by Deborah Levy
There she goes. The beautiful Greek girl is walking across the beach in her bikini. There is a shadow between her body and my own. Sometimes she drags her feet in the sand. She has no one to rub sun-cream on her back and say here yes no yes there.
Dr Gómez
We had begun the long journey to find a healer. The taxi driver hired to take us to the Gómez Clinic had no reason to understand how nervous we were or what was at stake.
We had begun a new chapter in the history of my mother’s legs and it had taken us to the semi-desert of southern Spain.
It is not a small matter. We had to remortgage Rose’s house to pay for her treatment at the Gómez Clinic. The total cost was twenty-five thousand euro, which is a substantial sum to lose, considering I have been sleuthing my mother’s symptoms for as long as I can remember.
My own investigation has been in progress for about twenty of my twenty-five years. Perhaps longer. When I was four I asked her what a headache meant. She told me it was like a door slamming in her head. I have become a good mind reader, which means her head is my head. There are plenty of doors slamming all the time and I am the main witness.
If I see myself as an unwilling detective with a desire for justice, does that make her illness an unsolved crime? If so, who is the villain and who is the victim? Attempting to decipher her aches and pains, their triggers and motivations, is a good training for an anthropologist. There have been times when I thought I was on the verge of a major revelation and knew where the corpses were buried, only to be thwarted once again. Rose merely presents a new and entirely mysterious symptom for which she is prescribed new and entirely mysterious medication. The UK doctors recently prescribed anti-depressants for her feet. That’s what she told me – they are for the nerve endings in her feet.
The clinic was near the town of Carboneras, which is famous for its cement factory. It would be a thirty-minute ride. My mother and I sat shivering in the back of the taxi because the air conditioner had transformed the desert heat into something more like a Russian winter. The driver told us that carboneras means coal bunkers, and the mountains had once been covered in a forest, which had been cut down for charcoal. Everything had been stripped for ‘the furnace’.
I asked him if he’d mind turning down the air conditioner.
He insisted the AC was automatic and out of his control, but he could advise us on where to find beaches with clear, clean water.
‘The best beach is Playa de los Muertos, which means “Beach of the Dead”. It is only five kilometres south of town. You will have walk down the mountain for twenty minutes. There is no access by road.’
Rose leaned forward and tapped his shoulder. ‘We are here because I have a bone disease and can’t walk.’ She frowned at the plastic rosary hanging from his mirror. Rose is a committed atheist, all the more so since my father had a religious conversion.
Her lips had turned blue due to the extreme weather inside the car. ‘As for the “Beach of the Dead”’ – she shivered as she spoke – ‘I’m not quite there yet, though I can see it would be more appealing to swim in clear water than to burn in the furnace of hell, for which all the trees in the world will have to be felled and every mountain stripped for coal.’ Her Yorkshire accent had suddenly become fierce, which it always does when she’s enjoying an argument.
The driver’s attention was on a fly that had landed on his steering wheel. ‘Perhaps you will need to book my taxi for your return journey?’
‘It depends on the temperature in your automobile.’ Her thin, blue lips stretched into something resembling a smile as the taxi became warmer.
We were no longer stranded in a Russian winter so much as a Swedish one.
I opened the window. The valley was covered in white plastic, just as the student in the injury hut had described. The desert farms were devouring the land like a dull, sickly skin. The hot wind blew my hair across my eyes while Rose rested her head on my shoulder, which was still smarting from the jellyfish sting. I dared not move to a less painful position because I knew she was scared and that I had to pretend not to be. She had no God to plead to for mercy or luck. It would be true to say she depended instead on human kindness and painkillers.
As the driver steered his cab into the palm-fringed grounds of the Gómez Clinic, we glimpsed the gardens that had been described in the brochure as ‘a mini-oasis of great ecological importance’. Two wild pigeons lay tucked into each other under the mimosa trees.
