Ay Corona!

I always thought that having Dutch parents was about as weird as life could get. Then an invisible particle started spreading around the world, sending humans into a flat panic that had them wearing nappies on their faces and pointing plastic gun-shaped toys at each others’ foreheads.

Covid-19 saw my guy and I go from free-spirited world travellers to small-town scaredy-cats on the brink of insanity. I remember the night of 26 March 2020 well: we hunkered down at his sister’s family home in Noordhoek while they chose to stay in the bush. We arrived in the dark with a few hours to spare before the nationwide lockdown started; the air thick with tension as we braced ourselves, in our unfamiliar surroundings, for a whole new unknown reality…

Shortly after midnight, I was struggling to fall asleep when I heard the distinct doof-doof-doof sound of helicopters approaching. I jumped out of bed, yanked open the curtains and pressed my face against the glass to witness what I imagined would be the scene of bright lights flashing against a black sky as soldiers were deployed to control us – in Noordhoek, I thought?! But I couldn’t see a thing, so with my heart hammering at my chest I went back to bed and tried to sleep. The next morning I woke to hear it again. This time I managed to follow the sound to its actual origin: the Kreepy Krauly sucking against the pool walls. I realised that anxiety might actually be a thing for me.

Over the next few weeks we settled into slow life in the sleepy town, which meant spying on law-breaking neighbours with their consistent visitors and amusing ourselves at the sight of other neighbours running laps around their house; dogs happily following at their heels. Soon I was running laps too. The world was not my oyster but the pool could at least be my hamster wheel as I timed my dizzying circular sprints around it. I also timed my free-diving boyfriend’s nauseating breath holds inside this pool, where he beat his personal five-minute record shortly before breaking into a face-down-in-the-water hypoxic fit and I had to drag him out of the pool to save his life. In diving terms it’s called a samba because the victim’s rhythmic convulsions resemble the movements of that dance, but I do not find this funny and I prefer the kind of dancing where one gets to breathe and not die. At this point we were facing the threat of potential death by corona virus and drowning.

One week later we left the house for the first time, to go grocery shopping. After all my years of travel I never thought that driving over Ou Kaapseweg could feel like a daring adventure. Or that the first items on our list would be industrial face masks and latex gloves and that when my boyfriend returned to the car I’d spray him down with sanitiser like I was fumigating cockroaches. Nor did I imagine that the cornucopia that is Woolworths would ever wane in its seemingly endless supply of fresh foods, but there I stood, staring at empty shelves, pining for broccoli in a haze of pseudo-apocalyptic disbelief.

Driving through town was an eerie experience. Closed shops and deserted streets save for a few masked faces made me feel like I was on a closed movie set. Then en route home we hit a road block. An officer stopped us and asked a few questions about where we’d been, before informing us that the passenger needs to ride in the back seat of the car to conform to social distancing rules. I snorted as I climbed into the back to protect the man I’d share a bed with later that night.

Arriving home was a complicated business. We’d vaguely rehearsed a plan for re-entry into our virus-free zone: leave the potential corona-particle-carrying packets in the garage and go upstairs to shower… wait, or was it to bring them inside and disinfect them first? Shit, we’re both bursting to pee as we’d avoided public toilets on this trip… reconvene after emission. Okay, revisited protocol as follows: take shoes off at the door. Carry packets up stairs and deliver to kitchen floor. Strip off clothes and chuck into machine for a wash cycle. Collect warm soapy water for disinfection of groceries…

So there we are, crouching over a bucket in our underwear like imbeciles, methodically wiping down every single item including a box of tea and a slab of chocolate, for what feels like hours. After it’s all transferred to the clean kitchen counter I go take a shower, wash my hair, cut my nails short and gargle with mouthwash. That night we ate our dinner in a daze of bemused silence as we reflected on the most absurd day of our lives.

