by Deborah Levy
‘That’s perfect,’ Rose said. ‘A perfect reverse.’
Something crunched under the wheels.
‘It’s that poor child’s doll,’ my mother said, peering out of the window. ‘Never mind, change gear, indicator on, put your seat belt on, very good, off we go.’
I was driving at ten miles an hour while Rose leaned forward to adjust the mirror. ‘Faster.’
I was in the wrong gear but then I corrected the gear stick’s position and even dared to increase the speed along the new, empty motorway.
‘Sofia, I feel completely safe in your hands. Just one observation.’
‘What?’
‘In Spain, you drive on the right-hand side of the road.’
I laughed and Rose told me the time on her new watch.
‘We are going uphill, so you need to change gear. Can you see there is a car trying to overtake us?’
‘Yes, I can see him.’
‘It’s a her,’ she said. ‘A her is trying to overtake you because she has perfect visibility, she can see there are no vehicles coming in her direction. It’s one o’clock, by the way.’
Driving was a breeze after working the coffee machines, just as Rose said it would be.
Something was rolling around in the boot. Every time I turned a corner it banged against the sides. I slowed down and the car suddenly jerked and stopped.
‘You have to find a better balance between the brake and the accelerator. Into neutral and start again.’
The Berlingo lurched forward and the object in the boot rattled around.
‘That is not neutral.’ Rose adjusted the gears for me and we were off. ‘It is not your lack of a licence that worries me, it is your lack of spectacles. I will have to be your eyes.’
She is my eyes. I am her legs.
After we arrived in the car park at the end of the village and I had pulled up the handbrake, Rose announced she had a new chauffeur.
My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.
She stretched out her finger to touch the oiled curls on the nape of my neck. ‘I’m not sure what you’re doing to your hair, Fia. You remind me of the taxi driver who got lost taking your father and myself to our hotel in Kefalonia for our honeymoon.’
She gestured to me to pass her the keys. ‘Your father was very proud of his hair, and I was forbidden to touch it. In those days his hair was long and fell to his shoulders in soft black curls. In the end, I began to regard it as symbolic hair.’
I did not want to know any of this. But as she had told Gómez, I was her only.
When I opened the door for her in my new role as chauffeur, she told me she would walk home. Walking was, apparently, no problem at all. I turned my back on her and searched the boot for the object that had been rattling around. When I eventually found it, I guessed that Matthew must have hidden it in the boot after he picked up the hire car and signed off the papers with Nurse Sunshine.
It was an aerosol of blue spray-paint.
Rose was leaning against the trunk of the palm tree at the end of the car park. She was bent over as if carrying something too heavy to bear.
Horseplay
The Kiss. We don’t talk about it but it’s there in the coconut ice cream we are making together. It’s there in the space between us as Ingrid scrapes the seeds from a vanilla pod with her penknife. It’s lurking in her long eyelids and in the egg yolks and cream and it’s written in blue silken thread with the needle that is Ingrid’s mind. I don’t know what I want from Ingrid or why she enjoys humiliating me or why I put up with it.
It seems that I have consented to being undermined.
She shows me the clothes piled in baskets all over the floor of their Spanish house and pulls out a white satin dress with thin, fraying straps. It has a stain on the hem but she says it would suit me. She’ll mend it when she gets round to it because she knows my medusa stings hurt all the time.
They don’t hurt all the time but I don’t want to disappoint her. While we wait for the ice cream to set in the freezer she twists a strand of my hair around her finger. ‘Let me cut out this knot,’ she says.
She reaches for a pair of ornate, sharp scissors lying on top of one of the baskets of clothes. The blades saw through my hair. When I turn round she is holding a thick strand of my curls like a trophy in her hand. I feel uneasy but it is more exciting than waiting for my mother’s side effects and withdrawal symptoms. Perhaps feeling uneasy is a side effect?
‘Zoffie, do anthropologists steal heads from graves to measure and classify them?’
