by Deborah Levy
‘You are always so far away, Sofia.’
I am not far away. I am always too close. To her grievances.
The medusa stings were throbbing but I liked to feel them there, just as I liked to feel the word Beloved threaded into my new silk sun-top. Beloved was the antidote to the sting. Rose had impatiently started the engine, so I threw the cloth into the bucket, hiding it under a sign that said HOTEL FAMILY. ROOMS VACANT, with an arrow pointing to a dust track that apparently led to families who had checked into Hotel Family. Simmering, fuming, seething families; monogamous, polygamous, matrilineal, patrilineal, nuclear.
We are a mother and daughter, but are we a family?
I slammed the car door.
How was my mother to drive with no feeling in her legs? But she did. She moved her feet from the clutch to the brakes to the accelerator and I just had to believe that she would not lose her grip and that I would return home unharmed to find her more of the wrong kind of water. The route to the market was a straight drive across the newly tarred motorway. Rose drove fast. She was enjoying herself, her left elbow hanging out of the window. When she asked me why I had never learned to drive, I reminded her that I had failed my driving test four times and my driving theory exam, too, and after that I’d decided to call it a day and buy a bicycle.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine you driving.’
How do we set about not imagining something? What if I said that I can’t imagine human sexuality? What if I can’t imagine human sexuality in a way that has not already been described to me? What if I can’t imagine another culture? How would the day start and how would it end if it was beyond me to imagine Greece, the birthplace of my father? What if it is impossible to imagine he is missing his abandoned daughter and that one day we might be reconciled?
I looked down at my mother’s foot on the brake. Her toes moved off and then landed on it with delicacy and confidence. ‘I can imagine you walking the entire length of the beach,’ I said.
In reply she started to sing the words to a hymn: ‘And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England’s mountains green’.
If only. My mother’s feet are mostly on strike, but I’m not sure what she is negotiating for or what the deal breaker would be. Her feet are an English size nine. Her jaw is large. Our ancestors developed a protruding jaw because they were constantly fighting. Grievance is very strenuous. My mother needs her jaw to see off anyone who will separate her from her stash of resentment. I need to become interested in something else because I am not earning a living to support my interest in her symptoms. I have abandoned my doctorate, which might contribute to making my interest public rather than private and earn me a licence to teach the subject that takes up all my time. Getting a licence is another one of my problems.
Rose tapped the indicator and turned right on the motorway towards the sea. ‘You seem to have made some new friends here in Almería?’
I ignored her.
‘There is something I should tell you about your father. Compared to my own father, he is a very gentle man.’
I could do with whatever pill she takes for dizziness but it has been deleted from the menu of her medication. My father is obviously so gentle he has not had the strength to contact me for eleven years.
Perhaps the case histories with Julieta Gómez were offering Rose another view of her former husband. She had some views of her own about Nurse Sunshine. As she sped down the motorway, she told me it was clear to her that Julieta was a drunk. Her breath often smelt of alcohol during their physiotherapy sessions. Frankly, it was a matter of ethical concern.
She was driving too fast. I was holding my breath and biting my cracked lips at the same time. ‘Julieta is astute. Very clever. She is never judgemental of me, Sofia, and so I am reluctant to judge her. But it is perplexing and I will have to consider my options.’
Rose had now archived three case histories with Julieta Gómez. She had become more reflective, secretive, maybe even kinder, although she still hated the white cat, Jodo, whom she had come reluctantly to regard as a member of staff at the clinic. She wouldn’t be surprised if Jodo started to administer her vitamin injections. Gómez had told her that she should draw a picture of the cat on the soles of her feet. That way she could stamp on Jodo all day long.
I thought his comment was a clever way of getting her to walk.
We parked in the driveway of an empty house on the edge of the motorway. A pile of abandoned, torn clothes was strewn across the porch. As I lifted the wheelchair out of the boot I could see the sprawl of the market across the road. An aeroplane flew low in the sky, preparing to land at the nearby airport. It is such hard work carrying my mother. In she goes. I am pushing her across the hot tarmac towards a stall that has a few tables and chairs laid out in the shade. Rose demanded I queue up for a portion of churros, which she would enjoy with a small glass of anise liqueur. She even finished her request with ‘Thank you, Fia.’
We are in a lunar landscape. That’s what all the guides say about Almería. Wind-beaten and sun-baked. The riverbeds are cracked and dry. A blue petrol haze floats above the tattered stalls selling handbags and purple grapes and onions. I wheel Rose to some shade under the plastic awning held up by rusty poles. Already she is talking to an elderly man who is sitting with a bandage around his right knee. They seem to be having a conversation about walking sticks.
The churros come in two shapes, long sausages to dip into chocolate and then a shorter kind. I buy us the longer ones and carry Rose her anise liqueur in a paper cup.
The old man is waving his walking stick in the air and showing my mother the rubber tip on the end of it. I sit down next to them and pretend to be fascinated by the rubber tip.