Little did I know that henceforth, absurdity was only going to become the barometer by which we measured our entire existence. When the morning outdoor exercise curfew came into effect, Alessandro went for a longer cycle than planned. He was stopped by a cop car full of policemen who questioned why he was outside after 9am, and they weren’t satisfied with his answer that he was en route home from a food shop. He reached into his backpack and pulled out an apple as proof, but they wanted to see a receipt – which he did not have. For fifteen minutes four cops continued to interrogate him over the forbidden fruit and baleful bicycle until he lost his cool and retorted that this was a whole hour of wasted police time in which they could be doing something remotely useful instead of arguing with a civilian over the origin of an apple. They presented him with a R1000 fine. He cycled home with the world’s most expensive apple on his back.

As time went by I felt like I was navigating a life of constant change, both in the external world and internally. I had to choose which new habits to keep because they served me and which ones to drop because they only made me mental – like sanitising every single item I brought home. Greetings had become an awkward dance of anticipation led by raised elbows, and in my case, raised eyebrows… I felt angry when my partner’s friends hugged me against my will (there’s a sentence I never thought I’d say), but when I finally embraced the hug again, I found tangible joy. My head still instinctively does its protective outward turn though, and on greeting a friend’s husband he complained that he’d had to kiss my ear. Habit is a funny thing. I still hold my breath when someone nearby coughs or sneezes, and I try not to share drinks. I still avoid touching keypads and door handles so scraps of toilet paper shields often come in handy, or I use a shopping packet as a hand-condom (another sentence I never thought I’d say).

I have been through all of the emotions. I once walked into a shop where none of the staff were wearing their masks and I asked, with loud sarcasm, if the corona virus doesn’t exist in this particular shop. But I’ve also been told many times to wear my own mask properly and felt the burn of indignant defiance rise within me. I’ve marvelled at the runners who wear their masks whilst exercising and sniggered at the lone drivers wearing theirs – who are they trying to protect inside their empty cars?! I watched a small child crawl on a shop floor and get scooped up by her father, who doused her hands with sanitiser and told her he was going to bathe her whole body in it later, which triggered in me a deep sense of sadness about the world. And then I looked up and chortled at another man in the shop who was happily wearing his mask on his forehead, like a visor. I’ve vacillated between seeing these masks as a sign of humankind’s solidarity in helping to protect each other, and as a symbol of silencing and oppression. But what they definitively do indicate is how much you didn’t realize your own breath smells.

It feels like we’re all playing a game of Survivor, where you’re sure to spread your disease if you walk through a restaurant without covering your facial orifices, but being seated at a table grants you instant immunity. Pay counters have become small fortresses of plastic shields protecting the double-masked and gloved cashier and similarly-armoured customer from each other, but also preventing any decipherable dialogue, so after a parley of shouting back and forth through the barriers they exasperatedly resort to pulling their masks aside and leaning around the open end of the counter to hear each other – and breathe their germs directly at each others’ faces. It’s a joke.

Actually, it’s a near comedy show. I went to dinner with some friends and witnessed a brouhaha develop between two grown men as they debated hotly over the vaccine, and I nearly asked the waiter to bring me some popcorn for this front-row seat. One day I was minding my own business in the local organic grocery store when I realised that another argument had erupted between two older men – one masked, the other not – both bellicose about it. I kept my head down and quietly picked out potatoes as the two combatants hurled incivilities at each other from across the store:

“Don’t tell me how to live my life!”

“You are NOTHING!”

“FUCK YOU!!”

I felt a touch of amusement at the same time as an urge to protect the innocent veggies that lay in the middle of this ruckus. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at the state of humanity. This time of covid has left me completely discombobulated, and the more I’ve learnt and witnessed, the more my disquiet about humans and their behaviour has grown. What I do know (and what root vegetables might teach us), is that anger is often rooted in fear – and there are a lot of fearful people around. The mass media machine has left us questioning who to trust and what we can believe. What has become increasingly evident is that we have never known what is truly going on in the world, and that fact is just being highlighted for us now.

