After the deterioration of personal hygiene, the consequence of isolation that can be considered the most harmful is boredom. La Condesa, the neighborhood where I live, was far from a dull and boring place, until the virus arrived.
But now, dozens of restaurants, bars, and cafes are closed. My favorite café, the one that allowed me to read the French newspaper "Le Canard Enchaîné" (The Chained Duck), was one of the first to close.
Little pleasures such as sitting on a bench of the divider of Mazatlán Avenue, having tea and watching people go by who would walk their dogs in the afternoon, is no longer possible. The free movie club at the Hotel Condesa is suspended. In short, everything that gave life and liveliness to the neighborhood has disappeared.
And what are we left with? Well, to follow orders and stay locked up at home.
Well, regretting doesn't fix anything. What should I do to get me through the day which might not be fun but at least will keep me busy until evening falls because that's when the things that I DO consider fun begin?
For starters, I have assigned myself the task of writing a "post" for this blog every day. This is not only a healthy occupation but also an exercise that allows me to overcome the writer's number one enemy: laziness and distractions. If you, reader, think that writing is a relaxed and easy task because I practice it sitting down (few writers write standing up like Hemingway did), you are wrong. Writing a thousand words a day (which is what I assign myself between this blog and a novel I am writing), is like trying to squeeze about 100 milliliters of water out of a rock. (Let the metaphor be understood as the brain is the rock and the words the water).
When I click "Save" in MS Word after I have written the 1000th word, I feel like I have finished a round of boxing with a heavyweight. Now I understand why Hemingway boasted of having beaten opponents like Turgenev, Maupassant and Stendhal in an imaginary ring.
The other danger to completing any writing task is distractions: WhatsApp messages, phone calls from friends and family, the temptation to see one more chapter of my favorite series on Netflix, to see what the folks are saying on Facebook or Twitter.
But when laziness, tiredness or distractions threaten to diminish my production, I remember that this activity, these words that unfold on the screen to describe my thoughts, are and should be, allies and a great help against boredom, the true enemy.
When the "fun" part of the day begins, another great ally against boredom is YouTube. I am addicted to old movies, especially those that were filmed between 1935 and 1955. How I envy people who lived through that post-war era because (according to Hollywood) they traveled by train and when they were not having a cocktail in the Club Car of the train, they were having it in a fancy bar. Witness the scene from "Leave Her To Heaven" in which Cornel Wilde is in the Club Car of the train, sitting in a comfortable chair and in front is Gene Tierney. Wow, talk about confort.
And I never get tired of seeing "His Girl Friday" with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, for my money the best comedy that has ever been filmed. You have to have a very fine ear to capture the funny dialog of the characters that shoot out of each scene as if it were from a machine gun. You have to be very attentive to catch them all.
For example, Rosalind Russell (as Hildy the reporter) is accusing Louie a pickpocket of having set his girlfriend to charge Hildy's boyfriend of proposing improper things to her:
Hildy: "It's your fault Louie, you sent that blond albino to get my boyfriend in trouble."
Louie: "She ain't no albino. She was born here in this country."
Two other characters that "from time to time" accompany my boredom are anger and nostalgia. The anger that says "I am pissed that this unfortunate virus has robbed me of so many things that I like to do and live, especially at this stage of life when every day feels like I'm countdown of my life. After the anger comes nostalgia for those things, those days that we enjoyed so much.
But there's a solution:
The other day, when nostalgia got hold of me, that kind of nostalgia that the Portuguese call "saudade", which is a feeling of longing, melancholy and nostalgia. I remembered the many summers we spent in Paris. When I lived in France, every year we rented the house for the entire month of August to a Parisian family. And we would go to Paris. Paris can be very unpleasant in August due to the number of tourists that invade the city, but if you know what areas the tourists never go to, it can be very pleasant even in the middle of summer. So, we would drive up to Paris via Route 21, the national route that crosses the geographical center of the country and passes through many pleasant and beautiful towns, which the super highways do not do. We would take two days to do so, spending the nights in whatever towns that we liked, such as Perigueux, for example.
Once in Paris, we would stay in Suresnes, a suburb on the other side of the Seine, far from the madding crowd of central Paris.
This is the Hotel de Ville de Suresnes, the equivalent of a municipal palace in Mexico. But, what makes me nostalgic is remembering the walks we used to take in those parts of Paris that are not frequented by tourists, such as the 5th Arrondissement, the so-called Latin Quarter, which in summer is very quiet given that the students are on vacation. There are many things to see and experience there: the old-book sellers (like the one who sells books by the kilo), and the movie house on Rue des Ècoles, which shows remastered old films.
But, since I can't go to Paris to walk through those streets and avenues that I enjoyed so much, I do what we can all do now: I make virtual visits. There are web cams everywhere and there are 30 or 40 minute walks that one can enjoy on YouTube. Searching for "city walks paris france" one finds walks through various parts of the city. It is a palliative.
Finally, I will say that to combat boredom, there are many offers and many of them free, between visits to museums and my favorite: the extraordinary productions of opera by the New York Met. Look for the site metoperas.org
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