by Deborah Levy
I did not need to go to Samoa or Tahiti like Margaret Mead to research human sexuality. The only person I have known from infancy to adulthood is myself, but my own sexuality is an enigma to me. Ingrid’s body is a naked light bulb. She puts her hand over my mouth but her mouth is open, too. I have seen her face before I met her, once in Hotel Lorca and then in a mirror when the day was slow and now she lifts her back and we change position.
Meeting Ingrid is an assignment that had been scheduled without either of us writing it down. It was there anyway, like a bruise before a fall.
After a while we walked into the shower room. It was tiled from wall to ceiling in squares of flint-coloured stone. The water poured down like a tropical storm, except it was icy and we shuddered as it fell over our breasts.
As we walked out of the shower we both knew something was wrong. It was a feeling of danger. Invisible, but there. Noiseless, but the hairs on our arms were raised. And then we saw it slither out of the basket of kindling by the fire. It was blue, like a streak of lightning as it made its way across the stone floor to the far side of the room near the window.
‘A snake.’ Ingrid’s voice was calm but slightly higher than usual. A white towel was wrapped round her body, her hair dripping wet. She said it again in Spanish: ‘Serpiente.’
She walked towards the small axe that was placed on top of the log. The snake lay very still by the edge of the wall. She crept towards it slowly, holding the axe as if it were a golf club, leaving a trail of her wet footprints on the stone floor. She lifted the axe a few inches and struck hard on the head of the snake. Its severed body curled up and then continued to writhe in two parts.
I was trembling but I knew that I must not shout or show Ingrid my fear. She used the axe to turn the snake over. Its underbelly was white. It was still looping its body. She turned to me, the axe in her hand, the towel draped around her body like a toga, her upper arms muscled and lean from her boxing classes, and she spoke in German: ‘Eine Schlange.’
I told her to move away from it, but she wanted me to come to her. Her fingers which could thread the most delicate needle were still wrapped around the axe and I was frightened, but I had been frightened from the first day I met her. I was not convinced the snake was dead, even though it lay severed in two on the floor. I walked to Matthew’s bottle of wine and drank from it, my lips now purple, my tongue rasping. It was like drinking crushed plums and bay leaves, and I walked over to her and kissed her. While my left arm circled her waist, my right arm removed the axe from her fingers.
We dressed as if there weren’t a dead snake in the room, put on our dresses and rings and adjusted our earrings, brushed our hair and left the room, the white soft sheets with their hundreds of threads, the sewing machines and fabrics, the thick walls and wooden beams, the fig bread, the bottle of aromatic wine and a blue snake lying in two parts, our wet footprints on the stone floor and the shower still dripping.
As we made our way to the car, I saw a man in tight beige riding breeches leaning his back against the door. He was short and swarthy. Ingrid told me he was the riding teacher, Leonardo, the man who rented her the cortigo. He was smoking a cigarette and looking at her, then his gaze shifted to me.
I moved my hair out of my eyes. I could feel him slipping something to me in his gaze, like a dodgy drug deal in a pub where someone slips a wad of dirty banknotes to someone else. He was threatening me.
He was telling me he did not have a high opinion of what he was looking at, that I was someone who must be cut down to size, to a size he could manage to frighten with his eyes, which were the avatars of his mind.
He was making me weaker.
I had to strike down his gaze, which was his mind, to cut off his head with my gaze, just as Ingrid had, more literally, cut off the head of the snake, so I stared right back and slipped my own gaze into his eyes.
He froze with the cigarette stuck mid-air between his thumb and forefinger.
Ingrid suddenly ran to him and kissed him on the lips. That seemed to wake him up. He high-fived her, slap, hand to hand, while Ingrid leaned athletically towards him, his hand still in her hand because they hadn’t let go of each other during the high five.
It was as if she were coming in with a sort of betrayal – yes, I might be with her, but I’m not like her, I’m with you.