‘No, that was in the old days. I’m not looking for heads in graves.’
‘What are you looking for, then?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Really, Zoffie?’
Yes.
‘Why is nothing interesting?’
‘Because it covers up everything.’
She punched my arm. ‘You spend too much time on your own. You should make something with your hands.’
‘Like what?’
‘A bridge.’
If Ingrid is a bridge leading me across the swamp beneath it, she keeps taking a few of the bricks out every time we meet. It is like an erotic rite of passage. If I manage to cross the bridge without falling into the swamp, perhaps I will be compensated for my suffering? Ingrid’s lips are luscious, soft and full. She is poised, a woman of few words, but the word she has chosen, Beloved, is a big word.
She commands me to sit in the garden with Matthew who has just returned from work.
He is lying in a hammock slung between two trees in the shade. ‘To-day was an ex-per-i-ence.’ Matthew pushes his foot against the tree and the hammock starts to sway from left to right. ‘The hardest thing, Sophie, is to get people to be themselves.’
He waves his hands at the leaves above his head, as if conjuring a self that might be true enough for him.
It turns out that Matthew is a life coach. He teaches senior managers to communicate better, to sell their brand and put it across with humour and vigour.
Is Matthew being himself?
He is friendly but shifty, and I don’t blame him because his girlfriend is messing with me and he’s messing with something too, but I’m not sure what’s going on. Something like his right hand wrote a blue message to Julieta Gómez while his left hand caressed Ingrid Bauer’s long, tanned thighs.
Ingrid carries out a tray of her home-made lemonade, a pair of silver tongs, a sprig of fresh mint and a jug of ice. After she has formally kissed Matthew on his cheek, she fills a plastic glass with ice and then pours the lemonade, adding a slice of lime and a few leaves of mint. She is not exactly a wife. More like a cocktail waitress who is also an athlete and a mathematician. She has studied geometry and she is a seamstress with clients in China. She is also ‘a big, bad sister’, but she doesn’t want to talk about that.
Matthew’s hobby is collecting wine. He has gone on a few courses taught by the masters, the buyers and sommeliers who focus on a particular grape, or a region where the grapes are grown. Here in Spain he has found a fellow wine expert, a horse-riding instructor called Leonardo who owns a cortigo – a country house with its own stables. Ingrid rents one of the rooms there in order to sew. She works on Tuesdays and Wednesdays – just two days because life is short – and Matthew, who is also short, misses her when she is away from him.
‘Zoffie, perhaps you would like to see the cortigo? My machines are old, from India. I bought them on eBay and they have never broken down. They are heavy, really beautiful objects.’
Matthew looks bored, so she starts to talk about him. He finds himself very lovable and Ingrid seems to love him. He is radiant with self-belief.
Everything I know about myself is cracking and Ingrid is the hammer.
Matthew insists she sits in the shade. She ignores him and sits in the sunshine by my side.
He lifts up his head and smiles at me, as if we both share an interest in Ingrid’s well-being. ‘Tell Inge to move out of
the sun. She’s got pale skin, so it’s not healthy.’
I shake my curls at him. ‘Sunshine is sexy.’
Matthew scoops out a mint leaf from his glass and begins to chew on it. ‘That’s a tricky one, Sophie. There are debates in the scientific community about sunshine. It warms the planet every day, but it also makes us blind.’
‘Blind to what?’
‘Our everyday responsibilities. It is very seductive.’
While we are on the subject of responsibilities, he wants to know about my mother. ‘So did you pay a lot of money to the Gómez Clinic?’
‘Yes.’
He tucks his blond hair behind his ears and nods, as if he knows this already. ‘Look, Sophie, I can tell you, that so-called “doctor” should be struck off.’
‘You might be right.’
‘I am right. Gómez is dangerous and he’s an arsehole.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m training an executive from Los Angeles here in Spain at the moment. He says Gómez is a discredited quack.’
