The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit Page A

X-ray machines from the inside out and by microscope slides from the cellular level up; it was a portrait of mortality. Of course I had always been mortal, but not quite so emphatically so.
    I was being pared like an apricot with a bad spot, or rather a bad spot was being sought in the outer space under my skin. And this was only the beginning. The voyage I was to go on was a tour of a country where many go much farther and some don’t return. I had thought Iceland was my next major journey, but this other country was on the route beforehand. In this country, you are yourself the terrain, and you are traveling toward or away from your mortality. You do not know yourself, but must rely on expert guides and interpreters. More than that, you are not yourself.
    You must be patient, must become a patient, must take up residence in waiting rooms, must learn to wait for experts and results, must grow accustomed to being laid out upon tables and invaded, described in unfamiliar language, and treated with methods that may seem like illnesses and injuries though they are intended to cure. Your life is a ship others steer; it contains mysteries you do not understand; those mysteries include that eventuality when you are no longer yourself at all, whether these sailors save you from it for the time being or just hold you at the top of the waterfall for a while.
    The real story of your life is always all the way from birth to death, and the medical experts appear like oracles to interpret and guide even as they turn you from your familiar self, a dealer in stories, into mute meat, breathing or approaching last breaths. They often look away from you to make and interpret the maps of the world beneath your skin by which they navigate. Portraits and descriptions of you amass in folders you might be allowed to see, or not. You may need interpreters even to understand the scrawled notes and test results. You are your biological self, a vast and enigmatic landscape of interiors, flows, chemistry, cells, systems, and samples. You exist as a few cells under a microscope and on a chart of statistics for your categories.
    All of the images they make of you are vanitas images, reminders of your frailty and the fleetingness of all things, particularly your own flesh, a bubble sustained by breath. The singer of Federico García Lorca’s “Somnambule Ballad,” blood like roses blooming on his shirt, asks for refuge, but his friend, who suffers from a more enigmatic condition, replies,
“Pero yo ya no soy yo,
ni mi casa es ya mi casa.”
But I am no longer I, nor is my house still my house. House, country, landscape, kingdom of the body, now strange and foreign.

6 • Wound

A couple of years earlier, I was the one who offered to take home the very old woman, a friend of my friend, but the boyfriend who deserted during my crises, or fell apart during his, was the one who actually drove her across town. She was worn out from the political conference, but still lively enough to tell us about her adventures in Cuba forty years earlier, where she had met Che Guevara. That a figure so legendary had crossed paths with the tired woman with the creased cheeks and dyed black hair in the front passenger seat was a little astonishing, as it always is when what seems like the remote and mythic past turns out to be within reach of someone present. They started talking about the Che movie.
    That feature film,
The Motorcycle Diaries,
after Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s journal of the same name, makes the medical student and his young doctor friend Alberto Granado seem like dharma bums, drifting around the Latin American continent for general adventure, but their purpose was a little more pointed. In 1950 Granado was already working in a leprosy hospital in Córdoba, Argentina, and his friend had joined him there for several days, then set out on a solo adventure on motorcycle. Though he returned to medical school, his