They started to speak to each other in Spanish while the horses stamped their hooves in the stables nearby.
I’m not sure what it is that Ingrid wants from me. My life is not enviable. Even I don’t want it. Yet, despite being on my knees in lack of glamour (my sick mother, my dead-end job), she desires me and wants my attention.
Ingrid was telling Leonardo all about seeing off the snake. He pressed the bicep of her right arm with his bitten-down fingernails as if to say, My, how strong you are, to see off a snake on your own.
His brown leather riding boots came up to his knees.
Ingrid looked ecstatic. ‘Leonardo says he will give me his boots.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You will need these boots to ride my best Andalusian. His name is Rey, because he is the king of horses, and he has a beautiful mane, like you.’
Ingrid laughed, braiding her hair with her fingers as she leaned in to him.
I turned to Leonardo, and my voice was calm. ‘She will ride the Andalusian with a bow and arrow in her hand.’
Ingrid lashed the back of her hand with the ends of her hair. ‘Oh, really, Zoffie? Who will I shoot?’
‘You will shoot me. You will shoot the arrow of your desire into my heart. In fact, that has already happened.’
She looked startled for a moment and then she clapped her hands over my mouth. ‘Zoffie is half Greek,’ she said to Leonardo, as if this explained everything.
Leonardo gave her a friendly, soft punch. He would bring round the boots sometime and he would show her how to polish them.
‘Gracias, Leonardo.’ Her eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed. ‘Zoffie is going to drive me home. She is a learner driver.’
Lame
I haven’t slept for three nights. The heat. The mosquitos. The medusas in the oily sea. The stripped mountains. The German shepherd I freed who might have drowned. The relentless knocking on the door of the beach house. I have locked it now and don’t answer, except for yesterday, when it was Juan. It was his day off and he offered to take me on his moped to Cala San Pedro. It is the only beach with a freshwater spring. He said we could drive half the way on the road, then his friend would take us there by boat. I told him my mother was in a melancholy mood. I am her legs and she is lame. I don’t know what to do with myself. I have started to limp again. I have lost the car keys and I can’t find my hairbrush.
The incident with the snake and then Leonardo undermining me kept colliding with my other thoughts.
I was frightened when I took the axe from Ingrid’s hand. But not frightened enough not to want to know what will happen next.
Leonardo has become her new shield.
My mother was speaking to me but I was not listening, and she could tell because she raised her voice. ‘I suppose you had another happy day in the sunshine?’
I told her I did nothing, nothing at all.
‘How wonderful to do nothing. Nothing is such a privilege. I have been stripped of my medication and I am waiting for something to happen.’
She glanced at the gangster watch on her wrist. It was still ticking. It told perfect time. She was waiting for something while her watch ticked. It was hard for her to come off all her medication. Waiting for new pain was the big adventure in her life. While she waited she tore off small pieces of soft white bread, rolled them into a ball in the palm of her hand and sucked them for hours. The bread pellets resembled her pills and gave her some comfort. She was waiting. Waiting every day for something that might not appear. A rhyme I had learned in junior school came to mind.
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn�
�t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.
‘Whatever you are waiting for may not arrive,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t there yesterday, and it is not here today.’ I asked her if she would like something more substantial to eat than bread.
‘No. I only eat because I can’t take medication on an empty stomach.’
I puzzled over this and then turned away from her and gazed at the shattered screen saver on my laptop.
‘I suppose I am boring you, Sofia. Well, I am bored, too. How are you going to entertain me tonight?’
‘No. You entertain me.’ I was getting bolder.
She adjusted her lips to look even more hard done by than usual. ‘Do you think a person in pain with no help is a sort of clown?’
‘No, I do not.’
The constellations of my screen saver floated past my eyes, misty, undefined shapes. One of them looked like a calf. Where will it find grass in this galaxy? It will have to eat stars.
