Hot Milk

The Artist

Julieta Gómez had given me directions to her studio. It was near a small park in Carboneras, so she told me to leave the car in a side street and walk from there. I was driving the Berlingo all the time now. It was easy, apart from getting the gear into neutral, but that wasn’t the biggest problem in my life. My main fear was being stopped by the police and not having the right documents. This was another similarity I shared with the unpaid Mexicans who Pablo had sacked, and the immigrants working in the furnace of the desert farms.

Do you have a licence?

Yuh.

In the style of the old colonial anthropologists, I would slip the guardia civil tráfico thirteen glass beads and three mother-of-pearl river shells. If that wasn’t enough, I would give him a parcel of fish hooks from Bolivia, and if he wanted more I would offer two eggs from Señora Bedello’s hens to slip into his khaki pocket next to his revolver. I don’t know what I would do. I reversed into a parking space between a car and three bins and knocked over all the bins.

Twelve schoolgirls were having a dancing lesson on a wooden stage in the park which was circled by wilting lemon trees. They all wore brightly coloured flamenco dresses and matching dancing shoes, their hair scraped into tight, stern buns. I watched them clicking their fingers and stamping their heels. They tried not to smile but some of them couldn’t help it. They were about nine years old. Will they get their driving licence, as I never did, and all the other licences they need to function on Earth? Will they be fluent in multiple languages and will they have lovers, some of them female, some of them male, and will they survive the earthquakes, floods and droughts of a changing climate and will they slip a coin into the supermarket-trolley slot to search the aisles for tomatoes and courgettes grown in the furnace of the slave farms?

A bulge of purple bougainvillea was growing over the wall of the industrial building that turned out to be Julieta Gómez’s studio. It was the last of three small warehouses at the end of a cobblestoned mews. I pressed the bell next to her name.

She opened the metal door and led me to an empty room that smelt of oil paint and turpentine. Today, she wore jeans and a T-shirt and trainers, but her eyes were lined with a perfect flick at the end and her nails painted red. The floor was concrete, the walls bare brick and leaning against them were six paintings and a few blank linen canvases. Apart from a leather sofa, three wooden chairs and the fridge, there was no other furniture, and certainly none of the things I had seen on the market stall to make a home. Not even a mouse- moth- rat- or fly-trap. There were glasses and cups and two breadboards on the table. The shelves were crammed with books.

Julieta told me how to pronounce her name.

‘Whoolieta.’

She explained that her full name is Gómez Peña. The reason her father calls her Nurse Sunshine is because her mother died when she was a teenager and she never smiled. ‘It sort of works, and it cheers up the patients.’ She passed me a beer from the fridge and took one for herself.

I told her that I have often wanted to change my surname because no one knows how to pronounce it. Not one day has gone by in my life without someone asking me how to pronounce the letters after ‘Papa’ in ‘Papastergiadis’.

‘But you haven’t changed your name, so perhaps it interests you?’ She lifted the beer to her lips and took a long swig. ‘This is what I do in my spare time.’

Does she mean she drinks in her spare time?

She walked towards the wall and turned a canvas around to reveal a painting. It was a portrait of a young woman in a traditional black Spanish dress. She had startling, bulging, round eyes. Oily eyes like a fly, except bigger, the size of a two-euro coin. She was holding a fan under her chin and she looked a bit like Julieta.

‘That’s me with the eyes of a chameleon.’ The real Julieta laughed at the long silence that disguised my horror. ‘One is not born a chameleon, one becomes one.’

I wondered if she was drunk.

‘So do you like animals?’

I sounded totally dumb, but I didn’t know what to say about her nightmare eyes.

‘Yes. I like to live with animals. So does my father.’

Julieta told me that when she was a child she used to have a cocker spaniel but spaniels get dognapped in this part of Spain. The neighbours had seen a Toyota truck pull up in the early hours and her dog disappeared. Her mother had been an engineer. She had designed an inland pipe system to transport water from rivers in the more fertile parts of Andalucía to the desert. She had died in a helicopter crash on the Sierra Nevada and her father had to identify her body in the hospital in Granada. It was the second disappearance in Julieta’s life and sometimes she got mixed up in her dreams so it was her mother who was stolen in the Toyota truck.

I asked her where she had learned her interviewing techniques for what she called my mother’s ‘case histories’.

‘Oh, I do all the archiving for the clinic, because I speak good English.’ She pressed the toe of her trainer into the concrete floor as if she were stubbing out a cigarette.

When I looked down I saw that she had stamped on a cockroach.

‘So why is a case history called physiotherapy?’ I was looking at her more searchingly now that I had seen her self-portrait.

She sat on the big cracked leather sofa and crossed her legs, beer bottle in her hand. ‘Please sit.’ She gestured to one of the three wooden chairs near the table.

I pulled it nearer to the sofa and sat down. The studio was light and cool. I liked being there with her, drinking beer and talking. I felt calmer than I’d felt for a long time. Calm like a bird floating tranquilly in the sea, surrendering to the waves and currents. I felt at ease with myself, which must have meant that she did not regard me as strange and so I had no reason to imitate someone who was less strange and had been saved from doing the chameleon thing.

Perhaps I was drunk, too.

She sipped her beer and asked me if I liked this particular brand. She preferred Estrella, but this was San Miguel.

I did like it.

