Love in a time of restriction
My friend met someone; he took off her mask to kiss her. My other friend met someone; she didn’t know what two-thirds of his face looked like until the moment of kissing, when they took off their masks. This was summer-loving in San Sebastián, a coastal city in a region that should consider changing its name from Basque country to mask country. And I’m only half kidding, because masks are required from the moment you set foot outside your door, to the moment you re-enter it. Throughout the Summer, a booming loudspeaker on the beach reminded you that you were only permitted to remove your mask ‘in the moment of swimming.’ By now, a month into Autumn, facial orifices have become the new private parts, and the sight of a naked nose in an unsanctioned place, raises fear and alarm. No doubt, noses and mouths are on their way to becoming as fetishised as ankles were in Victorian times.
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For good reasons, where romance is concerned, we’re in a time of restriction - the number of meetings are limited, while the physical distance between potential lovers is stretched out for longer. In theory, this should lower the number of couplings, but over the summer, I noticed that the reverse was also true. People found ways around the restrictions, taking chances to get behind the masks of the people they fancied, or, were vaguely interested in. Crisis finds included: a potential love-interest who was buried for sixteen years at the bottom of a friendship group; friends of the desired sex who were being seen in a new light, and in the most Zorro-like case, a physio who became something more when he took my friend to the beach and revealed his unmasked beauty. People were losing the sense that there were limitless numbers of fish in the sea, and were instead getting creative with how they fished in their shrinking pools.
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As a reader of classic novels, I’ve been trained to see limitation as a precondition for romance. Coupled with hormones and idealism, it builds the kind of tension that you couldn’t find in a pre-pandemic climate riddled with myths of impermanent losses and replaceable loves. I realise that using books as mirrors is neither fashionable, nor scholarly, but I've always found parallels between reading and life, no matter how anachronistic. Literary scenes and descriptions inform the way I see the world, and I inhabit a topography of both real and textual landmarks.
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​In late August, I read Edith Wharton’s Summer, a 1917 novella that seems a prefigurement of romance in the pandemic, down to some uncannily specific details. The seventeen-year-old protagonist, Charity Royall, falls in love with Lucius Harney, the only attractive man she has even seen. The setting is North Dormer, an out-of-the-way New England town that has been left behind by the railway, and where all the books in the mildering local library are at least twenty years old. Wharton’s description of this time-stopped town, with its limited and predictable flow of people, speaks to the contemporary experience of living in any small settlement. Mine for instance: a summer holiday resort, which nine months of the year is off peak season and inhabited by people who are conscripted into their own social codes, and so may as well be made of rock as far as dating options go. If you’re part of the hodge-podge of internationals in this city, every person counts, and each new arrival causes a stir. Though Wharton said her novella was ‘written in a flash of summer heat’, the instrumental element is the ‘little June wind’ which ‘frisks’ down the street and tosses Lucius’ straw hat into a fish pond. This in turn, catches Charity’s eye and announces the presence of a newcomer. Last Autumn, a comparable wind carried an Aer Lingus flight over the Bay of Biscay. A stranger to town was on board. The blow in, as my now boyfriend would put it, turned out to be a person I fancied, who fancied me, who wanted a relationship at the same time. I’m listing the three unique coincidences. After years of living in London, a metropolis of overlapping attractions and distractions, the singularity of these events still strikes me.
My point is, that even before the pandemic, Whartonesque notions of scarcity, and the charge surrounding any new, available person, were real here. The pandemic has brought us closer to Summer’s world in other ways too. Mask-wearing and social-distancing can be likened to the era of hat protocol, where the refusal to cover one’s crown in public, would lead to accusations of being a ‘bare-headed whore.’ Both hats and masks obscure our most expressive facial organs, and embody the wish that strangers should maintain a respectful distance. By partially concealing the face, these coverings also transform it. Charity’s hat is of ‘white straw, with a drooping brim and cherry-coloured lining that made her face glow like the inside of the shell on the parlour mantelpiece.’ The voluminous hat hides the ‘rough dark rope’ of hair, that symbolises Charity’s earthy sensuality, and gives her the guileless rosy lustre of a polished shell. I’ve seen many mask equivalents to Charity’s hat floating through the streets of San Sebastián. While in the first months after quarantine, a sea of ephemeral blue surgical masks predominated, now that we’ve accepted that facial coverings are here to stay, they’ve become shapely, patterned, intricate, and conspicuously plain. Those with attractive hair and eyes are the big winners in the new sartorial reality, while those with bushy beards suffer the affliction of competing lines, and would do well to shave.
​Both in Wharton and in life, the adoption of facial coverings and distancing norms in public space, has caused restless youngsters to retreat to wilder, less regulated strips of land. I started reading Summer on the train journey from Paris to Hendaye, a French town on the Spanish border. While the Paris to Bordeaux leg of the journey spanned a flat, sunlit stripe of land, as we approached the Basque country and Spain, dark mountains loomed, and with them, ideas of intrigue. The inanimate protagonist of Wharton’s novella is the Mountain that ‘rose so abruptly from the lower hills that it seemed almost to cast its shadow on North Dormer.’ The Mountain is the home of poor, pagan outlaws, including Charity’s hillbilly family of origin. Although Summer takes place on America’s historic, Eastern seaboard, its fields, derelict barns and mountainsides, seem like barely-settled prairie-land.
When I crossed the border and resumed my life in San Sebastián, the sugar-heap mountain, two minutes away from my flat, became twinned with the one in Wharton’s novella. As Charity loses her virginity to Lucius out of wedlock, and becomes pregnant with his child, the mountain represents her id, or unconscious drive. She wishes that its reaches could ‘hide’ her, so that she can live as her whole self, away from society’s prying eyes. Similarly, Bandit Mountain, as I nickname it, remains unvisited by the police, and is where, until recently, groups of teenagers sheltered under castle ruins, yanked down their masks and drank blue spirits. With their stained mouths and drooping sleeves, they were ragged as the new-fallen leaves. Despite my pony-tail and navy blue norm-core, I was as suspicious as they were, when I climbed high enough and tugged at my mask, for a few gulps of free mountain air. Up there, at least fifteen metres from the next human, the ground-level distancing laws no longer made sense. And yet, I was slightly afraid of my fellow rebels, because we were mutually in hiding; mutually disobedient and forced to trust each other. Despite the story I was telling myself, about being different from them, because they were drinking, and I was on my evening constitutional.
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I'm going to leave the mountainside now, and move on to what caused me to fall right into Wharton’s one-hundred-and-sixty-page work. The book was a companion, as well as a guide for how to squeeze enough liveliness from a time when there are barriers to spontaneity and joy. I can forget the despondent ending, and admire how Charity makes the most of the little freedom she’s afforded, both over time and space; how she grows to know her limited terrain like the back of her hand, and finds possibilities in it. As the restrictions tighten again, we have to be equally resourceful. We have to learn to look at the local and familiar anew, to approach them with a beginner’s open mind.
Recently, when a friend asked me what five things made me happy, an odd thing slipped out. 'A lack of waste', I said. I have never known what to make of opulence, of bewildering amounts of choice, even if at times, I’ve been privileged enough to have them. I saved that excess chilli-pod from lunch and used it up at dinner. I’ve always liked the stories where a household object is endowed with magical properties, and still performs its original function; where chance meetings count, and make discernible shapes in our lives. My distaste for superfluity is driven at once by a thirst for meaning, and a fear of loss. But that's a topic for another essay.