And when I say "heights" I mean something as unidyllic as the roof of my house. A space usually reserved for prosaic tasks and for accumulating junk in the corresponding rooms and which, due to the Coronavirus and the forced general confinement, has become a territory of collective recreation for the neighbors (with strict shifts and safety distances, of course). Rooms that, wrapped in dust and abandoned to their fate, have mutated almost by magic, for example, into a charming painting studio. Leisurely painting, perhaps due to the character of the apprentice painter, perhaps because they only have a canvas that is intended to be stretched until the end of confinement.
It is curious how the perspective of things and spaces changes in extreme situations. An almost forgotten and even sometimes despised area, an accessible but barely transited place, has suddenly become a kind of trendy "chill out" to which we go to cool off, in the broadest sense of the word.
It wasn't always like this. The roof of my house awakens unforgettable childhood memories. Memories of innocent games, secret hiding places and mysterious objects, pets that have seen better days, never-finished crafts and, why not say it, with the passage of the years, lively activities typical of any teenager.
From the heights of my building, any vulgar and unremarkable building, I can see the roofs and neighboring rooftops, some refreshing penthouses and, with the reassuring anonymity that "looking from above" always offers, some fascinating neighborhood windows.
It is easy to see how most of the terraces that I can observe have undergone a gradual transformation over the days. First it was some timid and rickety hammock, in one of the most distant buildings. Then, without haste but without pause and in a generalized way, some umbrellas, tables, chairs, awnings, strange and incomprehensible gym equipment and even some fleeting barbecue dusted off from the depths of some storage room followed.
Life, practically inert at street level, has been progressively moving to the heights of the buildings where my fellow citizens have been creating small havens of tranquility. Air and light necessary to cope, in the best possible way, with the sadness of confinement.
I note the determination and conviction with which some neighbors, especially, engage in the most intense of physical exercises, or at least it seems to me. Whether doing "laps" in endless back and forth on the balcony, or jogging in circles on their terraces. People who perhaps cannot live without exercising or, perhaps, take advantage of the circumstances to settle accounts with eternal unfulfilled self-promises.
Not far away, at the height of Calle Mayor, a lady of contained age and meager roof terrace and whom I know from exchanging cordial greetings since time immemorial, has managed to jump daily to the roof of the adjoining building, much wider and more spacious. A commercial building locked up as everyone else. With evident satisfaction for having such an extension for herself alone and perhaps also seized by the exciting sensation of her small but successful trick, she jogs daily with manifest delight, above thousands of state-of-the-art articles that await better times to return to being the object of desire of alleged buyers.
Others, the fewest, strive as never before to care for the pots and small gardens of their windows and terraces. It seems more than a hobby, a true vindication of the true and the simple as opposed to the complexity of the times we live in.
I have put a face, even in a few cases a name, to many of my fellow citizens. Hitherto anonymous faces that make sense when we exchange complicit, protective glances. Veiled smiles and fleeting glances exchanged throughout the day, the endless day. When the pressing need for comfort fades, will we return to the routine of the polite and fleeting greeting? The future remains to be discovered.
Observing urban birds has become an unexpected hobby. Faced with the hasty retreat of humans to their respective lairs, the winged fauna is gaining space with determination. Unredeemed pigeons, foreign turtledoves, resurrected sparrows and even some wary blackbirds accompany me on my first morning visit to our discreet earthly paradise. Sometimes, when sleep rebels, before dawn, I settle down waiting for the parrots of the park to noisily take off in their hasty flight. They fly over me every morning in uneven formation and small groups, without much order or concert, marking the distances as if with them were also the new rules of "social distancing" that we are about to assume as commonplace in the future. And the swifts, always making impossible caprioles while, it seems, they feed on unwary insects. They say that swifts can sleep while flying. They furrow the air permanently and only land to lay their eggs and raise their chicks. Flying sleeping or sleeping flying! The eternal dream of anyone.
In the street, emptiness has taken over the entire space. Only some fleeting passer-by, bag in hand, and some dogs dragging their owners while trying to understand, with drooping ears and lost gaze, what the hell is going on. Perhaps they should be taken to the heights, where life, despite everything, continues.