‘Physiotherapy is a major part of what we do at the clinic. My father has his strategies and procedures. At the same time, of course, he has been looking for diagnostic clues for your mother’s symptoms. He has measured electrical activity in the muscles and the brain, but there is nothing to suggest concern. He does not believe he has missed an obscure organic illness or a vascular disease.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I was asking you about the case histories.’

‘It is best, Sofia, not to mistake her paralysis for physical fragility.’

‘That is why we are here in Spain. To find out if there is a physical problem.’ I was getting bolder.

She looked up at me, and she was smiling. I was smiling too.

Perhaps we were imitating each other’s smile and doing the chameleon thing?

Except her teeth were blindingly white and mostly made from porcelain. They were perfect. I don’t know why perfect is weird, but it is. I sometimes wonder about porcelain veneers. What if they fall off to expose the teeth beneath them that have been filed to a pointy stump, like a monster’s teeth?

Julieta leaned her head back on the sofa and glanced at the black stain on the toe of her trainers. ‘The archiving is the more interesting part of my job. I did not want to study the sciences, but I obeyed my father and took up a clinical placement in Barcelona. I was very bored every day. They wanted me to specialize in post-operation bleeds. Disaster!’

‘So why didn’t you go to art school?’

‘I have no talent. But I suggested the clinic should be built from marble to celebrate my deceased mother’s pale skin.’

We were sort of twins. One of us motherless, the other fatherless.

It was exciting to talk to Julieta in her studio. She told me she lived elsewhere, but the recession had given her the opportunity to buy a share of this property, which used to be a sardine-packing warehouse. I began to see that she was formidable. When I first met her she was so groomed and stylish that I doubted she was effective. But what did I want a nurse or physiotherapist to look like? Her problems with her father were reassuring because I had problems with my father and she was interested in the thesis I was writing for my doctorate. I found myself talking to her about its themes, which are to do with cultural memory. I told her how I felt guilty when things went right for me, as if the things going right were responsible for the things that went wrong for my mother.

‘Rose will be the first to tell you that guilt is very disabling.’ Julieta pointed to the ceiling. A spider had built an intricate web between the beams and had just caught a wasp in its silken trap.

I sipped my beer and told her how hard it was to return to the temporary beach house in Spain to live with my mother after her medication had been cancelled, but that I had nowhere else to go. I am always living in someone else’s home.

I talked for a long time.

The spider hadn’t moved from her place in the web and neither had the wasp.

I have no grip on time any more.

Julieta Gómez was now the holder of secrets, some of my own, but mostly my mother’s confessed childhood. If Rose’s bones were the medical subjects, the skeletons in the cupboard were another sort of subject. Everything that was transmitted from generation to generation was there in Julieta’s audio archive. I asked Julieta again why she called this process physiotherapy. Is it because my mother’s memories are held in her bones and muscles?

‘Well, Sofia, you are the expert on this because you are writing your thesis on cultural memory.’

We talked for over an hour and I began to wonder if there was a recording device in her studio. I was nervous I had revealed too much, but she had revealed something about herself because she had got through another two bottles of beer during our conversation. All the same, I had started to think of her as a role model — except I would not be able to rise to the cut of her clothes, to her designer shoes or her vigorous intake of beer — and, not least, to the skill of her interviewing technique. She was silent for the rest of our conversation, yet she was not passive. I was thinking about the flaws in my own interviewing style when I heard a motorbike engine revving outside her studio. There had been one particular informant who had become disorientated when I interrupted him. I had spoken over him and in the end he just walked away. Now, someone was shouting through the letterbox of Julieta’s front door. The door was being pushed open, the metal scraping against the concrete floor and then it slammed shut.

Matthew walked into the studio carrying a bottle of wine. When he saw me sitting on the chair his head jerked as if someone had just pronged his cheek with a fork. He tried to arrange his face into an expression that was neutral, which is the gear in the Berlingo that always gives me the most trouble. He wasn’t doing very well either.

‘Oh, hi, Sophie,’ he said. He glanced at Julieta on the sofa and then tipped his head to the side so his hair fell over his eyes. ‘I’m just calling round to give your mother’s nurse a bottle of wine from my cellar.’

Julieta parted her lips to show her blinding teeth. ‘No, Matthew, no. Never walk through my door without knocking first. There is a bell with my name beside it on the door.’ She turned her gaze to me. ‘Matthew thinks he can walk in while I am working,’ she said. ‘For some reason, he thinks he can shout through the letterbox and do what he likes. So now I need to be alone with him to teach him some manners.’

Matthew’s attention was now firmly fixed on the squashed cockroach on the floor.

‘It’s a bit of a tricky one.’

Julieta stood up and pointed at him with her red fingernails. ‘Well, are you my patient, or are you just calling round with some wine? It’s not so strange to wish to seduce your physiotherapist, but to spray this wish on the walls of her father’s workplace like a cat sprays its urine is insane.’

I wondered if she had used the word ‘insane’ in the same way Matthew always used it, or whether she meant it? He had looked a bit crazed in the hammock when he had stretched out his arms like a corporate messiah.

‘Yeah, right.’ Matthew shook his hair out of his eyes and raised his thumb in my direction. ‘Julieta thinks I’m a cat. They’re really into animals at the Gómez Clinic.’

I walked back to the car through the small park where the girls had been practising their flamenco steps. The younger class had been replaced by girls from the senior school. I leaned against one of the lemon trees and watched them dance. They were about sixteen and stood in a line in their flame-coloured dresses. When the music started they remained very still, then suddenly arched their backs and lifted their arms. It was a dance of seduction and pain.