This column was to be called Angels of Italy. In such an extraordinary moment, opening a window on the tenacious normality of those who continue to make the country work is an idea that has convinced us. Collect rumors of those who work every day leaving home and loved ones - and then return (if and when they are given to do so) with the doubt that they will harm them. Small stories of an even more difficult quarantine, precisely because it is permeable. Angels, heroes, are words that always come back when history takes turns that make us lose: they refer to the prodigy we have inside and that knows how to transcend the human skin. But knowing the people we will introduce you, looking at their eyes in photos, we noticed that there was nothing prodigious. Nothing that betrayed the fact that those expressions and those eyes were exactly the expressions and eyes that we would have in their place. Neither heroes nor angels. Trivially human eyes and faces. Weakened. Inhabited by fears and insecurities. But also from sparks of courage. So we got it. They are not heroes, they are not angels. They are us. We are.
Manuela
I'm Manuela. And I'm from Catania.
I have been living with my partner for a year. In Acitrezza. The town of the Faraglioni, of the Malavoglias, of the Lampares. I have no children at the moment. But I'd like a little dog. And in fact I think you calm the waters one of the first things I will do is a visit to the kennel. We'll see.
Since the quarantine is in place, only I leave the house.
I am an administrative assistant. It is necessary. Because I do it in an RSA. A nursing home.
I've always thought about becoming a writer for the truth. I still think so, I studied to do it, I don't give up. Telling stories is a passion that does not leave me.
I thought my work had nothing to do with my aspirations, writing, my dream. Instead, the place where I imagined dragging myself listlessly morning after morning turned out to be a mosaic, a kaleidoscope of stories. Stories of those who like me work there and very rich stories of those who live there and have an almost touching urgency to tell them to you.
Today going there is different, I feel a strong weight and I don't know exactly where it comes from. Perhaps from responsibility. Or from being lost. Of the during, but also of the after.
Isolation with my partner is also tiring. But it is a duty, an act of conscience.
And perhaps it is also an opportunity to love more who I am inside that structure, concretely, beyond what I dream of being outside.
So I continue, every morning, to take on the role of that concrete me. Today those cloths are called 'protective garments'. And when I look at them in the mirror in the office, I think: it's the right place where you need to be today.
Tomorrow, we'll see.
