Take back what I said about Bueu getting tired. Someone has rigged up a sound system, which is still blaring one hour and 19 minutes after the 8 o’clock clapping party. Earlier they used it to play a town-wide game of Bingo. To accompany the jacked-up speakers, the ambulance and police cars did two rounds of the streets tonight, sirens blaring, enticing people I’ve yet to see at their windows clapping with gusto.
Maybe I’m the only one who’s tired.
Today was supposed to be the last day of Spain’s lockdown. Instead, another two weeks looms, with even stricter measures to be enforced. I’m hoping Bueu will be spared what’s become known as the “balcony vigilantes” enforcing these rules, people who hurl insults, sometimes even launch spitballs, at passersby they believe to be breaking shelter-at-home orders.
My bakery excursion during the first few days of the lockdown could now elicit a “Hey, you! Go back to your fucking house! You’re going to make someone sick, you retard!” – the exact words, according to El País, yelled at Cristina, a lab technician from Lugo on her way home from work.
When I started writing this blog, Spain had 9,191 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 309 dead. Today, 78,797 are infected and 6,528 have died. Perhaps such figures explain the spitballs. As psychologist Laura García García (that’s not a typo) puts it: “This fear that society is experiencing in such a difficult scenario is expressing itself in a toxic way.”
Some of us choose to express ourselves in other ways, like by baking cupcakes. Chocolate with cream-cheese icing and confetti sprinkles. I ate one, then two – and then I thought –who really cares? and ate two more.
It was one of those days, another one of those days, that felt vague and timeless, when we question our place in the universe and wonder, finally, why the stove clock’s time seems different than the mobile phone’s time. Why does one say 2:30 and the other one 3:30?
Could it be that day, that change-the-clock day? What day is it, actually? What month? Where am I? Who am I? Can I eat another cupcake?
Yes, answers the universe. Eat as many as you please.
P.S. That’s a wrap for the Lockdown series. I promised myself I’d write every day for the two-week lockdown, and I did it. But not without a little help from my friends (thank you, Miguel) and this desk he made and delivered the day I started writing this blog. Coincidence?
P.S.S. Thank you for reading.
Angela Long 