In retrospect: 11 March 2020

A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar

Only inside a book or in front of a painting can one truly be let into another’s perspective.

Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena

I read Hisham Matar’s extraordinary A Month in Siena five years ago today: the day that the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak to be a global pandemic. I read it in little more than a single sitting, all the while with the creeping comprehension that for Siena—and indeed for all of Italy and all the world, including here at home—a month was about to feel like an eternity. Yet even that mood of sick suspense could not detract from the fascinating beauty of Matar’s work.

A Month In Siena is a book about art; jewel-like reproductions glow from its marble-white pages. But it’s also about spaces and the way we invest them with meaning beyond their physical bounds. It’s about absence and presence, mourning and acceptance. It is both loaded with sadness and elevated by hope. Enfolded within, there lies a lucent, pulse-quickening examination of the rapid course and lasting legacy of the virulent disease of the fourteenth century that we call the Black Death. For all our progress, we are not so different from our forebears: Matar describes the ‘outrageous indifference’ of the plague’s infection rate with a pin-point relevance he could never have predicted.

Night after night, since the very beginning of the year, I had tuned into the late news on BBC Radio Four, each bulletin mapping another step in the coronavirus’s inexorable progress towards Europe, towards Britain, towards those I held dear. Matar’s writing told me that the advance of the Black Death was so swift, it outstripped the news of its coming, and I wondered whether our mediæval counterparts weren’t perhaps more fortunate that we, to be spared the anxiety of the disease’s approach.

I grieved for Italy, held my breath.

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A few days ago, prompted by five-year anniversary recollections, I revisited my original review of A Month in Siena, which I posted on 9 April 2020. In it, I wrote that we were all seeking furiously to adapt our mode of living, but

Matar emphasises how art and literature were changed as humanity’s grasp on its own existence changed. He explains that unprecedented, indiscriminate mortality forged new concepts and expressions of both secular and divine justice. Great loss, like Matar’s own loss, meant that nothing could be the same again.

Here in rural England, I was luckier than most during that first lockdown. I have surprised myself, disappointed myself, with the effort it has taken to recall struggling to recover from the ‘flu-like virus’ that struck me down just days after returning A Month in Siena to the mobile library; the weeks and weeks of slavish handwashing; the earnest research into how long the virus could survive on paper, plastic, glass, or the garden gate; the unrelenting ritual of chasing a grocery delivery slot online at four in the morning, and the careful disinfecting of whatever supplies I managed to secure; the banging saucepans and children’s window posters in support of the NHS; the vain search for a face mask that might actually fit well enough to offer me protection; the way I would turn my face to the hedgerow whenever I met another person walking, devil-may-care, in the narrow lanes; my anxiety for my elderly parents and my asthmatic sister, miles away; the ever more frightening reports and the inexorably mounting toll; the tauntingly glorious weather and the journalistic excitement over the mass rediscovery of birdsong; the contradictory peace that surrounded us while death and chaos stalked just beyond.

It was obvious now that there would be no escape. Fear and hysteria echoed through the city. Some ran into the countryside . . .

Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena

I was as guilty as many other bookstagrammers in referencing The Decameron, and in contemplating Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Camus’s La Peste. The comparisons had become common currency. My sporadic journal—always a haphazard, cathartic mix of natural and polemical observations in any case—is chasteningly silent until 4 April, when I wrote:

The nation is deep in Covid-19 fear, and I feel old and weak and scared. I feel resentful, too, that this is being visited upon us, and that it has taken this to make us see the error in so many of our collective ways, and at those who remain in denial.

This evening I saw my first pipistrelle of the year . . .

Looking back, I have no idea which particular evils I had in mind. The trade in bush meat, perhaps, or our relentless encroachment upon the natural world, or the genie-from-the-bottle realities of globalisation. It is almost beyond belief that humanity has since found—and continues to find—new, ever more headline-worthy evils to surpass even these.

In concluding my review, I wrote:

The best books open that spring-door in the mind behind which our fluency and agility dwell. Reading this book a lifetime ago . . . I found a footing among the closed rooms and revelatory vistas of Matar’s Siena. Walking in a post-viral world—that may be another story.

It is clear that I expected the world that emerged to be different, although I am slightly stunned by my apparent confidence that there could ever be such a time as ‘after Covid’. Despite the culture of denial, perniciously and pervasively rooted in the corridors of power today, Covid will be with us always: as Matar’s writing reminds us, it was not the first pandemic and it certainly will not be the last. Yet I know I was not alone in lockdown, in possessing that particular brand of fatalism tempered by strange optimism—I might not be alive to see it, I knew, but I had expectations of a future that would be as fresh as it was disconcerting, in which humanity once again came to grips with a new reality in light of its vivid mortality.

But intrinsic forgetting is a function of human survival, and forgetting the pandemic has become international policy. We are the poorer for it. In Britain, successive governments have chosen to ignore the fallout effect of Long Covid, to profess themselves mystified by the increase in the number of those too chronically sick to work, while smugly and serenely vilifying them for their sickness. And not content with the number of lives lost to Covid, humanity has continued to deal in death.

My father is dead, now, too—taken not by Covid, but by lung cancer at the beginning of this year. My mother requires significant care each day, following a sudden event. ‘Here there be monsters’ can be written on every corner of the map.

The world is indeed a different place.

But not in ways that we imagined.

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