Rose prodded my shoulder. ‘I told the doctor I have a chronic degenerative condition. He confesses he knows very little about chronic pain. He says this might surprise modern patients, and I am surprised, because what are we paying him to do? He said my pain has not yet yielded up its secrets. All I know is that my pain magnifies every day.’
‘Do your feet hurt?’
‘No, they are numb.’
‘So what kind of pain magnifies every day?’
She shut her eyes. She opened her eyes. ‘You could help me. You could go to the farmacia and buy me my painkillers, Sofia. You don’t need a prescription here in Spain.’
When I refused, she told me I was getting plump. She demanded a cup of tea, Yorkshire tea. She was missing the Wolds, which she hadn’t seen for twenty years. I brought the tea to her in a mug with ‘ELVIS LIVES’ written across its side. She grabbed it from me and looked aggrieved, as if I had given her something she had not requested and was forcing her to drink. Was it the ‘ELVIS LIVES’ that made her do that scowling thing with her lips? Would it cheer her up to remind her that Elvis was actually dead? Grievance. Grief. Grieving. She more or less inhabited a building called Grievance Heights. Is this where I will have to live, too? Is it? Has Rose already put my name down for an apartment in Grievance Heights? What if I can’t afford to live anywhere else? I must remove my name from that waiting list, that long queue of forlorn daughters trailing back to the beginning of time.
Rose was sitting in her chair. Her back view was terrible to behold. It was vulnerable. People look more like how they really are from the back. Her hair was pinned up and I could see her neck. Her hair was thinning. There were a few curls on her neck, but it was the cardigan she had neatly draped over her shoulders in the heat of the desert that made me think she had inherited this ritual from her mother and exported it to Almería. It was very touching, that cardigan. My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.
‘Are you okay?’
For as long as I can remember, it was me asking her that question. If I wasn’t asking it out loud, I was asking it in my head: is my mother okay, is she okay? Rose’s tone was cross, perhaps a little bewildered, and it occurred to me she might not have asked me because she did not want to hear the answer. Questions and answers are a complex code, as are the structures of kinship.
F = Father. M = Mother. S S = Same sex. OS = Opposite sex. I have no G (Siblings) or C (Children) or H (Husband), nor do I have a Godparent (who we classify as fictive kin because godparents can make up their responsibilities and duties).
I am not okay. Not at all and haven’t been for some time.
I did not tell her how discouraged I felt and that I was ashamed I was not more resilient and all the rest of it which included wanting a bigger life but that so far I had not been bold enough to make a bid for the things I wanted to happen and I feared it was written in the stars that I might end up with a reduced life like hers which is why I was searching for the answer to the conversation her lame legs were having with the world but I was also scared there might be something wrong with her spine or that she had a major illness. The word ‘major’ was in my mind that night in southern Spain. It was 7 p.m., which is twilight, the end of the long day of sunshine and the start of early evening, and with my eyes firmly on the cracked cosmology of shattered lonely stars and milky clouds, I heard a kind of lament slipping from my lips about losing my way, stuff about a lost spaceship and putting my helmet on and how something was wrong and how I had lost contact with Earth but no one could hear me.
I could see Rose shuffling her legs, her left ankle twisting in her slipper, and I was not really sure who it was I was singing to, whether it was M or F or H or G or the fictive Godparent or even Ingrid Bauer. I could smell calamari being fried in the café in the square, but I was missing England, toast and milky tea and rainclouds. I heard my voice was very London because that’s where I was born, and then I left the room. My mother was calling to me, she called my name over and over – ‘Sofia Sofia Sofia’ – and then she shouted, but it was not an angry shout, and I suppose I wanted my ghostly mother to rise from the shattered stars made in China and say tomorrow is another day, you will land safely you will you will.
I walked into the kitchen and on the table was the fake ancient Greek vase with the frieze of female slaves carrying jugs of water on their heads. I grabbed it and threw it on the floor. As it crashed and shattered, the venom from the medusa stings made me feel like I was floating in the most peculiar way.
