September 22, For Alberto

Angela writes: Last night we saw the film Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami. I had had a particularly sad day, and the film somehow brought me back from my sorrow. Colin found a way to leave work and come with me to Trenton where the cat scan was scheduled. Often if I am on my own I can bear the difficulty of such tests with some stoicism, but as soon as he is with me, I let go. He is the perfect medium for tears. I have been to this hospital many times in the past year. I used to prefer it to others because it is small and easy to reach. Yesterday, nevertheless, this submission to imaging machines had reached some critical point and I found it difficult to even bring myself to go through the motions. For the first time, I was almost wishing for a more painful, physical, more real procedure. That something should be so painless, and yet so threatening, felt very much like mental torture. Every time a lay on the narrow gurney that goes into the machine, it is as if I am about to open one of two doors: one that leads to the normal, the other, to the pathological diagnostic. I wish so badly to open the right door, but the chances, optimistically speaking, are at most one out of two. If I used to lie still at the centre of the radiation machine, I realize today, it was because, precisely, it was treatment, and not diagnostic I was undergoing. I felt very little discomfort while knowing that the attack, the aggression was there and hopefully working for me. That in fact allowed for some exorcism, together with the exercise of courage. When the machine – and they all resemble each other, scanner, magnetic resonance, radiation – is used in order to read the inside of the body, something terrible occurs, especially when one, like myself at the present, thinks they are beginning to do better. All that work to become stronger can be wiped out by an image and the shadiest of images will give the lie to our subjective, hopeful idea. Already weak as I was entering the room, I kept loosing control by the second, so much more when I noticed that the technician who was going to do this test was one who had done other tests for me, in Belleville. Everything may become an ominous sign. I lay down and the woman in charge of positioning me wrapped a strap over my forehead so I may not move. As I went in, tears started streaming down my temples and try as I may, I could not stop them. I definitely did not want to start sobbing, which would really have shaken the whole of my body, head included. I had made the mistake of crossing my arms over my stomach and it was too late to change that; such a posture obstructed the deep breathing that might have put an end to this attack. Fortunately the head scan is very short. Somehow the two in charge had noticed I was crying although I always think they do not really see much about the person going into the machine. The girl brought tissues, which, light as feathers, took flight from the box and could not be grasped. They would have been useless anyhow, hospital tissues, ridiculously small. I got up in one straight motion from the gurney thinking that less than a year ago I would not have been able to get up on my own. I do not know why this film, which we watched later at night, was such a liberation for me. I encourage you to see it. The drama, which unfolds between two charming strangers who could be meant for each other, takes place in Florence. Of course, that would be enough to lighten anybody’s chagrin, for there is this atemporal, I dare say eternal quality to everything in that land, from cypresses to pots of flowers to statues of which the very copy of the copy is already antique. Everything the eye apprehends is the old copy of something so much older as to be immemorial. And yet people keep living there, in the here and now, and in each one of them something a bit off makes one wonder if the people themselves are not somehow the lovely ghost of somebody who lived amidst those walls a long time ago. Which made me wonder if I was not, right now, repeating perhaps an older, perhaps an immemorial story myself …