The number of years I had lived represented important information for the doctors. I had the feeling that, in this way, for the first time—in this long life—my time was being accurately measured. This meant that today all my illusions of youth vanished. We rationalize our experience of time, but beyond the givens of the calendar, we are not conscious of it. Because “in spirit” we stay the same. “In spirit” I was the same person I had been in my twenties. That’s how it is, probably, with everyone, it’s a characteristic of our species. That’s how we protect ourselves from death. Western cultures see man in his asymmetry and disharmony, so they separate him into a body that ages and a soul that doesn’t age. Apart, presumably, from Dostoevsky.

Reduced to a body, lying on the operating table, I communicated the whole time with my eyes and through a meager exchange of words with various people who were working on my revival. This was a surprising number of people, those who prepared for the operation and those who participated in it. They all struck up conversations with the dying person, and my impression was that the body (i.e., me) did not offer much information, even on the operating table. Apart from my unpronounceable name, the only piece of information about me was this bedspread with the floral pattern à la Paul Gauguin, in which I was wrapped when I came here, everyone commented on it, interested in the cultural origin of the drawing on canvas, presumably convinced that the bedspread had the same geographical origin as myself.

At one point the surgeon who was operating on me, not knowing how to negotiate my complicated name, brought his face close to mine and explained, slightly alarmed, that he would have to communicate with me in the course of the operation and for that communication he would need a name to call me by. He said: “I’ll call you Me’med. Is that okay?”

As for the bedspread, I don’t know exactly where it came from, other than that it was some South American country. Perhaps from the same country as one of the hospital staff who took such an interest in it. In any case, these people treated my origin with great sensitivity, although they didn’t ask, nor, I presume, did they know where I came from. From my accent they knew only that I was foreign.

Does this mean that we all suffer from a kind of anxiety about dying in a distant, foreign country that is not our own, a world where we are not at home?