While we talk, Ingrid is placing a few small pebbles around a potted baby cactus which she has balanced on her lap. ‘Zoffie is just trying to help her mother and your client is unreliable.’
Matthew shakes his head s-l-o-w-ly as the hammock creaks and sways. ‘No, he is not unreliable. Tony James is a great guy. Today I did an exercise with him where he throws a golf ball up in the air and catches it while he speaks. He stopped being a zombie. It was like seeing traffic lights change.’ He reaches for the leaves above his head and touches them with his fingertips.
I have to become bolder. I have to find more courage and purpose and chase my thoughts. ‘Does Tony James work for a pharmaceutical company?’
Matthew tosses his empty glass of lemonade on to the ground. ‘Yuh.’
The cicadas have started their call for the afternoon.
Yuh is a good subject for an original field study.
Yuh has covered the subject of the pharmaceutical company in the white plastic that covers the tomatoes and peppers growing in desert sweat farms. And Matthew has covered the marble wall of the Gómez Clinic with the words ‘Sunshine is Sexy’. Yet he seems to be angry with Julieta Gómez.
I’m not sure I believe he is authentically in love with Ingrid.
After a while I tell him I like his red leather belt.
‘Thank you. I like it because Ingrid bought it for me.’ He sounds relieved to be back on track.
Anthropologists have to veer off track, otherwise we would never rearrange our own belief systems. There would be no one to throw water at our smokescreens. No one to tell us that our reality is incompatible with other realities or to understand the significance of the plan of a village and its dwellings – its relationship to life and death, or why the women live on the periphery of the village.
Matthew continues on his track. He adjusts his position in the hammock and starts to swing with new force as he explains how he has developed a method to help his clients, mostly from oil companies, give their PowerPoint presentations. It is his job to help them project who they are and what they value, to learn how to stand with authority and confidence and not to worry about cracking a few jokes to get the audience onside. He has forbidden them to use phrases like ‘The tail is wagging the dog’ or ‘You are a star.’ CEOs always stumble with their autocue technique and so he gives them strategies to cope with stumbling, to make something of it rather than pretending it hasn’t happened. He finds it very rewarding to help free up the leadership potential in his clients. When they reveal their frailties about performing in public or being disliked by their staff, the feeling between his clients and himself is something like love. He encourages them to develop their eccentricities. Yesterday, he told Mr James from Los Angeles to take the golf ball with him to all meetings. Throwing it around while he talks will become his signature gesture.
Matthew stretches out his arms on either side of the hammock to suggest he is flying. The odd thing is that I heard a trace of some of the things Julieta Gómez had implied with fewer words when she recorded my mother’s case history, except they were altered when they came out of Matthew’s mouth. It was as if he had hijacked something she did and applied it to what he did. The executives he trains are his sacred buffalo. He helps them build a persona, a mask through which they can speak authentically on behalf of the brand. The face beneath the mask has to grow seamlessly into the mask. If this apparatus cracks they can call upon him to put it together again.
Ingrid walks into the shade and stands under the tree. I notice for the first time that her belly button is pierced with a green jewel in the shape of a tear. There are spines from the cactus in her fingers and she wants Matthew to pull them out for her.
‘Hey, keep out of the way of my hammock, Inge.’ He sounds vaguely threatening.
She waves her spiked fingers above his face. ‘Matty, you should shut up.’ She points to her lips and makes a zipping gesture. ‘Everything is a field study to Zoffie. She is taking notes. Believe me, she will give a paper on your life-coaching methods and then everyone will know your secrets.’
‘Keep your distance, Inge. This is my hammock and I don’t need a push.’ It is as if he is chastising her for something.
She walks back into the shade and places her hand on my knee. ‘Then Zoffie will take out the needles.’
‘So what’s your job, Sophie?’ Matthew speaks over her, his eyes now closed as he sways gently under the leaves.
‘I make artisan coffee.’
