Wherever you are in the world during this historical moment, there is a word, a concept, which unites all of us: isolation.
Wherever you are in the world, this word, this concept, make all of us a community.
This is the value that we would like to celebrate for our column ”Values in progress”, through the story of an Italian girl in Paris, Chiara Indelicato. A daily story made by words and photos that aims at feeling a little less alone and more as a part of something bigger through the sharing of the same isolated and intimate condition.
This is how Chiara describes herself: ”An Italian girl in Paris, my 42m² are an integral part of another country, mine. I use sun and garlic cloves, mint closed to the window and all my travels that become poetries. I paint the wall using photographs that turn into fragments of sunny dreams”.
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Chiarantena – The daily stories from the quarantine of an Italian girl in Paris
by Chiara Indelicato
DAY 1
On the last day of our so-called freedom even the roads were free.
I walked for hours and hours and I got on the other side of Paris. I walked 22 km.
I reached China, I was a tourist for a day and I amused myself crossing the streets in order to have the sunshine on me, to make my eyes bright in tears, sun-tears.
I have seen magnolias in bloom and witnessed the peace of those who work under a tree hoping for a snow made of petals.
I have seen the world dressed in pink.
Freedom had always existed, even before we temporarily lost the liberty of wandering.
Day 2
Along with the sun, the calm arrived. The shops were to remain closed. The city shifted into a version of Paris that only exists on Sunday morning before 11 am.
You know, Paris likes to sleep in.
Day 3
I then decided that my home is a castle, a 42m2 castle, and who knows whether this surface is entirely walkable. I only recite what my contract says.
I have reorganized my living space, I have found my favourite window.
My day glides by lulled away by the clouds.
Day 4
In my home the music reigns, it covers the echoing steps of the joggers, people run tirelessly, it seems that just now they discover that gyms are not the ultimate blessing.
They run so not to think. They run and they are not alone.
At times I get small rocks thrown at my window, small as a WhatsApp message, a friend shows up and chatters fly up and down two floors.
Day 5
I like running but right now I prefer practicing yoga, pretending I am a cat on my pink mat while I wait for the sun to land in the kitchen just in time for my first coffee, for pressing a grapefuit whose colors taste like summer and watch the shadows stretch on the counter. Right on time to play.
The shadow play is not enough anymore and I climb on the kitchen counter, I take the spot of the grapefruit that has magically become breakfast and I sit in the sun drinking my 4 servings of coffee in one cup.
Day 6
I am an only child and I have learnt to play by myself early on.
I wonder whether they are are only children as well. I will never find that out because I have the feeling that I cannot yell and break the silence that hovers like smog on the Canal Saint Martin.
A duck glides happily in the bluest of skies breaking the building’s lines. I follow him for a while until he makes me understand that he does not want to be photographed. I let him leave my focus range.
Day 7
My castle is an Italian island on French soil. The food says it, every meal repeats it and the prep time states it clear.
I tuck the entire Mediterranean Sea in two zucchini, I eat with a book.
I am okay.
I drift away.
The zucchini filled with all my thoughts make me think of Calcutta and as I listen to his song Paracetamolo I await that part that makes me laugh, that takes me back to the first time I listened to that song, I was leaving for an island.
I laughed in isolation.
I solely laughed with a light heart.
Day 8
Two.
Two weeks and I am not counting.
That’s it, I am not counting.
It is absolutely useless.
I cannot count anymore the days locked in my home as I always keep my windows opened and the sun that comes in without asking for permission.
Cats do not count hours, or days and my favourite window has started to reward me.
My window looks out on a sunny facade on which the sun draws the shadows of my building by the hour. I snoop around, it amuses me, it amuses me to catch a glimps of my neighbors cherishing the sun like sunflowers do. I see them placid, like cats in the sun. Undisturbable, even though this word does not really exist.
Day 9
I do not count these days that billow like the ocean waves that end up unwinding always on the same beach, my beach-like kitchen or the living-room one, maybe the couch or that of my large table hosting my every activity of the day.
With our days consuming themselves like this, like a match that bruns down, time has changed. It did it all by itself, without a notice. I do not count. However our days have grown 20 cm longer I haven’t seen a sunset yet.
Thus, I sit with my notebook in the courtyard. The sky grows bluer everyday as it sits wedged between this walls like the most precious of the stones. Who would have ever imagined that an enclosed and cemented place would become the wildest of liberties.
Day 10
I’d rather dream at home than dream to be out. During my rare escapades the streets make me sad, the closed gates of the gardens make me crave, they make me feel small. I feel like a child who cannot reach the cooky jar.
I feel like climbing over those gates, I dream of sitting on the grass and pick daisies. I want to steal a little branch from a tree and lock it in my notebook. A branch finely embroidered with silk petals.
Those blooming trees comfort me, they remind me that everything is going as it should. The sun is back, the sky remains blue and the trees turn pink, sometimes white, or even a mix of the two.
And if, on my path, I encounter a tree that has grown outside a fence, I stop and watch its long branches from underneath and I plunge in its perfume with my eyes closed.
Before leaving my free blooming tree I turn back and give it a last glance.
As I turn someone is smiling, someone carrying his life and his home with him on wheels.