When I looked up, my mother was standing – she was actually standing – in the kitchen among the shards of fake ancient Greece. She was tall. A cardigan was lightly draped over her shoulders. She had worked all her life and she had a driving licence, but she would have been neither a citizen nor a foreigner in ancient Greece. She would have had no rights in these ruins that were once a whole civilization which saw her as a vessel to impregnate. I was the daughter who had thrown the vessel to the floor and smashed it. My mother had tried to keep it together for a while. She taught herself how to make salty goat’s cheese for my father I remember I remember, warming the milk, adding the yogurt, stirring in the rennet, cutting the curds, doing something with muslin and brine, pickling cheese in jars. She put herbs on the lamb she roasted for him, herbs she had never heard of in Warter, Yorkshire, but when he left she could not pay the bills with herbs and cheese I remember, I do remember, she had to walk out of the kitchen and do something else, I remember she turned the oven off and put her coat on and she opened the front door and there was a wolf waiting for us on the mat but she chased it away and found a job and her lips were not puckered, her eyelashes were not curled when she sat in the library day after day indexing books, but her hair was always perfect and it was held up with one pin.
‘Sofia, what’s wrong with you?’
I started to tell her but a children’s entertainer in the square was letting off firecrackers. I could hear the children laughing and knew he was on a unicycle, blowing fire out of his mouth. I looked at the broken pieces of the fake Greek vase and reckoned it was a sign to fly to my father in Athens.
Nothing to Declare
My father was waiting for me at Athens International Airport, but he was not alone. I was alone with my suitcase and he was standing in the company of his new wife, who was holding their new baby daughter in her arms. I waved to him and the sound between us was the wheels of my suitcase on the marble floor. We had not seen each other for eleven years but we recognized each other with no hesitation. As I got closer he walked towards me and took my suitcase, then he kissed my cheek and said, ‘Welcome.’ He was tanned and relaxed. If anything his hair had become blacker, but I remembered it as silver, and he was wearing a blue shirt that had been ironed with care, its creases sharp at the elbow and collar.
‘Hello, Christos.’
‘Call me Papa.’
I’m not sure I can do that, but if I write it down I’ll see what it looks like.
As we made our way towar
ds his new family, Papa asked me about the flight. Had I managed to have a nap and did they serve a snack and did I have a window seat and were the toilets clean, and then we were standing next to his wife and younger daughter.
‘This is Alexandra, and this is your sister, Evangeline. Her name means “messenger”, like an angel.’
Alexandra had short, straight, black hair and she was wearing spectacles. She was quite plain but young, and her blue denim shirt (made by Levi Strauss) was damp from the milk in her breasts. She was sallow and looked tired. A steel brace was clamped across her front teeth. She peered at me from behind the lenses of her spectacles, and she was open and friendly, a little wary but, most of all, welcoming. I took a look at Evangeline, who also had black hair, lots of it. My sister opened her eyes. They were brown and lustrous, like rain glittering on a roof.
When my father and his new wife gazed down at Evangeline I could see the truest love in their eyes, the sort of love that is naked and without shame.
They were a family. They looked as right together as a 69-year-old man and a 29-year-old woman can possibly look. Mostly they looked wrong, like a father and daughter and grandchild, but as wrong goes, the affection between them was right. My father, Christos Papastergiadis, was caring for two new women. He had made another life, and I was part of the old life that had made him unhappy. To give myself courage I had pinned up my hair with three scarlet flamenco flower hairgrips I had bought in Spain.
He told me he would get the car and we were to wait outside at the pick-up point, then he gave me some information. Apparently, there was a bus – number X95 – parked right outside the airport exit. It cost five euro and I should know the next time I was in Athens that it would take me to Syntagma Square in the centre. Papa jangled the car keys above Evangeline’s head like a kindly grandfather and then disappeared through a glass door.