by Deborah Levy
‘Everything hurts. I might as well do away with these useless feet. It would be a relief.’
Julieta looked at me. Her eyelashes were mascaraed into spikes. ‘I think Rose does not stand up straight because she is tall.’
‘No, I hate these feet,’ my mother shouted at her.
Julieta led her back to the wheelchair which had now materialized, carried in by a porter who was trying to read the newspaper he had balanced on the armrest. On the front page was a photograph of Alexis Tsipras, the Prime Minister of Greece. I noticed he had a cold sore on his bottom lip.
‘Cut off my feet, that’s what I want,’ my mother told Julieta.
In reply, Julieta gave the wheelchair a deft kick with her left trainer. ‘What is your point, Rose?’
My mother started to make small circles with her shoulders, moving them forwards then backwards as if limbering up for a wrestling match. ‘There is no point.’
Julieta looked pale and exhausted. She walked over to me and gave me what looked like a business card. ‘Come and see me in my studio, if you like. I live in Carboneras.’
I was still puzzling over this when Gómez entered the room, followed by his white cat, Jodo. The stripe in his hair matched Jodo’s white fur. The cat was plump and serene, purring loudly at her master’s feet.
‘How is your physiotherapy, Mrs Papastergiadis?’
‘Call me Rose.’
‘Ah yes, it is good to let these formalities go.’
‘If you forget things, Mr Gómez, write them down on the back of your hand.’
‘I will,’ he said.
Julieta told her father she had taken the first case history and now she was tired and would like twenty minutes to have a coffee and a pastry. Gómez lifted his hand and smoothed down his vivid white streak. ‘There is no such thing as tired so early in the day, Nurse Sunshine. The young do not rest. The young must be up all night with the lighthouse keepers. The young must argue till dawn.’
He asked her to repeat to him the relevant sections of the Hippocratic oath. She walked to the recording device and turned it off. ‘I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgement and never do any harm to anyone,’ she said gloomily.
‘Very good. If the young are tired, they must improve their lifestyle.’
It seemed as if he was chastising her in some way. Had he somehow seen the kick his daughter had lashed out at the wheelchair?
Gómez’s attention was entirely focused on my mother. He was taking her pulse but from a distance it looked quite intimate, as if they were holding hands. His voice was gentle, even flirtatious. ‘I note you are not using the car yet, Rose.’
‘No. I will need to practise before I drive Sofia on these mountain roads.’
His fingers pressed lightly on her wrist. They were still, but moving. Like a leaf. Like a stone in a stream.
‘You see, Sofia Irina, Mrs Papastergiadis is concerned for your safety.’
‘My daughter is wasting her life,’ Rose replied. ‘Sofia is plump and idle and she is living off her mother at quite an advanced age.’
It is true that I have shape-shifted from thin to various other sizes all my life. My mother’s words are my mirror. My laptop is my veil of shame. I hide in it all the time.
I tucked it under my arm and walked out of the physiotherapy room. Jodo followed me for a while. Her paws were soft and soundless, and then she disappeared. I must have taken a wrong turning because I was lost in a labyrinth of milky marble corridors. I began to feel smothered by the veined walls, as if they were closing in on me. The echo of my heels hitting the marble floor reminded me of that first visit to the clinic, when I heard the amplified echo of Julieta’s heels as she ran away from her father. Now I was running away from my mother. It was a relief to find the glass exit, to at last breathe in the mountain air and stand among the succulents and mimosa trees.
In the distance below the mountain I could see the ocean and a yellow flag planted in the coarse sand on the beach. It was like a haunting, that flag. Where would the Medusa’s case history begin and end? Was she shocked, devastated, appalled to discover she was no longer admired for her beauty? Did she feel de-feminized? Would she walk through the door labelled ‘Ladies’ or the door labelled ‘Gentlemen’? ‘Hommes’ or ‘Femmes’, ‘Caballeros’ or ‘Señoras’? I began to wonder if she had more power in her life as a monster. Where had I got to in my own life by trying to please everyone all the time? Right here. Wringing my hands.
