Claudio Lavanga, NBC News correspondent in Rome, reported on a wide variety of stories. Most recently, he helped document the terrible number of deaths from the pandemic in Italy, where more than 104,000 died and nearly 3.5 million fell ill. Now, as the country goes through a third wave of Covid-19, he describes how his family became part of the story.
ROME – Since Italy became the epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe, I have followed the number of people who test positive every day. It quickly reached tens of thousands of victims daily, a war bulletin in a fight against an invisible enemy.
Then, on January 23, that number hit the target.
Of the 1,331 people in Italy who tested positive that day, one of them was my mother, Antonia – known to everyone who knew her as Antonietta.
Then, after being away from Covid-19 for a year, I realized it was time to go back to the white two-story house I grew up on outside Milan. It was time for me to see my mother – even from a distance.
Antonietta greeted me from an annex above our family home, where she is isolating my father from my sister Maria, who earlier this year decided to be quarantined with my mother and ended up getting the virus.
When I was a boy, my mother was a benevolent little dictator, shouting orders to us children at home.
Now, separated from the world in a tiny apartment and by my father’s concrete blocks, she was barely able to pronounce an audible “Ciao”.
Covid-19 didn’t just drop his voice.
Standing in a window, she looked even more tiny and fragile, and the fact that I couldn’t get close, much less hug her, made the collateral damage caused by the virus apparent: This disease is not only deadly, it is also transformed homes from safe havens to danger zones, and loved ones to Trojan horses.
Positive test
Antonietta picked up Covid-19 in another place that was supposed to be a safe area: a so-called Covid free hospital. She has cancer and was admitted to a series of tests in the oncology department.
The day after check-in, I called to ask if she had slept well and she said, “No, a lady in my room coughed up all night.”
Two days later, the roommate tested positive and my mother was transferred to isolation until the result of her own test came back.
The hospital was not equipped to deal with coronavirus patients, so a terrified team rarely entered its room. They would leave food outside the door, as in a prison. To my mother, Covid-19 looked like a life sentence.
Three days later, she tested positive.
That this virus has infiltrated a hospital that should be free of it is a metaphor for Italy.
This country, especially in the rich north, where my parents moved when they were newlyweds, was devastated by the coronavirus. Abundant money and utilities have not prevented the virus from spreading to cities and towns, hospitals and nursing homes.
My parents are part of a defining generation of Italians who were attracted from the south by the promise of security, stability and prosperity.
The two met for the first time across the table at a family dinner in the town of Scampitella, 50 years ago. She was 18 years old and Natalino, my father, was 10 years older. They soon got married. Our family was carried by a wave that took Italy from its post-war destruction to become one of the richest countries in the world. And that was it.
They worked tirelessly to build a life.
My father worked day and night in various jobs in neighboring Switzerland, but mainly as a truck driver and wine merchant. On weekends, he returned to Milan to finish the house. The second floor, a separate apartment – was meant to lure one of us children back to live with them after they retired. None of us did, and it remained empty for years as a symbol of our ingratitude.
Now, the apartment is my mother’s prison.
Face to mask
On a recent night, with my mother and sister trapped by the virus upstairs, my father and I sat at the kitchen table with a bottle of Primitivo – a red wine from southern Italy, where he and my mother were born. Sharing a glass of wine was something I wanted to do with my father long before I was of legal drinking age.
The oldest photo I have of my father is mine, as a child, trying to get a glass of wine I was holding in my hands. Today I am serving him.
He told how, during one of his visits at home, he met my mother at a family dinner.
“We looked at each other: we knew,” he said.
What he is most proud of, he said, is that, in order to marry my mother, he did not have to kidnap her. At that time, in small towns in the south, arranged marriages were still common and couples often had to resort to “kidnapping” to marry their true loves.
My parents don’t. In their case, there was no need for kidnapping or forced marriage.
Natalino is not an easy man with intimacy, so I was surprised when he blurted out: “She is still beautiful. She always has been. “
They are in the same house, but he still misses her, and maybe he is afraid of missing out on the opportunity to tell her personally.
She misses him too.
One night, around 4 am – after a month alone upstairs – my mother got up, dressed, took her oxygen cart to the door and opened it. The steep stairway must have looked like the descent of the Himalayas: because of its mobility problems, each step is a slippery slope towards a possibly deadly fall.
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She dropped the oxygen, grabbed the handrail, and went down. She went down to the apartment, unlocked the door and the alarm went off. The objective was to prevent intruders from entering. And in a way, this is what my mother became because of Covid-19: a fugitive who escaped the blockade, the Trojan horse in her own home.
My father woke up startled by the deafening sound, jumped out of bed and ran for the door. And there they were, Maria tells me, face to face, numb and confused, without remembering the code to disable the door alarm.
It was a perfect metaphor for the situation the virus had put them in: getting close to each other, the alarm went off, and they didn’t know exactly how to neutralize the danger.