I am in a reckless mood after my bold night of lovemaking under the real night stars. I want to sit here with a lover, close, closer, touching. Instead I am here with my mother, who is a sort of career invalid. I am young and might even be the subject of erotic dreams newly minted by Juan, who had said, ‘The dream is over,’ when we first met. And I might be beloved to Ingrid, who is tormenting me.
Rose taps my hand. ‘Fia, I would like to buy a watch.’
I shoved a churro in my mouth. It was crisp and oily and sprinkled with sugar. No wonder my body was shape-shifting towards the east and west while I lived in Spain.
Rose’s breath was hot from the anise. She seemed to be able to swallow fiery licorice liqueur more easily than she could swallow water. ‘By the way, if you can work those complicated coffee machines, believe me, you can drive a car. It’s really very easy to drive.’ When she tipped her head back and slurped the anise in one go, I thought she was going to gargle with it.
At that moment, my real mother and my ghostly mother – the woman who is glorious, victorious, well and vital – morphed together. That was another good subject for an original field study – the way imagination and reality tumble together and mess things up – but I was too distracted by the woman wearing one of the more flamboyant straw hats displayed on her stall to think about it. The price label was still attached to the hat with a string, so it kept swinging across her eyes. It was as if she had put something in the way of being looked at. Every now and again she jerked her head to make the label swing chaotically across her face.
I stood up and took my place behind the wheelchair, lifted up the brake, which was difficult because my espadrilles were flopping off my feet, and began to push my mother down the dust road, dodging the potholes and dog shit, past the handbags and purses, the sweating cheeses and gnarled salamis, the jamón ibérico from Salamanca, the strings of chorizo, plastic tablecloths and mobile-phone covers, the chickens turning on a stainless-steel spit, the cherries, bruised apples, oranges and peppers, the couscous and turmeric heaped in baskets, the jars of harissa and preserved lemons, the torches, spanners, hammers, while Rose swatted the flies landing on her feet with a rolled-up copy of the London Review of Books.
I paused on the dust road.
/> My mother can feel a fly landing on her feet.
A fly. She can feel a fly.
She is not numb. She is acutely sensitive.
As I resumed pushing her along, I could still hear the swish of her literary fly-swat as I gazed out at the unhomely grey-concrete apartment blocks that were now abandoned in the recession.
‘Stop Stop Stop.’
Rose was pointing at a stall of cheap watches. A tall African man in an elegant white robe waved to her with his left hand. Draped across his right arm which he had curved into the shape of a C was an array of headphones: blue, red and white headphones. Rose shouted to me to move her chair closer and immediately grabbed a bright gold metal watch with a thick wristband, its face studded with a circle of fake diamonds.
‘I have always wanted a gangster watch. This is the bling to see me out.’
‘To see you out of what?’
‘I am slowly being murdered at the Gómez Clinic, Sofia. My medication is dwindling and the staff at the clinic have no diagnostic skills whatsoever. They tell me everything is in order. Do I look like I am thriving?’ She slammed her feet on the wheelchair. ‘So far, what with the foot ulcers, it looks like diabetes. It’s the only thing that quack and his cat are taking seriously.’
The African man gently freed the watch from my mother’s fingers and started to fiddle with the winder. He held the diamond-studded face against his ear and shook it. Obviously, he didn’t like what he heard. He dipped his hand into the pocket of his white robe and took out a small screwdriver. By the time he was taking it apart I knew Rose was going to have to buy it.
I stepped in front of her. ‘How much is that watch?’ I had placed my hands on my hips as if I was indignant, which I was not. That was odd. I was imitating indignation, but my heart wasn’t in it. Where did I learn to express indignation I did not feel, my voice veering up the scales to land on a note which could be described as accusing? Where did I learn to adopt an attitude that I do not believe in? And what about the word Beloved? Perhaps Ingrid was imitating something she did not feel when she embroidered that word in blue thread and gave it to me as if it were of no importance.
He told me the watch was only fifty euro.
I started to laugh, but sarcasm is not the same as laughing and he knew it.
Now he was delicately holding a tiny round disc of steel between his long fingers. Rose explained to me that it was a battery, as if this were an entirely new invention.
They both became very involved in the battery. He was nodding and smiling in agreement with her, pointing to the diamonds as if they were priceless. The anise liqueur had flushed Rose’s cheeks. When she started counting the number of diamonds in the circle, he understood that her wrist would not be naked for much longer. I realized my mother had charm and verve. If I blew on her name, ROSE, the letters would shuffle around and come out as EROS, the god of love, winged but lame.
She held out her wrist and the man attached the watch around it.
I could see it was too big for her small bones and always would be. He dragged a stool to the side of her wheelchair and invited her to rest her wrist on his knee while he fiddled with the links of the gold band. The hairs on her arm were trapped under the links. I found myself wincing as if I were feeling this small pain on her behalf. Empathy is more painful than medusa stings.