A blast of fine sand lashed my cheeks. It was as if the sky had opened and it was raining sand. I saw a flash of white fur as Jodo ran for cover under the silver leaves of a succulent that was shaped like an umbrella. A male cleaner in overalls and a protective eye shield was hosing down the wall near the exit to the clinic. After a while I realized that it was not water pouring through his hose. He was sandblasting the wall. As I walked closer I saw that three words had been spray-painted in blue on the walls. They were fading now, so the cleaner had obviously tried more than once to remove them. Was this the graffiti that Gómez had referred to a few days earlier? But it did not say ‘QUACK’. I could clearly see the shape of the letters, despite the effort that had gone into erasing the paint. Gómez had obviously wanted to demonstrate that he knew my mother thought he was a quack. As if the thought had already committed the crime and defaced the walls of his clinic. The blue grafitti was not one single word.
It was three words.
SUNSHINE IS SEXY
She wears a sombrero some days, drifting around. No one to row her in a boat to the smaller bays, no one to hear her say the water’s so clear here oh wow I’m going to dive for that sea star. It has come to my attention that she has two credit cards to help her get through the month. Maybe I should offer to lend her some money?
Hunting and Gathering
‘Why do you want to kill a lizard?’
Ingrid was crouching in an alleyway near the pizzeria that is owned by a Romanian taxi driver. At first I couldn’t work out what she was doing and then I saw she was holding a miniature bow and arrow. It was so tiny it could fit in the palm of her hand. She was aiming the arrow at a lizard that had just flashed out of a crack in the wall. The arrow hit the wall and fell to the ground.
‘Zoffie! Your shadow distracted me. My aim is usually right on target.’ She picked up the arrow, which was sharpened to a point the size of a pencil, and showed me the little curved bow with its taut nylon string.
‘I made it myself from bamboo.’
‘But why do you want to kill a lizard?’
She prodded the white cardboard box I had left near the wall.
‘It seems like I’m always freaking you out, Zoffie. What’s in your box?’
‘A pizza.’
‘What kind of pizza?’
‘Margarita with extra cheese.’
‘You should eat more salad.’
Ingrid’s long hair is pinned up on top of her head. She looks like a statue, strong and toned in her white cotton dress with its criss-crossed straps. Her plimsolls are white, too. When the lizard scuttled out of the crack again, she gestured for me to get out of the way. It had a green tail and blue circles on its back.
‘Move! Go away, Zoffie, I’m working. Have you freed Pablo’s dog yet?’
‘No. He sacked one of the Mexican painters this morning. Pablo still owes him money.’
‘He’ll never get paid, Zoffie. Get a thicker skin, like our friend the lizard.’
I asked if I could take a photo of her with the bow and arrow.
‘Go ahead.’
I took out my iPhone and aimed it at her head.
Who is Ingrid Bauer?
What are her beliefs and sacred ceremonies? Does she have economic autonomy? What are her rituals with menstrual blood? How does she react to the winter season? What is her attitude to beggars? Does she believe she has a soul? If she does, is it embodied by anything else? A bird or a tiger? Does she have an app for Uber on her smartphone?
Her lips are so soft.
I pressed the time-lapse icon, then Slo-mo and then just Photo. Through the lens I could see her opening the box and taking out the pizza. She frowned at the congealed orange cheese and threw it to the ground.
‘I would rather eat the lizard. Have you finished taking the photo?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘I will remember August in Almería with you.’
‘Memory is a bomb.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you going to do with the lizard when you catch it?’
‘Study the geometry of its patterns – they give me ideas for my embroidery. It will come out of the wall soon. Move! Move!’
When I did not move she ran towards me in her white plimsolls as if she was going to attack me. Her arms were around my waist as she lifted me high above her head and then she let me drop down and her hand looped up the hem of my dress. I felt her shaking as blossoms drifted down from the jacaranda tree behind the wall.
