“I watched him as he was getting into the ambulance, and that was it,” writes one daughter about her father. “A good-bye wave and he was gone'
FOR A SOCIETY with legendarily strong family ties, and one in which physical and emotional closeness are inseparable, the enforced isolation brought about by the coronavirus is distressing enough. But covid-19 has done something more: it has torn the dying from their relatives and friends in a way that is worse than distressing. It is straziante, which an Italian dictionary defines as causing “a very acute physical or moral pain, beyond any capacity for tolerance”.
For the next 12 days Mr Mercalli lay in hospital until, on March 15th, he died, aged 78. But neither Anna nor any of his other loved ones could visit him for fear they, too, might catch the dauntingly contagious disease. “I am haunted by the thought of him dying alone in that bed. Was he frightened? Did he suffer? Did his very lovely blue eyes weep?” his daughter asked.
“If you want to understand Italians, you have to understand their physicality,” says Luca Vullo, an actor-director and the author of a book on the Italians’ non-verbal communication. Here, it is unexceptional to sign off a letter to an acquaintance of the opposite sex with baci . If you really wish to convey affection, you need to ratchet up to un abbraccio or un abbraccione . The concept of invading body space, dear to northern Europeans and North Americans, just does not exist in Italy.
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