The clinic itself was carved into the scorched mountains. Built from cream-coloured marble in the shape of a dome, it resembled a massive, upside-down cup. I had studied it on Google many times, but the digital page did not convey how calming and comforting it felt to stand next to it in real time. The entrance, in contrast, was entirely made from glass. Thorny bushes with flowering purple blooms and low, tangled, silver cacti were planted abundantly around the curve of the dome, leaving the gravel entrance clear for the taxi to park next to a small, stationary shuttle bus.
It took fourteen minutes to walk with Rose from the car to the glass doors. They seemed to anticipate our arrival, opening silently for us, as if gratifying our wish to enter without either of us having to make the request.
I gazed at the deep blue Mediterranean below the mountain and felt at peace.
When the receptionist called out for Señora Papastergiadis, I took Rose’s arm and we limped together across the marble floor towards the desk. Yes, we are limping together. I am twenty-five and I am limping with my mother to keep in step with her. My legs are her legs. That is how we find a convivial pace to move forwards. It is how adults walk with young children who have graduated from crawling and how adult children walk with their parents when they need an arm to lean on. Earlier that morning, my mother had walked on her own to the local Spar to buy herself some hairpins. She had not even taken a walking stick to lean on. I no longer wanted to think about that.
The receptionist directed me to a nurse who was waiting with a wheelchair. It was a relief to pass Rose over to someone else, to walk behind the nurse as she pushed the chair and admire the way she swayed her hips as she walked at a pace, her long, shining hair tied with a white, satin ribbon. This was another style of walking, entirely free of pain, of attachment to kin, of compromise. The heels of the nurse’s grey suede shoes sounded like an egg cracking as she made her way down the marble corridors. Stopping outside a door with the words Mr Gómez written in gold letters across a panel of polished wood, she knocked and waited.
Her nails were painted a deep glossy red.
We had travelled a long way from home. To be here at last in this curved corridor with its amber veins threading through the walls felt like a pilgrimage of sorts, a last chance. For years, an increasing number of medical professionals in the UK had been groping in the dark for a diagnosis, puzzled, lost, humbled, resigned. This had to be the final journey and I think my mother knew that, too. A male voice shouted something in Spanish. The nurse pushed the heavy door open and then beckoned to me to wheel Rose into the room, as if to say, She is all yours.
Dr Gómez. The orthopaedic consultant I had researched so thoroughly for months on end. He looked like he was in his early sixties, his hair was mostly silver but with a startling pure white streak running across the left side of his head. He wore a pinstripe suit, his hands were tanned, his eyes blue and alert.
‘Thank you, Nurse Sunshine,’ he said to the nurse, as if it were normal for an eminent doctor who specialized in musculoskeletal conditions to name his staff after the weather. She was still holding the door open, as if her thoughts had wandered off to roam on the Sierra Nevada.
He raised his voice and repeated in Spanish, ‘Gracias, Enfermera Luz del Sol.’
This time she shut the door. I could hear the cracking sound of her heels on the floor, first at an even pace and then suddenly faster. She had started to run. The echo of her heels remained in my mind long after she had left the room.
Dr Gómez spoke English with
an American accent.
‘Please. How can I help you?’
Rose looked baffled. ‘Well, that is exactly what I want you to tell me.’
When Dr Gómez smiled, his two front teeth were entirely covered with gold. They reminded me of the teeth on a human male skull we studied in the first year of my anthropology degree, the task being to guess his diet. The teeth were full of cavities so it was likely he had chewed on tough grain. On further scrutiny of the skull, I discovered that a small square of linen had been stuffed into the larger cavity. It had been soaked in cedar oil to ease the pain and stop infection.
Dr Gómez’s tone was vaguely friendly and vaguely formal. ‘I have been looking at your notes, Mrs Papastergiadis. You were a librarian for some years?’
‘Yes. I retired early because of my health.’
‘Did you want to stop working?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you did not retire because of your health?’
‘It was a combination of circumstances.’
‘I see.’ He looked neither bored nor interested.
‘My duties were to catalogue, index and classify the books,’ she said.
