Reunion

Abstract

Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2021), pp. 137–161. Copyright © 2022 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201 Reunion Michael Jackson I intend to relate one hundred tales or fables or parable or stories—whichever you choose to call them—as they were told in ten days by a band of seven ladies and three young men during the time of the recent plague. —Giovanni Boccaccio, Prologue to The Decameron Lockdown In the early spring of 2020, I developed a sore throat, persistent cough, and mild fever that confined me to bed for three days. Fearing that I had contracted the COVID-19 virus, I emailed my doctor only to be advised that in the absence of any tests all I could do was self-isolate and see what happened. I did as I was told, avoiding physical contact with my wife and spending long hours alone, with only a laptop computer to connect me with the world. During this period, in which I lost track of time, I enjoyed an unexpected reprieve from my ingrained feelings of social inadequacy. Communicating with students and colleagues in writing rather than face-to-face not only restored my self-confidence, it also sharpened my awareness of the degree to which our sense of self reflects the nature of our relations with others. By late March the dogwood and forsythia were flowering and walking in the woods with Pia it was easy to imagine that a semblance of normality was Reunion Jackson 138 n Reunion returning to the world. Yet, despite the excited voices of children off school and out with their parents, it was strange the way we kept our distance from each other, wary of the invisible menace in our midst. On several successive nights, I woke to sensual dreams that left me with the guilty feeling that I was being unfaithful to Pia. Was it because my weeks of self-isolation had precluded any intimacy with her, or because the pandemic and the mounting fatalities had released in me a primordial urge, not to protect myself but to procreate? The same impulse that moved Giovanni Boccaccio to write pornographic tales during the Black Death in mid-fourteenth-century Italy is echoed in Alex Munthe’s memoir of the 1884 Neapolitan plague. Despite the randomness and pandemonium that appear to prevail whenever life and death are fighting for supremacy, as in pestilence and war, Munthe observes that “the battle is regulated in its minutest details by an immutable law of equilibrium. . . . Nature sets to work at once to readjust the balance, to call forth new beings to take the place of the fallen. Compelled by the irresistible force of a Natural Law, men and women fall in each other’s arms, blindfolded by lust, unaware that it is Death who presides over their mating, his aphrodisiac in one hand, his narcotic in the other. Death, the giver of Life, the slayer of Life, the beginning and the end.”* My own yearning also precipitated memories of two of my oldest friends. Although I saw Harry occasionally in London where he worked in publishing, and I always spent time with Fletcher on my periodic trips back to New Zealand, these reunions were always brief and somewhat dutiful. Why then should I now feel it was imperative that I get in touch with them? “It’s understandable,” Pia said. “At times like this, we all long for a time when we felt safe and secure. A time before we went out into the world and had to fend for ourselves. I have been thinking of my parents, who are probably thinking of theirs right now. Of India, Uganda, then England. All those traumatic upheavals in our family’s history that sometimes leave me wondering where I belong.” That I did not tell Pia that I was homesick for New Zealand was because my bouts of nostalgia deeply unsettled her. She was afraid that in a state of dissociative fugue I might quit my job, pull our children out of school, and drag her back to the life she had endured in New Zealand for five years before we moved to America...