I walked across the burning sand to cool my feet in the sea.
Sometimes, I find myself limping. It’s as if my body remembers the way I walk with my mother. Memory is not always reliable. It is not the whole truth. Even I know that.
When I arrived back at the clinic at 2.15, Rose had swapped the wheelchair for a chair and she was reading her horoscope in a newspaper for English expatriates.
‘Hello, Sofia. I can see you have been having a nice time at the beach.’
I told her the beach was desolate and that I had been staring for two hours at a pile of gas canisters. It was my special skill to make my day smaller so as to make her day bigger.
‘Look at my arms,’ she said. ‘I’m all bruised from the blood tests.’
‘You poor thing.’
‘I am a poor thing. The doctor has taken me off three of my pills. Three!’
She screwed up her mouth to make a mock-crying expression and then waved her newspaper at Gómez, who was not so much walking as promenading across the white marble floor towards us.
He told me that my mother has a chronic iron deficiency, which could be why she lacks energy. Among other things, such as a silver-lined dressing to enhance the healing of her foot ulcers, he had prescribed vitamin B12.
A prescription for vitamins. Is that worth twenty-five thousand euro?
Rose began to list the names of the pills that had been erased from her medication ritual. She spoke about them as if she were grieving for absent friends. Gómez lifted his hand to wave at Nurse Sunshine, who was making her way towards him in her grey suede heels. When she was standing by his side, he brazenly put his arm around her shoulders while she fiddled with the watch pinned above her right breast. An ambulance had just pulled up in the car park. She told him in English that the driver needed a lunch break. He nodded and removed his arm from her shoulders so she could get a better grip on the watch.
‘Nurse Sunshine is my daughter,’ he said. ‘Her real name is Julieta Gómez. Please feel free to call her what you wish. Today is her birthday.’
Julieta Gómez smiled for the first time. Her teeth were blindingly white. ‘I am now thirty-three. My childhood has officially ended. Please call me Julieta.’
Gómez gazed at his daughter with his eyes that were various shades of blue. ‘You will know there is high unemployment in Spain,’ he said, ‘something like 29.6 per cent at the moment. So I am lucky my daughter had a good medical training in Barcelona and is the most respected physiotherapist in Spain. This means I am able to be a little bit corrupt and use my position to get her a job in my marble palace.’
He opened his pinstriped arms in a sweeping, royal gesture, as if to fold into himself the curved walls and flowering cacti, the shiny new ambulance, the receptionists and other nurses, and a couple of male doctors who unlike Gómez wore a uniform of blue T-shirts and brand-new trainers.
‘This marble is extracted from the earth of Cobdar. Its colour resembles the pale skin of my deceased wife. Yes, I have built my clinic in homage to my daughter’s mother. In the spring months we are enchanted by the abundance of butterflies that are attracted to my dome. They always lift the spirits of the afflicted. By the way, Rose, you might like to visit the statue of the Virgen del Rosario. She is sculpted from the purest marble from the Macael mountains.’
‘I am an atheist, Mr Gómez,’ Rose said sternly. ‘And I do not believe that women who give birth are virgins.’
‘But Rose, she is made from a delicate marble that is the colour of mother’s milk. It is white, but slightly yellow. So perhaps the sculptor was merely paying his respects to the act of nurturing. I wonder, did the virgin’s only child call his mother by her first name?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Rose said. ‘It’s all lies, anyway. And by the way, Jesus called his mother “woman”. It translates in Hebrew as “Madam”.’
The receptionist suddenly appeared and started to speak very fast in Spanish to Gómez. She was carrying a fat white cat in her arms and she put it down on the floor by Gómez’s polished black shoes. When it started to circle his legs he knelt down and stretched out his hand. ‘Jodo is my true love,’ he said. The cat rubbed its face against his open palm. ‘She is very gentle. I am just sorry we do not have mice, because she has nothing to do all day long except to love me.’
Rose began to sneeze. After the fourth sneeze she clapped her hand to her eye. ‘I am allergic to cats.’
Gómez slipped his little finger into Jodo’s mouth. ‘The gums should be firm and pink, and Jodo is okay in this respect. But her stomach is bulging in a new way. I am worried that she might have a kidney disease.’
He reached into his pocket, took out a bottle of sanitizer and sprayed it on his hands, while Julieta asked Rose if she would like some drops for her itching eye.
‘Oh, yes, please.’
It’s not often my mother says ‘please’. She sounded as if she had just been offered a box of chocolates.
Julieta Gómez took out a small, white plastic bottle from her pocket. ‘They are anti-histamines. I have just helped someone else with this problem.’ She walked over to Rose, tipped her chin back and squeezed two drops into each eye.
My mother now looked daintily tearful, reproachful, as if the tears were welling but had not yet spilt on to her cheeks.
Jodo the cat had disappeared in the arms of one of the paramedics.
Nurse Sunshine, who was really Julieta, was neither friendly nor hostile. She was matter of fact, efficient, serene. She had none of her father’s exuberance, although I observed that she listened very carefully to Rose, without appearing to do so. I was starting to rethink the way she had lingered by the door when we had walked into the consulting room. Perhaps she had not been as far away in her thoughts as I had imagined. She noticed things because she asked if she could help me do up my dress. I had forgotten I had loosened it at the beach. Julieta fiddled discreetly with the zip, then placed her hands on her tiny waist and informed us that our taxi had arrived.
‘Goodbye, Rose.’ Gómez vigorously shook her hand. ‘By the way, you should drive the hire car we have organized for you. It is included in my fee.’
‘But how can I drive? I have no feeling in my legs.’ Rose once again looked affronted.
‘You have my permission to drive the car. Pick it up on your next visit. There is some paperwork to do, but it is ready for you in our car park.’
Julieta put her hand on my mother’s shoulder. ‘If you have any problems with the driving, Sofia can call us to come and fetch you. She has all our contact numbers.’ The Gómez Clinic was obviously a family business.
Not only were we going to be provided with a car, Gómez informed my mother that he would be pleased to take her out for lunch. He asked Julieta to put a date in his diary for two days’ time, bowed his silver head and turned on his heels to talk to one of the young doctors waiting for him by a marble pillar.
As I limped with Rose to the taxi, I asked her what kind of exercise Gómez had given her to do.
‘It is not a physical exercise. He has asked me to write a letter in which I name all my enemies.’ She snapped open her handbag and wrestled with a tissue that was stuck in the clasp. ‘You know, Sofia, when Nurse Sunshine — or Julieta Gómez, or whoever she is — squeezed those drops into my eyes, I’m sure she smelt of alcohol. In fact, she smelt of vodka.’
‘Well, it is her birthday,’ I said.
The sea below the mountain was calm.
The Greek girl is lazy. The windows are dirty in their beach house but she has not cleaned them. She never locks the door. That is careless. It is like an invitation. It is like riding a bicycle without a helmet. That is careless too. It is an invitation to be hurt very badly should there be an accident.