On Feb. 20, with the World Health Organization reporting three
cases of Covid-19 in Italy and 15 in the United States, my family and
friends boarded the No. 2 vaporetto, one of the many water buses
where Venetians and tourists jam and jostle. It was the second week
of Venice’s Carnivale, and some people’s faces were covered by
spooky masks. My immediate neighbors wore gigantic hoop skirts
that rubbed against my lower legs like playful dogs.
Our group of four adults and fi ve off spring disembarked at San
Marcuola to visit the former site of the Jewish ghetto. Some of
us cared about its history. The teens and tweens overwhelmingly
did not, even though three are Jewish and Venice’s ghetto is often
considered the world’s fi rst, and whence the word ‘‘ghetto’’ derives.
In 1516, Doge Leonardo Loredan relocated the Venetian Jewish
population to the site of an old ironworks (geto in Venetian dialect),
where they were contained behind a stone wall, with gates that
were locked at night. Had anyone been interested, I might have
talked briefl y about acts committed by states and city-states and
basically just people driven by the fear of religious and cultural
contamination by outsiders. Instead we found the arch where the
gates once hung, and where we could see the indentations left by
the old hinges.
On Feb. 21, with the W.H.O. still reporting three cases in Italy of
Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and 15 in
the United States, we took a vaporetto to an island, beyond which
ships with their entire crew used to anchor for 40 days (quaranta
giorni) during illness outbreaks, a practice dating back to the 14th
century’s Black Death. Venice, for centuries a maritime merchant
society, was especially vulnerable to disease spread from distant
lands via the comings and goings of ships (something that, given
the seasonal megacruise invasions on the city, has changed little),
which might explain why in Venice, and not in Paris, where we were
days earlier, our temperatures were taken before we were allowed
into the non-security-restricted area of Marco Polo Airport (which
had become, inversely, the security-restricted area). Regardless,
in addition to ‘‘ghetto,’’ the medieval Venetians are credited, ety-
mologically, for introducing a second ‘‘containment’’ word to our
vocabulary: ‘‘quarantine.’’
On Feb. 22, with Italy reporting its fi rst two deaths from Covid-19,
we got on a plane to fl y back to the United States. In Paris, where
we changed fl ights and airlines, no one checked the temperatures
of the passengers arriving from Italy’s outbreak hot spot. No one
asked us, before we boarded our fl ight back to the United States,
or when we disembarked in New York, at J.F.K., where we’d been.
n Feb. 23, with the cancellation of Carnivale and the W.H.O. report-
ing 76 cases in Italy, we realized that we had been more at risk on
vacation than we had thought. Yes, there were a handful of Covid-19
cases in Europe when we left, and yes, I understand how viruses
work, but I was not worried about the virus, by which I mean I
was not worried about the virus’s hurting us. Which in retrospect,
despite statistics that labeled us ‘‘low risk,’’ was odd. Typically,
and depending on your take, I’m either a ceaseless catastrophizer
or a gifted psychic of the unlikely. It’s rare that I’ll have water or
Band-Aids in my bag, but if you need a rigging knife or a piece of
rope, I’ve got those. My favorite it’s-late-and-I’m-alone-in-a-hotel
TV show is ‘‘ SOS: How to Survive,’’ hosted by the ‘‘survival expert’’
Creek Stewart. Stewart, fond of bandanna ascots and factory-torn
pants, fi nds real people who nearly died in the wild but didn’t,
and teaches the audience how, for example, after his snowmobile
became wedged in the ice, a Greco-Roman wrestling gold med-
alist might have better survived the negative-20-degree night if
only he’d packed duct tape and a tampon. Regardless, I trust my
husband to cover the obvious dangers. I mind the less-obvious
ones. The danger — a virus that threatened to become a pandemic
— fell into the obvious category. Before the fl ight home, at my
husband’s urging, I distributed little bottles of hand sanitizer that
nobody used and everybody lost. On the plane, my daughter’s
friend wore a blue paper mask that became covered in chocolate
and provided few barriers to anything, including the many jokes
we made at her expense.
On Feb. 23, however, my husband and I established our own
ethical containment ‘‘border.’’ Even though there were no cases
of Covid-19 in Venice (the outbreak was in Milan and throughout
Lombardy), and we were assumed to be unlikely carriers, we said
to ourselves: If anyone comes down with a cough or a fever, for two
weeks we would all stay home.
Already, this small (and yet, at the time, abundantly cautious)
step required a shift in our thinking, not unlike the shift I only
semi-experienced in the Venice airport, when we had to go through
security to leave security. Staying home is typically what a person
does to avoid danger, or more specifi cally, personal harm. This is the
deep cognitive groove ‘‘home’’ has carved into our brains, no matter
how irrational, given what the reality of home, depending, might be.
Exactly one year earlier, during the previous February break,
we were urged to stay home, by family and friends, because they
feared for our safety. I had booked a trip to Acapulco, Mexico, in
part because our daughter would soon be in college and we wanted
to start investing in family vacations before she wouldn’t be going
on them with us. I chose Acapulco because the hotel was cheap,
presumably because of its location in a city my friend erroneously
referred to as ‘‘the murder capital of the world’’ (an international
list of cities ‘‘not at war’’ ranks Acapulco’s murder rate second). My
mother, a practical person, cited the U.S. State Department’s Level
4 (‘‘Do Not Travel’’) advisory for Guerrero state. (A less diplomatic
— in all senses of the word — friend asked, ‘‘What’s next on your
itinerary, Damascus?’’) And yet I talked to people who lived in or
frequently visited that part of Mexico. I learned from one that the
highway between Mexico City and Acapulco should be avoided,
and that instead of renting a car or taking a bus, we should fl y. A
friend who owns a house in Acapulco told me: ‘‘Don’t go wandering
around the back streets. Take registered taxis everywhere. Don’t
drive to remote areas at night. All normal precautions for any big
city.’’ I concluded: American tourists who practiced basic common
sense were not exceptionally or even especially endangered. Far
more endangered were the residents of Acapulco and rich Mexican
nationals on vacation.
But the consideration process — should we or should we not
go? — revolved around our own safety, and whether we might,
while abroad, become victims of nontransferable injury. Our family
wasn’t at risk of importing direct harm, via our bodies, to Mexico,
and the anxiety experienced by our loved ones aside, we wouldn’t
be bringing harm home.P. 52 The Voyages Issue
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Opening photograph by Harry Gruyaert/Magnum. Icon illustration by Francesco Muzzi/StoryTK.