My family and I were in Bilbao, Spain when we started to hear news that countries might be closing down. It was hard then to imagine what it would mean for a country in Western Europe to close down. But then Italy did it—its borders were shut, its restaurants shuttered, its citizen stopped by police even on short trips out of their apartments. Meanwhile, my wife and I and our two kids were on a ten-day vacation, thanks to the frequent school holidays in France, where we were living during our year-long sabbatical. As we wandered awe-struck through the Guggenheim museum (a must-see, if you are in Northern Spain), it wasn’t just the art that we felt we couldn’t touch. It was any surface anywhere. A few days later, our kids’ schools reopened back in Bordeaux only to be shuttered a week later, when Macron announced a national shutdown. This meant that nearly everything closed, except for food stores. Residents were not permitted to leave their homes except for food shopping, medical care, and open-air exercise (no more than one hour a day within a one-kilometer radius from one’s home). You couldn’t circulate without a kind of official permission slip, which one signed and time stamped.
This lockdown (confinement) was serious and enforced, and it lasted for two months, during which our family of four lived entirely within the walls of our 1000 square-foot apartment. This was the seventh month of our 10-month stay in France, and it felt like a bruising end to what had been until that moment a liberating escape from our daily routine back in Boston, where we’d rented out our home. It was also frightening to be in another country during a global crisis and we briefly considered packing up and leaving for the US. But our renters couldn’t move, and so neither could we, which turned out to be fortunate.
This kind of space apart from the world is, of course, what writers spend a great deal of energy trying to construct and what, for the most part, the world does its best to prevent them from doing. Now we had to do it—and with our kids (not always great for writers), who were supposed to be in “l’ecole à la maison,” which meant my wife and I had to support their learning. While our French is pretty good, we weren’t ideal teachers of the language, and our son corrected our accents and pronunciation as we forced him to complete his oppressively boring grammar exercises and math worksheets. (There was no online school for him, just booklets of photocopied work for him to complete.)
Meanwhile, we converted our small second-story bedroom into a makeshift office space and traded off writing shifts for teaching shifts. The room had space only for a tiny desk and chair just in front of a window that looked out onto our narrow street lined with 19th-Century rowhouses. It was a view we’d come to know very well over the next two months. And while I got some writing done (including the story that will appear in Fiction), I spent hours watching our neighbors. We had made many friends in our first seven months in Bordeaux through our son’s neighborhood elementary school. But our neighbors remained a mystery to us. In the quiet of the empty streets, the opening of a front door made a racket. And so it was hard not to notice anyone coming or going. Across the street were (we would soon learn) two doctors, one who lived with his wife and two adult daughters. The other doctor on the street lived alone and had frequent visits from different young men. When he opened the door for them, he was often dressed in his bathrobe, which he would still be wearing about an hour later when he opened the door again to let them out.
The only social event of the day, aside from talking to our neighborhood cheese monger, came at eight o’clock in the evening, when residents would step out of their front doors and applaud the medical workers who labored around the clock to treat Covid patients. During one of these evenings, someone proposed that we have Friday night drinks on our street. Over the next weeks, this event became the highlight of our small neighborhood. Neighbors set up chairs and tables, opened bottles, and brought out plates of food, which we weren’t supposed to share but inevitably did. The event tended to last two hours, and sometimes more. As there were no cars, neighbors drifted out into the street with their wine glasses, more or less careful to maintain the distance of one meter (about 3 and half feet) that the government required at that time. In fact, the doctor who lived alone seemed unable to keep his distance. He got right up close as he cursed the government for providing his medical practice with no masks and no Covid tests, which meant he had been unmasked that day with several patients who showed the classic symptoms, including the inability to smell or taste food. As one backed away from him, he tended to step forward as he drank his whisky and smoked. Next to him lived a thin librarian, a quiet man whose wife talked a lot. She was eager to tell us, the Americans, about the summer she spent in San Francisco with her aunt more than thirty years ago. San Francisco, she said, did we know it? Had we been there? Hippies were all over the streets the summer she’d been there. When her husband did speak, he wanted to talk about his favorite American authors, Raymond Carver, Jim Harrison, Toni Morrison. Farther down the street, we met a midwife and her partner, a marathon runner, who had just learned that the Boston Marathon, which he was supposed to run in that month, had just been canceled. As we talked, the doctor who had been cursing the government for its lack of preparedness, opened the doors of his apartment and blasted French cabaret music, which seemed to bring the hermitic elderly couple on the corner out to look at everyone with disapproval, though they didn’t say anything before retreating back into their home. There was, it seemed, a small village in our neighborhood and all the villagers had come out to drink, talk, and rediscover communal life for a few hours.
It is hard to convey just how nourishing and necessary these Friday evenings were with our neighbors, some of whom quickly became friends. At the end of the two-month lockdown, this weekly ritual ended and cars once again drove down our street. Unlike life in the U.S. in the time of Covid, the French (at least, the French we knew) gradually returned to a nearly normal life. The same neighbors we saw only in the streets invited us over for meals. We saw our friends again, ate with them inside, stayed with them in their country homes on the coast. And we also enjoyed the experience of traveling in a France that was almost completely empty of tourists. (That was in May and June. France is just now reopening gradually after a second lockdown, clearly the consequence of returning to something like normal life.)
When we returned to Boston at the beginning of July, we quickly learned that the epidemic was entirely different in our country, where mask wearing was political and the American legacy of racism had broken out into nationwide protests. Whereas the pandemic felt like a shared national emergency in France, back home it felt (and still feels) like another barrier between people that raised suspicions and caused finger pointing and resentments. And something was—and still is—lost for me at the desk. The level of distraction has been intense and constant as a second surge of Covid and the election collided this fall. The constant news cycle existed in France, too, but so did the view from the window above my small writing desk, and what it looked out on and showed me seemed to be life that was carried out on a more human and humane scale. Of course, it’s easy to idealize another culture when one lives in it only a few months. France certainly has its problems and its sources of profound division, some of them the same as ours. But the volume of discontent and suffering blares more loudly here, it seems to me, and it has not been easy to settle in at the desk, to focus, to listen to the sentences, when I even manage to get them on the page.
I am no longer on sabbatical now, no doubt a large reason the writing is more challenging. Teaching and worrying about my students have been good distractions. The year is almost over and I feel (I think) optimistic about all that might be different in 2021. I have never been a writer who responds to the present moment in his work. Much of what I’ve been writing about over the last months took place more than twenty years ago. But I’m sure this time will lead to a great deal of rich and nuanced writing, and I look forward to seeing what other writers make of it. The small magazines that print literary fiction and cultivate language and stories that tell the truth about our experience are absolutely essential after years of blatantly false political rhetoric. To address one part of the prompt we’ve been given, I’ll admit that I’m not sure where this crisis has “placed” me, where I am now. The image of our narrow street in Bordeaux, with neighbors venturing out on Friday evenings to drink and talk together after another week of isolation comes to mind. The need and hunger for reestablishing community was palpable as we talked. And maybe it’s suggestive in a small way of what could happen when we all finally reemerge from our current situation in some months or even years from now.
John Fulton’s short story, Lovers, is forthcoming in FICTION No. 65. He has published three books of fiction: Retribution, which won The Southern Review Short Fiction Award, the novel More Than Enough, and The Animal Girl, which was short listed for the Story Prize. His fiction has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and been published in several journals, including Zoetrope, Oxford American, The Missouri Review, and The Southern Review. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Boston.