From the depths

Author's name: José Cardozo Berish

The Portuguese writer José Cardoso Pires (1925–1998) recounts his experience with the stroke he suffered in 1995. But he does not do so in the voice of a doctor, nor in the voice of a survivor, but in the voice of a person who was split in two, and who observed himself during his absence.
This angle offers us a disturbing tale, in which the writer revisits objects—and consequently their functions—just as he revisits words. It is a tale of the fragility of life, and of all that we have accumulated over the years, which can be lost in seconds.
This slow dance of the body is transported to another place, where there is no memory, and where the slightest possible reference is absent; another place, outside of time and outside of the body, that lasted two weeks, and from which the writer could have returned, or perhaps never fully returned, as his friend Joao Lobo Antunes, the neurosurgeon, confirms in his long introduction entitled “Letter to a New Friend.”