I smile back and he asks me to take a picture of him. He keeps on smiling.
The one alive smile in days.
Day 11
I don’t count days as I look out the window, as I wonder and rave among my mint and rosemary that like have survived this white winter veiled in grey. I do not count but I look at the moon.
Many lit windows have gone dark, but a few stars have come back to twinkle in the sky. What a surreal happening is seeing the stars in Paris, I think out loud as I lock outside the chills of night.
How is it it possible that I see the moon and even the stars if I have not seen the sun going to sleep in days?
Sunsets. That’s what I really miss.
I imagine this falling sun, if I close my eyes I can just see it plunging in the sea, I see the all colors bursting in the sky and all shapes becoming shadows. The orange arrive, some red follows and then purple and black just until the night, falls.
Now I start counting.
I count all of the sunsets that I have missed. I melt and hex the moment I have realized it and I look for all of the colors that I am missing. I find them in the fridge.
I still have one thought left in the back corner of my head. If the sun has never gone down in my days, but the moon has nevertheless arrived, could it be that this is just a very unsettling dream where everything is possible?
Day 12
The morning sleepiness struggles to drift away from my eyes.
I lean over the kitchen counter waiting for a sun beam to come and lay down exactly there.
And myself with it.
A perfect view of the courtyard requires changing position. The same that I would do at the beach. It has the exact frame of my camera. A nice big vertical rectangle. I see picture in the picture
My voyeurism is on fire. The sun wakes my eyes up.
If I do not see the sky it’s just because I have to bend a bit. There it is, the sky.
The wind runs across my home, finding a shortcut in the open windows.
I feel on a boat as the wind makes my hair dance.
The curtains fly as the sun paints them of gold and bronze.
My gown flutters with the curtains. Wait, I can smell the sea. I let my house drifts in the wind. I let my plants, my air and sun eateing plants, to their feast. I look from a distance.
If I bend, where the sun is I manage to see some jellyfish. I dive in and look at them curlying in the waves to look at the sun from twenty thousands leagues under the sea.
I come out the water and as I touch the hot stones I dry my hands and warm up my heart.
The time of a blink, I lift my eyes and there above, off the shore of the third floor, I see a pirate vessel in full sail.
Do not mistake my daydreaming for happiness. We could could call it nostalgia, even folly by now.
Know that I dance along the grim refresh ball of 6pm, I dance alone. And in this absurd and unsettling dream I find solace in seeing my shells resting on the whitest seabed of my bathtub.
Day 13
Camomille to relax your face, strawberry for eyes and skin.
These words made me pop into the kitchen. I drank the camomille straight away to bring balance back after 2 cups of coffee. Then I cut the strawberries.
It must have been the very white sky, or maybe the way too light couch, I eased down on my bed like I would have on a flowery meadow, and my head, soft, among the pillows.
I closed my eyes and I sucked in the scent of countryside and the warmth of the sun on my back.
I dressed with my pink raincoat and inside the hood I kept the scent of the strawberries pn my skin and their light taste on my tongue.
I crossed a rainy canal and looked with my compass for all the alleys that would take me straight to the North.
I walked sad streets ringing in ambulances, I walked the middle of the road encountering very few people and no cats.
When I found my North, I found spring.
I found myself to be in a place that I had seen two years back, or maybe last year. A mix of sweet and sour, all is in bloom, all if bewildering.
The sky now burns in blue.
I found alleys covered in tiny purple flowers, blooming saplings that were calling on to me from behind the fences way too short to constrain them. I moved closer and took them with me. I soaked my hands in their rainy dew.
I picked all the flowers that I could. I felt like the little girl that I have been as on Sundays I used to pick up poppies and daisies and all of the weeds to make eccentric bouquets.
On my way back I picked up smiles, non many, regards, very many and also a lone voice saying that flowers would not even have lasted until home.
And what do you think you know about flowers and their life?
My flowers got home. We had dinner together and waited also until breakfast time.
This is my North and my home is the center of my compass. I see what this period is about. It is about not seeing sunsets and cherish them even more, later. It’s about picking wild flowers and weeds in a city, so that they nourish us with their colors. It is about becoming the center of our life again, this time, with dignity.
Day 14
The end of this projet doesn’t match with the end of this quarantine nor of the Chiaratine.
And I, I feel like that flower there surviving despite eveything.
Bottled up.
This life carries on like a ghost image. A nostalgic life that lives in the reflection of what was before, trying to emulate it.
But this ghost image living it is also upside down, and lines have been switched.
Who used to be casted out, now is the only admitted. And as I watch, I would really like to be a Parisian pigeon right now. Fearless, as they are, but not as much as a rat.
This life doesn’t stop, it multiplies.
If we stop, after fear and much before recklessness, if we really pay attention, we can see the boldness within the possibility of starting over, doing again, differently. There is a different perspective.
As the sun hasn’t gone down yet, I will defnitely make the most out this long and dreamy day. I will devote my time to the books I never finished, to the projects I have left hal-way, to the things I never wanted to learn.
I will find my dreams.
Everything else can wait and if something really cannot, like those important things, a hug, a kiss on the cheek, we will always find a way around it.