‘That’s a good skill. How do you make it perfect?’
‘Quality beans, texture of the grind, the way the water flows through the coffee.’
He nods gravely, as if we were discussing something important. ‘So what do you want?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know, insane things like work, money, being included in the game? If you had to write your wish list and you could use invisible ink, what would it be?’
I can see my face flushing in the various triangle-shaped shards of mirror that have been planted around the desert plants in their garden.
‘Zoffie has nothing on her wish list. Nothing nothing nothing.’ Ingrid flutters her spiked fingertips on my knee.
I am deformed with embarrassment. Have I ever said what I meant in my life so far? So why would I say it to Matthew?
He snaps his fingers and laughs. ‘You need an autocue, Sophie! That’s what Julieta Gómez does, isn’t it? She prompts her clients to jog their memory?’
I stand up and jump over the low stone wall that separates their garden from the beach. One of the good things happening to me here in Spain is that I now jump over things.
I am so lonely.
I am walking on the sand and the tide is out. A woman is galloping on her horse across the burning sand of the playa. A tall Andalusian horse. His mane is flaming his hooves are thundering the sea is glittering. She is wearing blue velvet shorts and brown riding boots and she is holding a giant bow and arrow. Her upper arms are muscled, her long hair is braided, she is gripping the horse with her thighs. I can hear her breathing as the arrow flies through the air and enters my heart. I am wounded. I am wounded with desire and I am ready for the ordeal of love.
Four boys are playing volleyball on the beach, thumping the ball over the net. When the ball comes towards me I jump high and whack it back to them. They cheer and wave to me.
One of them was Juan.
Ingrid and Juan. He is masculine and she is feminine but, like a deep perfume, the notes cut into each other and mingle.
When the Greek girl speaks her accent is English but her hair is black like the bread my father eats with salted lard and mustard. In the morning she saves watermelon rinds for the chickens that live in the yard near the cemetery at the back of the village. She puts the rinds in a carrier bag every morning and takes them to Señora Bedello who owns the chickens. The wide brim of her sombrero casts a shadow around her shoulders. Her medusa s
tings are fading.
Human Shields
There was a strange atmosphere in the consulting room. Gómez looked irritated. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and the alarming white streak in his hair was damp with sweat.
‘I am not so sure how to read this most recent X-ray. There is no doubt that you, Rose, are losing bone density, but this is normal in women who are aged fifty and older.’ He sighed and folded his arms across his pinstripes. ‘Bone is very interesting. It is made from collagen and minerals. It is a living tissue. After the age of forty-five all of our bones become less dense and less strong. Yet you have not suffered from a significant loss of bone material. I suggest you walk home.’
The single silver hair on my mother’s chin stood erect.
‘Mrs Papastergiadis, if you want to continue with the treatment you will have to give up all your medication. All of it. Every single pill. For high cholesterol, for sleeping, for heart palpitations, for indigestion, for migraines, for back pains, for blood-pressure regulation and all the painkillers. Everything.’
To my surprise, Rose looked straight into his eyes and agreed to his request. ‘I am ready to start working with you, Mr Gómez.’
Gómez obviously did not believe her either. He clapped his hands. ‘But I have good news! My true love is pregnant!’
At first I did not know what he meant, but then I understood that he was referring to the white cat. He walked over to me and gave me his arm. It was an invitation to link my arm in his. Bone to bone with all our densities and holes covered by skin and clothes, he guided me out of his consulting room like a bride, across the marble floor to a small alcove by the pillars.
A cardboard box had been placed in the shadow. Jodo was lying inside it on a sheepskin rug. When she saw Gómez she narrowed her eyes and started to lick her milky paws. He knelt down and stroked her under the chin until Jodo’s intense, deep purring overwhelmed every other sound in the marble dome of the clinic. I realized for the first time that the ceilings were low. In some ways its architecture resembled a tent stretched out in the scorched desert.