by Deborah Levy
There was one thing I knew. I was the most important person in the room. Ingrid’s mock-flirtation with Leonardo was designed to hide her desire for me.
She was a voyeur.
Of her own desire.
I understood now that Ingrid Bauer did not literally want to behead me. She wanted to behead her desire for me. Her own desire felt monstrous to her.
She had made of me the monster she felt herself to be.
She had been lurking near me for a long time, watching, secretly observing, waiting for me, spookily still, silent. I had heard her voice in my head all summer, I had seen her hiding and heard her breathing. Breathing the fire of her desire.
‘Zoffie, Leonardo and I want to schedule our riding lessons.’
I picked up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. Silver leaves of seaweed drifted in the air.
The Severing
‘Take off Mrs Papastergiadis’s shoes, please.’
Gómez was sitting in his consulting room, staring at his watch. It was 7 a.m. and he seemed irritated to have to attend to my mother so early in the morning. Julieta Gómez slipped off Rose’s shoes and passed them to me.
My mother grimaced, the corners of her mouth falling down, her prominent chin lifted upwards as she spoke. ‘I have told you, Mr Gómez,’ she said, ‘there is no need for a further examination.’
Gómez knelt at her feet and started to wiggle her toes. His wrists were covered in soft black hair. ‘Do you feel this?’
‘Feel what?’
‘The pressure of my fingers on your toes.’
‘I have no toes.’
‘Is that a no?’
‘I no longer want these feet.’
‘Thank you.’ He nodded at Julieta Gómez, who was now taking notes. His silver eyebrows were fierce. Today, he was wearing a starched white coat that matched his stripe of white hair. The stethoscope that was wrapped around his neck made him look more clinical than usual.
‘I suppose you will listen to my heart with that contraption at some stage,’ Rose said.
‘You have told me there is no point, and I believe you.’ Gómez turned towards me and folded his arms across his white coat. ‘Your mother has filed a complaint in regard to my clinical practice. We therefore have a visit in two days’ time from an executive from Los Angeles and a health official from Barcelona. I will require you both to attend it. I believe the gentleman from Los Angeles is a client of Mr Matthew Broadbent. Mr Broadbent has been coaching him how to communicate effectively with investors.’
When I glanced at Julieta, she was engrossed in her notes.
I asked Rose why she had filed a complaint.
She was sitting very straight and had obviously been arranging her hair since five o’clock that morning. It was immaculately pinned in a chignon. ‘Because I have complaints to make. I feel very much better now that I have my medication under control.’
‘It is very unlikely,’ Gómez replied, ‘that your new medication will succeed in making you well. Please keep in mind that we are now waiting for the result of the endoscopy.’
I did not know what an endoscopy was and he explained. ‘It is a procedure in which the inside of the body – in this case, the throat – is examined by a device called an endoscope. It is a long, flexible tube with a video camera attached to one end of it.’
‘Yes,’ Rose said, ‘it was uncomfortable but it was not painful.’
Gómez nodded to Julieta who was also in a strange mood because she announced that from now on all further consultations would be minuted by herself. When she wheeled Rose towards the door she did not look at me.
‘Sofia Irina, stay behind, please.’ Gómez gestured to me to sit on the chair opposite his desk.
I sat down and waited while another nurse came in, carrying a silver tray, and placed it on his desk. On it were two croissants and a glass of orange juice.
Gómez thanked the nurse for his breakfast and instructed her to tell the next patient he was running late. ‘I want to talk to you about two matters,’ he said to me. ‘First, we must discuss the gentleman from the pharmaceutical company. I think you would be interested.’
He lifted the glass of orange juice to his lips, changed his mind and put it down again, untouched. ‘Our visitor Señor James from LA needs to find effective strategies to expand his market. He has been harassing me for some years. What he does is very fascinating. First, he creates a disease and then he offers a cure.’ He pressed his thumb into the white stripe in his hair.
‘How does he create a disease?’
‘Let me explain.’
He continued making small circles on his head with his thumb, as if he were trying to remove something unpleasant from inside. After a while, he took the stethoscope from around his neck and placed it on his desk.
‘Imagine that you, Sofia Irina, are a little introverted. Let us say that you are shy and need to be bolder and to learn how to protect yourself in the everyday of your life. He would like me to call this a social-anxiety disorder. In this way, I can sell you his medication for the disorder he has invented.’ His lips parted and suddenly his smile was so wide I could see myself reflected in his gold teeth. ‘But you, Sofia Irina, being a warm-blooded anthropologist, and I, being a warm-blooded man of science, must let out minds wander freely across Las Alpujarras. We must not always be a slave to the pharmaceuticals.’ Gómez moved the plate of croissants towards me. ‘Please help yourself.’
It felt like a bribe. His tone was kindly but he was definitely on edge. He glanced at the computer on his desk. ‘You saw your father in Athens?’
‘Yes.’