‘You are a monster, Zoffie!’ She pulled away from me and kicked the pizza box out of her way. ‘Go and study a Stone Age settlement, or something. Don’t you have work to do?’
I do have work to do. I am studying Ingrid Bauer’s bow and arrow. It is magnifying in my mind until it becomes a weapon that can wound its prey. The bow is shaped like lips. The arrow’s tip is sharp. Why am I a monster to Ingrid? She thinks of me as some sort of creature. I am her creature. The tip of the arrow is aimed at my heart.
I felt very light. Like an arrow in flight.
It was late afternoon and the beach was empty. I waded into the warm oily sea, for once not crowded with lilos and plastic boats. I told myself I was going to swim to North Africa which I could see across the horizon in vague outline. Heading for a whole other country was my way of doing the crawl for a long stretch, aiming for somewhere impossible to get to. The water became clearer and cleaner the further I swam out. After about thirty minutes I turned on my back and floated under the sun, my lips cracking all over again from the salt and heat.
I am far away from shore but not lost enough. I must return home but I have nowhere to go that is my own, no work, no money, no lover to welcome me back. When I flipped over I saw them in the water, the medusas, slow and calm like spaceships, delicate and dangerous. I felt a lashing, burning pain just under my left shoulder and started to swim back to shore. It was like being skinned alive as I was stung over and over again. When I limped across the sand towards the injury hut on the beach, the bearded student seemed to be expecting me because he was waiting with his tube of special ointment in his hand. I turned around to show him my shoulder and heard him say, ‘That is bad, very baaaad.’ He stood behind me and his fingers were on the stings. It was agony but he was touching me very lightly, moving the ointment in circles, and he spoke in a voice that started off soothing, like a mother, perhaps, I don’t know.
‘I saw you swim out. Did you not see the flag?’ His voice became higher. ‘I was calling to you, Sofia.’
He remembered my name.
‘Sofia Papastergiadis. Are you breathing?’
‘No.’
‘You are crazy to swim so far out when the flag is up.’
He was shouting, like a brother, perhaps like a lover, I don’t know. Something weird was happening because I wanted to pull him down to the floor and make love to him. I had been stung into desire. An abundance of desire. I was turning into someone I did not recognize. I was terrifying myself.
He took my hand and helped me on to a low table. I lay on my right hip – there was no way I could lie on my back – and he gave me a thin cushion for my head. When he drew up a chair and sat at my side I was so turned on by the way he was stroking his beard. The sting was electrifying me. I heard a swoosh. He was standing now, washing the sand off my feet with a bucket of water. I wanted him to climb on to the table and cover my body with his and I wanted to wrap my legs around his waist like a lover and I wanted to give him so much pleasure he would scream the injury hut down. Instead, he gave me the form to fill in.
Name:
Age:
Country of origin:
Occupation:
This time I left everything blank, except under Occupation I wrote Monster. He looked at the form and then at me. ‘But you are a beautiful woman,’ he said.
The night was humid and windless. I couldn’t sleep. There was no position that did not chafe the tender stings on my shoulders and back and thighs. I had thrown my sheet on to the floor. Weak and thirsty, I must have been hallucinating because I saw my mother standing by my bed. She seemed very tall. The bed sheet was lifted from the floor and folded gently over my body. A male voice close to my ear began to whisper in Spanish, telling me to visit the salt-mining town of Almadraba de Moltelva, the palms in Las Presillas Bajas and the black mountains in El Cerro Negro. It might have been the student from the injury hut. Two hours later, in my delirium, I could smell Matthew’s cologne. He had been on my mind ever since I saw the graffiti on the clinic wall. Someone else was in my room, breathing, lurking. I fell asleep and when I woke up I saw a woman with blond hair curled up at the ends like an old-fashioned movie star. She wore a backless red evening dress and she was holding a jar in her gloved hands.
‘Zoffie, let me see your new stings.’
I lifted up my shirt.
‘Oh, you poor girl, those sea monsters are evil. You’re really in the wars.’
Rose was calling from the next room. ‘Sofia, someone is in the house.’