He nodded and turned his gaze to his computer screen. While we waited for his attention, I looked around the consulting room. It was sparsely furnished. A basin. A bed on wheels that could be lowered or raised, a silver lamp placed near it.
A cabinet filled with leather-bound books stood behind his desk. And then I saw something looking at me. Its eyes were bright and curious. A small grey stuffed monkey was crouching in a glass box on a shelf halfway up the wall. Its eyes were fixed on its human brothers and sisters in an eternal frozen stare.
‘Mrs Papastergiadis, I see that your first name is Rose.’
‘Yes.’
He had pronounced Papastergiadis as easily as if he were saying Joan Smith.
‘May I refer to you now as Rose?’
‘Yes, you may. It is my name, after all. My daughter calls me Rose and I see no reason why you should not do the same.’
Dr Gómez smiled at me. ‘You call your mother Rose?’
It was the second time I had been asked this question in three days.
‘Yes,’ I said quickly, as if it was of no importance. ‘Can we ask how we should address you, Dr Gómez?’
‘Certainly. I am a consultant, so I am Mr Gómez. But that is too formal so I will not be offended if you just refer to me as Gómez.’
‘Ah. That is useful to know.’ My mother lifted her arm to check that the hairpin in her chignon was still in place.
‘And you are just sixty-four years old, Mrs Papastergiadis?’
Had he forgotten he’d been granted permission to call his new patient by her first name?
‘Sixty-four and flagging.’
‘So you were thirty-nine when you birthed your daughter?’
Rose coughed as if to clear her throat and then nodded and coughed again. Gómez started to cough too. He cleared his throat and ran his fingers through the white streak in his hair. Rose moved her right leg and then she groaned. Gómez moved his left leg and then he groaned.
I was not sure if he was mimicking her or mocking her. If they were having a conversation in groans, coughs and sighs, I wondered whether they understood each other.
‘It is a pleasure to welcome you to my clinic, Rose.’
He held out his hand. My mother leaned forward as if to shake it but then suddenly decided not to. His hand was stuck in the air. Obviously, their non-verbal conversation had not elicited her trust.
‘Sofia, get me a tissue,’ she said.
I passed her a tissue and shook Gómez’s hand on behalf of my mother. Her arm is my arm.
‘And you are Ms Papastergiadis?’ He emphasized the ‘Ms’ so it sounded like Mizzzzzz.
‘Sofia is my only daughter.’
‘Do you have sons?’
‘As I said, she is my only.’
‘Rose.’ He smiled. ‘I think you are going to sneeze soon. Is there pollen in the air today? Or something?’
‘Pollen?’ Rose looked offended. ‘We are in a desert landscape. There are no flowers as I know them.’
Gómez mimicked looking offended, too. ‘Later I will take you for a tour of our gardens so you can see flowers as you do not know them. Purple sea lavender, jujube shrubs with their magnificent thorny branches, Phoenician junipers and various scrubland plants imported for your pleasure from near Tabernas.’
He walked towards her wheelchair, kneeled at her feet and stared into her eyes. She started to sneeze. ‘Get me another tissue, Sofia.’
I obliged. She now had two tissues, one in each hand.
‘I always get a pain in my left arm after I sneeze,’ she said. ‘It’s a sharp, tearing pain. I have to hold my arm until the sneeze is over.’
‘Where is the pain?’
‘The inside of my elbow.’
‘Thank you. We will conduct a full neurological examination, including a cranial-nerve examination.’
‘And I have chronic knuckle pain in my left hand.’
In response, he wiggled the fingers of his left hand in the direction of the monkey, as if encouraging it to do the same.
After a while he turned to me. ‘I can just see the resemblance. But you, Mizz Papastergiadis, are darker. Your skin is sallow. Your hair is nearly black. Your mother’s hair is light brown. Your nose is longer than hers. Your eyes are brown. Your mother’s eyes are blue, like my own eyes.’
‘My father is Greek but I was born in Britain.’
I wasn’t sure if having sallow skin was an insult or a compliment.
‘Then you are like me,’ he said. ‘My father is Spanish, my mother is American. I grew up in Boston.’