‘And so?’
‘My father has written me off.’
‘Oh. Like a crashed car beyond repair?’
‘No.’
‘How have you been written off?’
‘He is trying to forget I exist.’
‘Is he succeeding?’
‘He is trying to exist by forgetting.’
‘Is forgetting the opposite of memory?’
‘No.’
‘So you have not been written off?’
‘No.’
He was kinder to me than my own father had been. In the one telephone conversation we’d had while I was in Athens, he had insisted that I was Leonardo da Vinci. Apparently da Vinci also wanted to fly back to the father who abandoned him and that’s why he became obsessed with flight. As far as I know, the home-made flying machines he had strapped to his body fell apart and threw him to the ground.
My elbow jutted into the glass of orange juice and knocked it over. The impending visit from the pharmaceutical executive had unnerved me too.
Gómez did not appear to notice as the juice dripped on to the floor. He gestured again towards the untouched croissants. He seemed nervous, but I trusted him. I could sense he had paternal feelings for me.
I took a bite of the croissant.
‘You have a certain je ne sais quoi, Sofia Irina.’
‘Really?’
He nodded.
I was now devouring one of the croissants. I had an appetite beyond my status and size. When I’d finished, Gómez asked me if I would like the other one.
I shook my curls at him. ‘No, thanks. That would be unhealthy.’
Gómez glanced at his computer and then at me. ‘I don’t have good news,’ he said. ‘I cannot treat your mother. I doubt if she will walk again. Her symptoms are spectral like a ghost, they come and go. They have no physiological substance. While you were in Athens, she was talking to me about amputation. In fact, that is her wish. She has asked for surgery.’
I started to laugh. ‘She’s joking,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand her Yorkshire humour. She’s always saying, “Do away with these feet.” It’s a turn of phrase.’
He shrugged. ‘It is perhaps a joke, certainly a threat. But I have already told her there is nothing I can do for her. She is defeated.’
He went on to say it was not in his remit to undo her words or indeed
to undo her wish to sever parts of her body. Instead, he intended to reimburse a large portion of his fee. In fact, he had arranged for this sum to be transferred to her bank the next day.
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.
How could Gómez misinterpret my mother’s dark humour and then abandon her, as if she meant what she was saying?
She is my mother. Her legs are my legs. Her pains are my pains. I am her only and she is my only. I wish, I wish, I wish.
‘There is nothing I can do for her,’ he said again.
‘But she’s having you on,’ I shouted. ‘It’s not literally true, it’s not real.’
He touched his chin with the tips of his fingers. ‘You have some crumbs on your chin,’ he said.
‘It’s not real!’ I shouted again.
‘Yes, it is hard to accept. However, she intends to pursue her desire for amputation with a consultant in London. In fact, she has already made the appointment.’ He told me our conversation was over. I should understand that Mrs Papastergiadis was not his only patient.
I was so shocked I could not stand up. Instead, I glared at the vervet crouched in its glass cage. The rage of my gaze would shatter his final home in Gómez’s consulting room. I would free him to run into the sea and drown.
Gómez’s gold teeth were on full display. ‘I think you would like to free our little primate so he can scamper around the room and read my early editions of Baudelaire. But first you must free yourself from that chair and walk to the door.’ His new tone was sharp. ‘Go for a hike in the mountains. You must be sure not to borrow your mother’s limp or step into her shoes.’ He pointed to my hands.
I was still holding my mother’s shoes which were no longer attached to her feet.
Yesterday the Greek beauty saw three hens tethered by one leg to the same tree at Señora Bedello’s. She started to weep. It is anguish. Angst. Four of the chickens have died in the heat. Let her think no one can see her suffering or how she drags her feet with sadness. Love explodes near her like a war but she never admits she started it. She pretends she has no weapons but she likes the smoke. Love is not all she needs even though she has no one to hold her hand under the stars and say god the moon. She wants a job. I have other things to do too.
Paradise
I am lying naked on the Beach of the Dead. Playa de los Muertos. There is a tiny sliver of glass embedded above my left eyebrow. I don’t know how it got there. Playa de los Muertos is a nudist beach. There is no shelter for those who wish to be naked. Two slender girls, perhaps seventeen, are swimming naked in the clear, turquoise sea. A ragged, ugly dog swims between them. When they climb out of the water the girls search for sticks that have been washed up on the shore and hammer them like tent pegs into the shiny, white pebbles. When they drape a green sarong over the sticks to make a canopy of shade, the dog crawls under it and they sit with it in the full blaze of the sun. One of the girls takes out a bottle of water and pours it into a bowl for their beast. When she strokes its mangy fur it howls.
The dog is howling.
It is being stroked but it is still howling.
It is howling for nothing.
Life doesn’t get better than this and it is still howling.
It is Pablo’s dog. The Alsatian. The German shepherd. The diving-school dog. I’d recognize his howl anywhere. Pablo’s dog is alive and howling on the Beach of the Dead.