There were times when I really feared this virus. Then just as I’d changed my mind and started relaxing my thoughts about it, an unintended swipe on my phone revealed an old photo of my face engorged in blood blisters (I was working on a National Geographic series as a dying, Ebola-ridden nurse with haemorrhagic fever) and I wondered whether the universe was trying to frighten me out of my impending complacency. I also wondered about my stagnant career, as that had been my last job before covid hit and decimated the already notoriously difficult acting industry.

After two depressingly quiet years, I recently broke through the iciest winter of my working life and finally booked an international TV commercial… only to arrive at the wardrobe fitting and be betrayed by my nasal passages. Waiting and watching that pregnancy-like antigen test develop two solid red lines across it – I’m talking bold and bright, the kind whose presence you can’t even begin to try and deny because they’re fucking fuchsia – carried for me the distress of a teenager finding out she’s fallen pregnant by mistake. I had no symptoms so they followed it up with another rapid antigen test for verification, and then I was sent for a PCR test, just to shove one more shit stick up my nose and three fuck you’s in my face. I. Was. Livid. I politely left the set with a sad but good-natured smile on my now double-masked face, which, as soon as I got into my car, contorted into an ugly mess of spitting hellfire and screaming tears as I ripped off the masks and phoned my agent to tell them what had happened but could barely talk through the convulsions as saliva frothed from my mouth and anyone who could see me in that moment would have thought I had rabies instead of covid. I cried for two days straight as two years of angst and frustration boiled furiously within me and out through my eyes.

Time is such a strange thing to comprehend. Two years has felt like some kind of twisted time warp that took an eternity but also passed by in a blink. Looking back, I can laugh at a lot of the covid-induced scenes of my life, including the ridiculous timing of that job I lost. I remember meeting my parents for lunches in parking lots where we sat in our cars and ate takeaway food out of polystyrene containers at a safe distance from each other.

At that time my mom was forwarding videos that demonstrated how to kill corona virus by shoving a hairdryer up your nose. My dad died during that first year (not of covid) and the last time I hugged him was through a human-sized plastic bag that my friend had made for me. That friend was one of my first to get covid and I remember arriving at her house to drop off vitamins when her dog came bounding across the street and I ran screaming into my car as I didn’t want to be touched by her possibly covid-infected fur… I threw some old health magazines through the passenger window as I hightailed out of there. Memories of buying groceries and dropping them off with my sick siblings have been immortalised in the photos I took of their faces pressed up against closed windows, like caged animals in their isolation.

As the world went mad, new worlds were created in my head and highlighted the importance of mental health. I felt unsafe and that made me reactive. It’s a process of self-discovery when you find yourself in unprecedented circumstances and witness all your foibles come to the fore. At the height of my distress, when I was most affected by the chaos around covid, I burst into my hairdresser’s salon in such a state that with a worried look on his face he swiftly sat me down and shoved a CBD vape in my hands, but in my confused hysteria I didn’t even know if I was supposed to stick it up my nose or in my mouth.

I’m one Dutch parent down and life is still weird. These two years have made me wonder even more about the human condition; how we toil and scatter like vulnerable, insignificant little ants on this earth. It reminds me of a phrase my brother uses when referring to a hard task: It’s not for ants. I think covid and the loss of control around it has given me some of the most uncomfortable experiences of my life, but they say life begins at the end of your comfort zone so maybe that’s a good thing. It certainly has made me acutely aware of the importance of where I place my focus and attention. Covid has fuelled not only my OCD but also our local outdoor adventures – we’ve become extensive countrywide hikers and travellers. I’ve come out of it with so many new and uniquely South African experiences. That and a strong aversion to touching metal objects. I’ve changed from a kisser to a hugger, and my sanitiser-drunk hands have chapped so much that I probably don’t produce fingerprints anymore. And that’s fine – quite fitting really – because it has been a time of questioning my identity ad nauseam. That and feeling new compassion for ants.