While my mother proceeded with the ritual of purchasing a time-keeping device to ‘see her out’, I walked to a stall selling brooms and mousetraps, among other things. An abundance of pink and blue birthday-cake candles were laid out on foil trays. Three candles for one euro. The more expensive ones were silver and had matching spiked silver holders to pierce the cake. I gazed at a variety of mops and buckets, pots and pans, wooden spoons and sieves. I have never had a home of my own in my adult life so far. If I made a home, what would I buy from this stall of domestic goods? I would apparently have moths and mice to kill and rats and flies. I picked up an aerosol of air freshener that had been designed in the shape of a curvaceous woman. She was wearing a polka-dot apron that did not disguise her massive belly and heavy breasts. Her eyelashes were long and curled, her lips tiny and puckered. The instructions for how to use her were translated into Italian, Greek, German, Danish and a language I did not recognize, but she was ‘Extremely Flammable’ in every language.
There were instructions in English, too. Shake her well. Point her towards the centre of the room and spray. The scale of her belly and breasts was not unlike early fertility goddesses found in Greece around 6000 BC, except they did not wear polka-dot aprons. Did they suffer from hypochondria? Hysteria? Were they bold? Lame? Too full of the milk of human kindness?
I bought the air freshener for four euro because it was a kind of artefact translated into many languages, and also because it was clearly an interpretation of a woman (breasts belly apron eyelashes) and I had become confused by the signs for servicios in public places. I could not figure out why one sign was male and the other female. The most common stick-figure sign was not particularly male or female. Did I need this aerosol to make things clearer to me? What kind of clarity was I after?
I had conquered Juan who was Zeus the thunderer as far as I was concerned, but the signs were all mixed up because his job in the injury hut was to tend the wounded with his tube of ointment. He was maternal, brotherly, he was like a sister, perhaps paternal, he had become my lover. Are we all lurking in each other’s sign? Do I and the woman on the air freshener belong to the same sign? Another aeroplane was flying above the market, its metal body heavy in the sky. A male pilot I had met in the Coffee House had told me that an aircraft was always referred to as ‘she’. His task was to keep her in balance, to make her an extension of his hands, to make her responsive to the lightest of touch. She was sensitive and needed to be handled delicately. A week later, after we had slept together, I discovered that he was also responsive to the lightest of touch.
It wasn’t clarity I was after. I wanted things to be less clear.
The African man and my mother seemed to be hitting it off. He was telling her about the history of Almería while he took the watch off her wrist so she could soothe the fine hair that had been caught in the links. He was taking a long time to sell her that watch.
‘“Almería” in Arabic means “the mirror of the sea”.’
Rose was pretending to listen but all her attention was on her diamond-studded watch. ‘It’s ticking! I can feel the ticking because my arms are not numb like my feet.’
It is a time-keeping device to see her out and it is ticking.
‘I have difficulty walking,’ Rose told the African salesman. He shook his head in commercial sympathy as she waved a fifty-euro note in the air with a flourish and then graciously passed it to him. ‘Thank you for your time.’
He waved us goodbye as the sun warmed the brine in the bucket of olives and giant capers nearby. Everything smelt of harsh, dark vinegar.
‘Do you want to know the time, Sofia?’
‘Oh Yes Please.’
‘It is twelve forty-five. Time for my dwindling medication.’
When we arrive back at the car I invite Rose to get out of her wheelchair and stand while I fold and stack it in the boot.
‘It’s not a matter of will, Sofia. I can’t stand today.’
By the time I had heaved my mother into the car, her groans, moans, hisses and then insults all directed at me, and then my flaws, imperfections and irritating habits, I felt that she was indeed a gangster and that she was mugging my life.
I sat down on the passenger seat, slammed the door and waited for her to drive us away, but she had become very still, as if she was in shock. We had parked outside the ruin of a house that we thought was uninhabited. But now we saw that people were living there despite the holes in the roof and broken windows. A mother and her young daughter were eating soup on the porch. Everything was broken, the wheelbarrow, the pram, the chairs, the table and the doll with one arm that was lying near the car.
It was a broken home in every sense.
My mother was the head of her own small, broken family.
It was her responsibility to stop wild animals sneaking in through the door and terrifying her child. It was as if this sad house was a spectre she carried inside her, the fear of not keeping the wolf from our door in Hackney, London. I had been entitled to free school meals at my school and Rose knew I was ashamed. She had made me soup in a flask most days before she left for work. I carried it in my heavy schoolbag while it leaked all over my homework. That flask of soup was a torment but it was proof to my mother that the wolf had not yet arrived. My guidebook has a whole page on the Iberian wolves (Canis lupus signatus) that once flourished in Almería. Apparently, during Franco’s dictatorship, there was a special campaign to exterminate the wolves. Obviously some of them had survived and hadn’t bothered to knock on the door of this house. They had crashed through the windows.
An aeroplane cut a white trail in the sky.
The child waved her spoon at my mother.
‘Sofia, drive us home.’ Rose threw the keys into my lap.
‘I can’t drive.’
‘Yes, you can. Anyway, that anise liqueur was too strong and I can’t drive either.’
She started to edge her body into the passenger seat so I had to jump out of the car. I walked round to the driver’s seat, sat down, inserted the key into the ignition. The engine started. I fiddled with the handbrake and began to reverse.