One of the girls takes out a comb and pulls it through her long, wet hair. The rhythmic movement of the comb seems to calm the agitated animal as he laps up water from the bowl. She is combing her hair and he is lapping up water.
The girls turn their attention away from their forlorn beast and lean their backs against his breathing, wet body. They are facing the horizon. A naked man in his late thirties is throwing pebbles into the sea with his young son. When he senses the naked girls are looking at him, he turns away from their beauty and suddenly throws a small rock into the sea. He is displaying his strength to the girls and they are pretending not to notice, but they have noticed him. The man is a father. He is standing with his son and he is forsworn to someone else. Perhaps he has snared a woman as enchanting as these young girls, at ease with their bodies, attending to the tangles in their wet hair. He has already been caught but he wants to be caught again. It is a hunt. The only sort of hunt where the prey wants to be jumped on and mauled by its predators.
The hot rocks. The transparent sea.
The medusas are in abeyance. They have disappeared from the ocean today. Where have they gone? My face is pressed down on the white pebbles. I am naked apart from the glass sliver near my eyebrow. I no longer want to know what anything means.
The heat of the white pebbles warms my belly, the salty sea leaves white streaks on my brown skin. It is paradise, but I am not happy. I am like the dog that used to belong to Pablo. History is the dark magician inside us, tearing at our liver.
There is a whole day to kill on the Beach of the Dead.
Dan from Denver called to say he has given the walls of the storeroom in the Coffee House a new coat of white paint. It is as if his minor refurbishment has now made my room his room. He pointed out that I had left some of my anthropology textbooks under the bed. What did I want him to do with my shoes and winter coat, both of them hanging on a hook behind the door? It was a catastrophe. The storeroom was my place. It might be a modest, temporary place, but it was my home. I had made my mark on the walls when I wrote out the Margaret Mead quote, using the five semicolons (;;;;;) that are also used in a text message to represent a wink.
I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalysed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it.
That evening I met Matthew, who was carrying a box of clothes from the vintage shop. He told me it was work for Ingrid to take home to Berlin and asked me if I had a message I would like him to give to her. It was as if I was forbidden to speak to her and could do so only through him.
I stood there in the fiercest late-August sun, sweating, freaked out.
What kind of message did I want to give Ingrid?
I let him wait.
‘By the way, Sophie, that bottle of wine you and Inge stole from my cellar? It’s a mid-range wine, worth about three hundred pounds. So I reckon you should pay half.’
His hands were full because of the box of clothes, so he waggled one of his white espadrilles in my direction for emphasis.
When I laughed I sounded monstrous to my own ears. ‘Tell her that Pablo’s dog is alive and free. He can swim because he has a sea past.’
‘What do you mean, a sea past?’
‘Someone must have trained him to swim when he was a puppy.’
‘You’re so insane, Sophie.’
Matthew walked towards me, struggling with the box, and kissed me on the cheek. I could tell that his body was cleverer than he was because I liked the feeling of him being close to me. I offered my other insane cheek to his insane lips.
It is 11 p.m. and I am naked again, but this time with Juan.
Our bodies are shaking. We are lying on a Turkish rug on the floor of the room he has rented while he has his summer job at the injury hut.
‘Sofia,’ he says, ‘I know your age and I know your country of origin. But I don’t know anything about your occupation.’
I like how he is not in love with me.
I like how I am not in love with him.
I like the yellow flesh of the two tiny wild pineapples he bought in the market.
He is kissing my shoulder. He knows I am reading an email from Alexandra.
He asks me to read it out loud.
It is written in Greek, so I will have to translate it into English.
Dear Sofia,
Your sister is
missing you. A friend said to me that I have two daughters. I corrected her, no I have one, and she said, no you have two. She meant you. I regard you as a sister, but then I remembered it is my daughter who is your sister. Your papa has told me he will leave all our money to the church when he dies. I tell you this as a sister. Although I too have faith, I need to take care of my daughter, who is your sister too. You should know that I lost my job at the bank in Brussels. I am concerned that my two daughters, yes, one of them is you, and his wife, that is me, will be sacrificed to his god and we will lose our investments and our home. This is also to say I hope the health of your real mother is improving and that her legs are getting better.
Kind wishes to you, Sofia
Alexandra
He asks me to read it to him in Greek. ‘It is the right language to read that sort of email.’ He knows he is touching me somewhere that makes me tremble.
We discuss America. The country that gave a home to Claude Lévi-Strauss the anthropologist and to Levi Strauss & Co., the manufacturer of blue jeans, and which might also give me a temporary home to finish my doctorate. If its theme is memory, Juan wonders where will I begin and where I will end. While he takes the tiny sliver of glass out of the skin above my eyebrow, I confess that I am often lost in all the dimensions of time, that the past sometimes feels nearer than the present and I often fear the future has already happened.