Venice. The night before last, I was reading an essay about Venice by Sergio Pitol, his first encounter with the town, which he saw through a fog because he had lost his glasses somewhere on the way. I read that two nights ago, which now seems like the distant past, or some other life. And while I was reading, I could smell cement, because a few hours earlier, at work, my friend Santiago Chillari had been showing me photographs of the inside of an old building beside one of the Venetian canals, which he and his family are restoring with the intention of turning it into a hotel; the photos were of workmen scraping the walls, stripping off the old paint, with building materials, sacks of cement around them on the floor . . . After reading this piece about Venice, I wrote one about Aleš Debeljak, my friend who died tragically two months ago, I thought about him and jotted down memories of our encounters. We used to meet often, speak on the phone, and exchange emails. We got to know each other in the early 1980s, but it seems to me that our contact became pure friendship only last year: in October, at a literary conference in Richmond, for a few days we shared a common balcony in our hotel and chewed over our two pasts in lengthy conversations. I went through my email inbox to find his last sentence to me. His last message ended with the announcement: “This evening I’m taking our dog on our regular walk beside the Venice-Budapest train-line.” A poet! So a whole cultural space was transformed into the boundaries of a “regular” evening stroll.
The door described a complete circle, and I stepped back, into the hospital . . .
In the morning, as I was washing my face, I spotted in the mirror some white strands of hair on my forehead. Only two days have passed since we got here, and I’m already going gray.
When the nurse comes into the ward to give her an injection, Sanja says, “You smell nice,” to please her, to establish human contact with a small compliment before the pain.
Otherwise I think there’s something deeply problematic about the way treatment is managed in a hospital. Every ten minutes people come to check her name and date of birth; to scan the bar code on the plastic armband around her right wrist; to take her pulse, blood pressure, temperature; to take blood samples, knock her knee with a rubber hammer . . . It’s torture by lack of sleep, and it could all be done in a slower rhythm, so that the patients have time to catch their breath, to fall asleep, to have a minimal amount of rest, at least during the night. A hospital ward is a torture chamber. I think hospitals ought to sign the Geneva Convention and stick rigorously to the rules.