basilica built by the Venetians as an ex voto after the plague of 1630.
Then, of course, the story of the challenge would also come. of science at Covid-19, of the laboratories where vaccines are being born that - hopefully - will be able to defeat it.
Too late for those who surrendered along the way.
Known and unknown names, from the Chilean writer Luis Sepulveda onwards, in a 2020 in which humanity also loses other icons for reasons other than the pandemic.
Diego Armando Maradona above all, superhuman genius of football (genius and recklessness, as almost always when dealing with absolute talents), cried at the end of the year in his native Argentina, in Naples, adopted homeland, and by anyone who has been in able to appreciate his unstoppable art around the world.
Or again, in Italy, Paolo Rossi, Pablito, symbol of the blue triumph at the 82nd World Cup, who with his goals and his smile made an entire nation dance for a summer back from the dark years of lead.
And without forgetting, among the protagonists of the celluloid world, the farewell to the most famous of the 007, the Scottish highlander Sean Connery, James Bond film par excellence, who left the scene at the age of 90.
As for politics, to seal the year is undoubtedly the end of the presidency of the republican magnate Donald Trump of a single term in the USA, short but tumultuous.
And the disputed election in his place of Democrat Joe Biden, a 78-year-old veteran of the establishment to whom half America and a large part of the world now entrust hopes of change - or just peace - after a race for the White House never so divisive for a country already shaken in the previous months by the protests of the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, in the wake of the killing of African American George Floyd, yet another victim of the police: with an historic record of votes in absolute numbers for the winner (flanked for the first time by a female vice president and not white, Kamala Harris), but also for the loser.
A turning point destined to certainly reverberate on the future of the breathless superpower from overseas and the globe in 2021: a year in which "nothing will be the same again", one can only repeat between fears and wishes, as in a mantra.
Provided that the bitter prophecy of the Leopard does not come true once more.
(HANDLE).