Say No Evil

February 2, 2022

So the story goes, when the first people in this village caught Covid-19 in 2020, a few of the neighbours wanted to burn down their house with them in it. This medieval method wasn’t used, thankfully, but there has been a lot of denial around catching the virus ever since. It’s a little like in the early 1900s when a man came back from a business trip with an ailment indicating he’d had a dalliance with a lady of the evening. The family hoped the Salvarsan would cure the disease, but it was never, ever to be mentioned.

Quite why people here are held responsible for infections more than the virus is, I can’t really say. I suspect it stems from general ignorance of how disease is transmitted, abetted by the flakiest of New Age theories on the topic propagated by superannuated hippies who live here. They are often confident enough in their beliefs that these bleed through to the native community around them. Thus, (you will hear) diseases can’t infect you without you having some karmic imperfection, some imbalance in your aura, or a similar idea. I’ve had someone shout at my face that without such an auric weakness, I couldn’t possibly get sick, so why did I wear a stupid mask? I did, I confess, savour the schadenfreude when I heard he too had a bad case of Covid.

Whatever the reason, to get the virus is a mark of shame, like a punishment from God.

All this was underlined last week when a Mexican friend came to stay at my place for a couple of days while attending an arts course being held locally. On Friday morning, she told me she had pain all down her body, a dreadful headache and fever. I was despatched to acquire Naproxen, Prednisone and vitamins from the village pharmacy; and like other substances made by the evil guys at Big Pharma, they worked – and without any auric adjustments. I was hopeful my recent booster jab, something she’d not had, might keep me safe, but by Saturday night I too felt low, and my throat was sore.

By Monday, it was plain she was on the mend, and my symptoms had become standard for a typical winter cold. I sneeze from time to time, my throat is a bit irritated, and my temperature is just under fever-level. Tylenol and plenty of fluids are my basic food-groups this week.

But she was insistent we create a cover story, and I had already reported to two friends who live elsewhere, plus my son in Toronto, that I probably had the bug. She let me know a mutual acquaintance of ours, who lives a ten-minute walk from this house, had Covid a few weeks ago, and has never told a soul. I had initial concerns about it getting serious, but it was almost a badge of macho pride. “Hey, I’m finally in the C-club!”

Monday, I was out of cash to buy food, and went into town, duly masked. I had the Titanic, the ancient Ford Explorer I drive, so I didn’t have to infect people, provided I was cautious. I did run into one American friend, and waved him off with hand-signals that he quickly grasped. Do not approach: I am a centre of pestilence. He signalled back: No problem – thanks for the warning! I still didn’t know I had actual Covid, and not a simple cold, but the probability lay with the coronavirus. 

Meanwhile, since I’ve had an inflamed knee for a couple of months, my friend back at the house was telling people I was incapacitated by this, and I needed her to care for me.

She’s recovering – it doesn’t seem to be a bad case – and she has gone home. I’m still sneezing, but the thermometer tells me I’ll live. 

But it has been an odd lesson in attitudes to disease. It has reminded me of an old book, Susan Sontag’s remarkable Illness as Metaphor, which focused on tuberculosis and cancer, but examined how people view diseases generally, especially those they don’t understand.

This all means, of course, that any caseload statistics from Mexico are meaningless. My cleaning lady, asked by my friend to postpone her weekly visit because “Edward has a bit of a cold right now” remarked that there were a lot of such colds around the village right now. But, naturally, no Covid-19. The C-word must not be uttered.