(Director’s note: Salvador Oropesa, Chair of Languages, earned a PhD in Latin American literature from Arizona State, was born in Málaga, Spain, and studied Spanish Philology at the Universidad de Granada, Spain. This is Clemson Humanities Now.)
At this age of wisdom and foolishness, the pandemic arrived with the new year. The citizens of the kingdom of Spain obediently followed the royal decrees and constitutional States of Alarm. Spaniards stayed at home and wore masks. The old folks died alone in residences, and the younger survived thanks to the best cleaning and auxiliary personnel, nurses, and doctors. Tourists disappeared, and the Prado Museum ghosts returned. The old kings and queens painted by Titian, Velázquez, Ranc, Goya, and others were puzzled by the lack of visitors. The bars poured the last beer and turned the lights off, and the school principals closed the doors with keys that no one knew ever existed. People moved to the balconies of their apartments to contemplate deserted streets. They applauded and cheered the work done by the exhausted hospital personnel and police officers. Army soldiers entered abandoned residences to pick up the corpses of our elderly and disinfect the facilities. Grandparents could only see their grandchildren via video WhatsApp and schoolmates became little squares on computer screens and smartphones. Some local representatives, just a few, became beacons of hope amongst a generation of Instagram, hollow politicians. Democracy is boring and managerial, and many representatives got tired of dealing with reality. Teachers, doctors, pharmacists, firefighters, supermarket managers, restockers, cashiers, truckers, and bikers became the city’s lifeblood by delivering goods to those in need and became heroes in their own right while civic servants kept state services functioning.
Spaniards learned again or for the first time, what an exponential chart was. Today’s date, mid-June, the official death toll is more than 28,300, and the highest mortality rate in the world per million inhabitants. The curve has been flattened, and there is a slow return to the new normalcy: the soccer season is finishing with empty stadiums with a virtual audience, and furloughed players. People get sunburnt in the lines at the beach, waiting for their determined square meters to abide by social distancing standards. Churches are practically empty, with marks to determine where you can sit, communion is to only be received by hand, and offerings such as holy water and peace greetings are banned. The government canceled spring Holy Week ceremonies and the summer celebration running of the bulls. Resilience is the new buzz word. Many jobs have disappeared forever, Nissan shut down for good the Barcelona plant.
Many bars and cafes will never reopen, and plastic screens reflect the sadness of a new society, covered by the obligatory face masks. Memes in my Whatssup groups display the new reality. Why is the Committee of Experts secret under the excuse that they will be harassed if we know their names? Democracy and transparency are always casualties of big crises. The nation is not better; we have become too polarized; my friend Javier uses the term “podrido,” ‘rotten.” Javier is the epitome of common sense and cordura, the sanity of the heart as the Latin root ‘cord’ indicates. Tribes are more important than science and common sense. Greeks invented the tragedy to represent situations like this. We all lose, the least fortunate their lives, many their jobs, others, their immediate future like college degrees without a job waiting for them. I talk to my brother and sisters, my nephews and nieces, and their children, my schoolmates, and their feelings are that of being in the middle of a war, with many more months to come and no light at the end of the tunnel. The unaffected and the devastated of the pandemic share the same street as if a random bomb of the resurrected Civil War exploded. “Safe Sport, Safe Tourism” is the new slogan promoted by the Ministry of Health and professional soccer La Liga. Ojalá (I wish.)