‘Like my laptop. It was designed in America and made in China.’
‘Yes, identity is always difficult to guarantee, Mizz Papastergiadis.’
‘I am from near Hull, Yorkshire,’ Rose suddenly announced, as if she felt left out.
When Gómez reached for my mother’s right foot, she gave it to him as if it were a gift. He started to press her toes with his thumb and forefinger, watched by myself and the monkey in the glass box. His thumb moved to her ankle. ‘This bone is the talus. And before that I was pressing the phalanges. Can you feel my fingers?’
Rose shook her head. ‘I feel nothing. My feet are numb.’
Gómez nodded, as if he already knew this to be true. ‘How is your morale?’ he asked, as if enquiring about a bone called The Morale.
‘Not bad at all.’
I bent down and picked up her shoes.
‘Please,’ Gómez said. ‘Leave them where they are.’ He was now feeling the sole of my mother’s right foot. ‘You have an ulcer here, and here. Have you been tested for diabetes?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said.
‘It is a small area on the surface of the skin, but it is slightly infected. We must attend to this immediately.’
Rose nodded gravely, but she looked pleased. ‘Diabetes,’ she exclaimed. ‘Perhaps that’s the answer.’
He did not seem to want to continue this conversation because he stood up and walked to the basin to wash his hands. He turned towards me while he reached for a paper towel. ‘You will probably be interested in the architecture of my clinic?’
I was interested. I told him that as far as I knew, the earliest domes had been built from mammoth tusks and bones.
‘Ye-es. And your beach apartment is a rectangle. But at least it has an ocean view –’
‘It’s unpleasant,’ Rose interrupted. ‘I think of it as a rectangle built on noise. It has a concrete terrace that is supposed to be private but isn’t because it’s right on the beach. My daughter likes to sit there looking at her computer all the time, to get away from me.’
Rose was in full flow as she made a list of her grievances. ‘At night there are magic shows for the children on the beach. So much noise. The clattering of plates from the restaurants, the shouting tourists, the moped
s, the screaming children, the fireworks. I never get to the sea unless Sofia wheels me to the beach and it is always too hot anyway.’
‘In which case I will have to bring the sea to you, Mrs Papastergiadis.’
Rose sucked in her bottom lip with her front teeth and kept it tucked like that for a while. Then she freed it. ‘I find all the food here in southern Spain very hard to digest.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’ His blue gaze settled on her stomach like a butterfly landing on a flower.
My mother had lost weight in the last few years. She was shrinking and she seemed to have become shorter, because her dresses, once knee length, now fell just above her ankles. I had to remind myself that she was an attractive woman in early old age. Her hair, always styled in a chignon and held in place with a single hairpin, was her one expense. Every three months when the silver came through, it was wrapped in foils and lightened by a fashionable colour technician who had shaved off all her own hair. She had suggested I do the same to my wayward black curls which turned to frizz whenever it rained, which was often.
I regarded the hairdresser’s shaving of her scalp as a ritual I could not participate in. At the time, I had wondered if she thought of her hair as the weight of the past and the shedding of it as a move towards the future, in the Hindu tradition, but she told me (a square of foil in her mouth) that she shaved her hair because it was less work. The weight of my own hair is the least of my burdens.
‘Sofia Irina, sit down here.’ Gómez patted the chair opposite his computer. He had casually called me by the full name written in my passport. When I sat down as instructed, he swung the screen round to show me a black-and-white image on the screen, with my mother’s name written above it: R. B. PAPASTERGIADIS (F).
He was now standing behind me. I could smell a bitter herb in the soap he had used to wash his hands, perhaps sage. ‘You are looking at a high-definition X-ray of your mother’s spine. This is the back view.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I asked the doctors in Britain to send them to you. They are now out of date.’
‘Of course. We will take our own and compare. We are looking for abnormalities, something out of the ordinary.’ His finger moved from the screen to press the button on a small, grey radio standing on his desk. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I want to hear what’s happening with the austerity programme.’