I pulled the sheet over my head.
Ingrid pulled the sheet off my head. ‘Have you told your mother you never lock the door?’
‘No.’
Ingrid took off the white glove on her right hand. ‘I’ve brought you manuka honey for your cracked lips.’ She dipped her finger into the jar and smeared it on my lips. ‘You are getting too brown, Zoffie.’
‘I like being brown.’
‘Where is your father?’
‘Athens. I have a new sister. She’s three months old.’
‘You have a sister? What is her name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I have a sister, too. She lives in Düsseldorf.’ She took a deep breath and blew across my stings. ‘Does that feel nice?’
‘Yes.’
She told me she was on her way to a 1930s party at the vintage shop. An orchestra from Almería was going to play all the old tunes. She hoped I would hear the music from my sickbed and think of her and she would pick some desert jasmine and think of me. She stroked my shoulder with the white glove. ‘Do you like the taste of the honey?’
‘Yes.’
She told me how she knew the steps to all the 30s dances but she would prefer to gallop on a horse in the mountains because she had too much energy for slow dancing. ‘Shall I lie with you for a while, Zoffie?’
‘Yes.’
‘You are a monster,’ she whispered.
She leaned over me and licked the honey off my lips. When she stood up, the pleats of her red dress touched the tiles on the floor. She remained very still for a long time.
After a while I began to feel the same sort of panic I had experienced in the Señoras the day I first met her. I wanted her to leave but I didn’t know how to ask her to go. When I told her I would have to get my mother some water, she laughed in the dark. ‘If you want me to go away, why don’t you say so?’
Two flies circled my lips. I need to be bolder. I don’t want her to lurk in the dark. It is so hard to say out loud the things I want to say.
‘Will you visit me in Berlin?’
‘Yes.’
She was whispering again as she stood over me like a glamorous mourner at a wake. She wanted me to spend Christmas with her and she would pay for my flight. Berlin was cold in winter. I was to bring a heavy coat and she would take me for a ride in one of those horse-drawn carriages. They were for tourists but she liked them, especi
ally when it was snowing. The ride would start at the Brandenburg Gate and move on to Checkpoint Charlie. She would hold a sprig of mistletoe above my head and I would obey the ritual. It was as if she was implying that the mistletoe would lead me to her lips, and not my own free will.
‘Will you ride in a stupid carriage with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is okay with you that I visited so late?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you happy we have met, Zoffie?’
‘Yes.’
She walked out of my room and let herself out through the unlocked door.
Boldness
The local fish market turned out to be near the Romanian pizzeria in the basement of a block of apartments. Not many tourists knew it was there, but when I walked in there was already a crowd of women from the village buying the day’s catch.
Gómez had suggested I steal a fish to achieve more courage and purpose. I regarded this task as an anthropological experiment, though it crossed a border into something approaching magic, or perhaps magical thinking. When I googled how to gut a fish, there were over 9 million results.
The first fish to snare my attention from the point of view of a thief was a monkfish with a monster face, mouth gaping open to reveal its two rows of sharp little teeth. I lightly poked my finger into its mouth and discovered a world that was totally unknown to me, like Columbus discovering the Bahamas. The cashier, a fierce woman in a yellow rubber apron, shouted in Spanish not to touch the fish. Already I had made myself visible, when the point of a thief is to slip unseen into the night and not into the mouth of a fish. I had slung a basket bag with leather straps over my shoulder and it chafed the stings, which were now raised welts, a sprawling, crazy web of tattoos inked in venom. The cashier, who was now weighing three mackerel on an old-fashioned brass scale, had her eye on everyone, including the criminal in the room. This catch was her livelihood, she would pay her sea hunters from the sale of their hard-won bounty, but I couldn’t think about that now.
I walked towards the silver sardines. I could easily steal one but that would be a token, not worth the risk. Women were frowning and shaking their heads at the scales, as if they couldn’t believe what it told them. Sometimes they included me in this conversation, throwing up their hands in mock-despair at the heaviness of fish which looked deceptively delicate.