Cristina de Middel

(...)

henever I was meeting someone who was not giving the right importance to the situation. Now with half of my family in Spain and the other half in Italy, the juggling has stopped. I managed to leave Spain a few days before the lockdown. You could see people carrying tons of toilet paper and also the terraces and parks full of normality due to the nice weather in Madrid. It was a total schizophrenic reality, Buñuel would have been very proud of Spanish people right before the start of the lockdown. I could feel there were stories everywhere but found myself totally incapable of synthesizing and understanding what I was seeing. If that is how History is made, it is really confusing, honestly. Fiction is much more manageable. I am now in Itacaré, a small town by the sea in the North of Brazil, where I live with my husband Bruno. I wanted to be here because it is my house and my home but I have spent so little time here in the last 3 years that I am forcing myself into believing this is the right place to be. I am as curious as scared for discovering how the country is going to manage the situation. Up until 2 days ago, life was totally normal. I was in Salvador de Bahía, the capital of the state, doing paperwork and trying to find images or stories that could represent the imminence of something terrible about to happen, but it was very difficult. Nothing in the streets and the people you could meet had any feeling of urgency, the conversation was out there but in the form of jokes and eventually some appreciation of a distant drama. "Coroa" is the jargon word for old crazy man in Portuguese, the typical old drunk or crazy man that nobody pays attention to and that lives in the streets. I find it also funny that they talk about the "Corona V Itacaré. Brazil. March 20, 2020. © Cristina de Middel | Magnum Photos

I have been myself juggling from denial to paranoia, changing my mind about the seriousness of the situation every 2 minutes, sounding careless when conversations became too dramatic and alarming w