It was raining in Azinhaga, a slow rain that the old people of the village would have called feminine, because it neither hurried nor announced itself, and the thermometer in the doorway read twelve degrees, which is the temperature of indecision, the temperature at which the body cannot decide whether it is cold or only pretending to be cold, and the author of these lines, watching the water make its small territories on the windowpane, thought that this is perhaps the best weather for understanding what is happening in the world, because under such a sky no certainty can survive intact, every conviction is washed gently downward, the political assertions, the borders, the announcements of victory, the bulletins of the foreign ministries, everything streaks and runs together until the colours are indistinguishable, and only the water itself, patient and democratic, remains.
A ship has been emptied of its passengers. This sentence, simple as a stone dropped in a well, might be the beginning of a parable, and indeed it is, because aboard that ship a virus was found whose name, hantavirus, sounds like the surname of an exiled count, and the count had been travelling without papers, without a ticket, without even being noticed until the bodies that carried him began to fail, and now the ship is empty and the passengers are quarantined in places they had never heard of, in Nebraska, in Atlanta, in cities they cannot pronounce, while the World Health Organization, with its careful voice that has learned over the decades how to whisper bad news so it sounds like reassurance, declares the public risk very low, very low, very low, repeating the phrase three times so that we may believe it once. The reader will recognise here the shape of an old story, the story of an epidemic that begins as an inconvenience and ends as a mirror, in which every nation sees, eventually, its own face.
And what does the face look like, today, this twelfth of May. Let us be patient and assemble it feature by feature. In Washington a man says that a ceasefire is on massive life support, calling the proposals from the other side garbage, which is the language of children fighting over the broken pieces of a toy that was never theirs to begin with, and in Tehran the parliamentary speaker replies that the Americans have no alternative but to accept his fourteen points, fourteen being a number of biblical patience, and meanwhile in the Strait of Hormuz the oil tankers slip past each other like nervous animals in a forest at dusk, and the price of petrol climbs, as petrol climbs in such weeks, and the same man in Washington promises to suspend the federal gasoline tax, a promise he cannot keep alone, requiring as it does the consent of a body called Congress, which is a parliament that has forgotten its own name, and so the promise hangs in the air like a kite without wind.
–
The author pauses here because the rain has stopped, briefly, and then resumes, and somewhere in London a Prime Minister has stood at a lectern to declare that he will not resign, which is what Prime Ministers always declare on the day before they resign, and the members of his own party are counting heads in corridors, their faces composed but their hands restless, the way hands always become restless when they are about to push someone, and Sir Keir Starmer, who only a few months ago promised to put Britain at the heart of Europe, now finds that Europe is a heart with many chambers, none of them entirely his. In another European chamber the foreign ministers have agreed to sanction seven Israeli settler groups for violence in the West Bank, and Israel has called the decision arbitrary, which is the word that powerful states use when other powerful states do something they cannot prevent.
Meanwhile, and the word meanwhile is a great consolation in difficult times because it suggests that there is always something else happening, something kinder perhaps, somewhere on the other side of the wound – meanwhile, a conference in Belgium has gathered to discuss the Ukrainian children taken to Russia, children whose names are now Russian names, whose memories are being rewritten as one rewrites a letter that has gone out of fashion, and the delegates pledge to return them, and we know how such pledges are kept, slowly, partially, with much paperwork and few children, and in Bolivia the police are looking for a former president who did not appear in court, and in Mexico whole Indigenous communities have fled into the mountains because the drug gangs now use drones, the same drones that drop pizza in Texas drop bombs in Guerrero, the technology being neutral as God is said to be neutral, which is to say, useful to whoever has it.
The reader will perhaps grow weary, but the author asks for patience, because we have not yet spoken of the hippos. In Colombia the descendants of Pablo Escobar's private menagerie have multiplied in the rivers, and the town that grew up around them, that sells postcards of them, that has organised its small economy around their enormous indifference, must now decide whether to euthanise them or to feed them, and the decision will be made by people in offices far from any river, which is how most decisions are made, and the hippos themselves, who never asked to be in Colombia, who never read the newspaper that announced the death of their first owner, continue to bathe in waters that are not their waters and to be a problem that no one quite knows how to name. There is an allegory here too, of course there is, but the author will not press it, will leave it for the rain to develop.
–
A boy in Chicago has died. His name was Kevin González, he was eighteen, he had colon cancer, and he had argued, against the great inertia of the state, for the release of his parents from immigration custody, and the state, in its slow generosity, finally let them go, and the boy was reunited with them in Mexico for a short while before he died, and what shall we say about such a story, that justice came too late, or that it came at all, or that some forms of mercy are indistinguishable from cruelty when measured against the clock. Perhaps only this: that in Canadian seabird eggs the levels of certain forever chemicals have dropped by seventy-four per cent over fifty-five years of regulation, which is to say, the world can be improved, slowly, by people who insist, even when no one is watching, even when the gannets themselves do not know that they are being saved.
The rain in Azinhaga continues. The temperature has not moved from twelve degrees. The author looks out at his small unimportant garden and thinks that the great difficulty of our century is not that we lack information, we drown in information, we are passengers on the same quarantined ship, all of us, breathing one another's air, the diplomatic air, the financial air, the air of grievance and the air of hope, and the virus that we carry is the old one, the human one, the one for which there is no vaccine, only attention, only the small patient courtesy of looking at one another and saying, you exist, I see you, you exist.
It is not much. But the rain too, drop by drop, is not much, and yet by evening the fields are wet, and the river runs higher than it ran in the morning, and the world, against all its appearances, continues.
