Julieta Gómez

Julieta Gómez is a physiotherapist whose work with Rose Papastergiadis and Sofia Papastergiadis makes her both a clinical listener and a sharply observant presence beyond the treatment room. She records Rose’s shifting account of illness, recognizes Sofia’s expertise in cultural memory, and insists that others respect the boundaries of her own studio. Her encounters suggest that care depends not only on examining a body, but also on attending to the stories and limits of the people around it.

Clinical Work and Rose’s History

At the Gómez Clinic, Julieta takes part in documenting Rose’s condition through recorded consultations. Before Rose recounts her history, Julieta adjusts a small black audio-archiving device and gives her facts for the record, including the date, time, name, age, weight, and height. The reassurance that the recording is confidential does not remove Sofia’s unease at being asked to sit in on the session: she has agreed to be present at Dr Gómez’s request, but feels that listening to her mother’s words is the price of her time away from caregiving.

Julieta’s work requires more than recording a neat chronology. Rose’s account moves among present illness, childhood sickness, and past experience; the symptoms do not resolve into one complaint, or even a handful. Sofia, an ethnographer, recognizes the parallel with her own discipline: Julieta will later transcribe Rose’s words and write a case history, while Sofia has been trained to make accounts of people’s lives. In Sofia’s perception, past, present, and future press together in the complaints. Julieta’s clinical task is therefore also an interpretive one: to make a history from experiences that resist orderly sequence without pretending they are a single, simple problem.

Rose’s description of pain underscores the limits of what such documentation can settle. She tells Sofia that Dr Gómez knows little about chronic pain, that he has said the pain has not yet yielded its secrets, and that its daily increase contrasts with numbness in her feet. Julieta is not presented as supplying a diagnosis or resolving that uncertainty. Her role is to listen, record, and make space for the patient’s account within a treatment process whose explanations remain incomplete.

Listening, Memory, and Sofia

The consultations also bring Julieta into a relationship with Sofia that exceeds her role as Rose’s physiotherapist. After Sofia asks why the process is called physiotherapy, wondering whether Rose’s memories might be held in bones and muscles, Julieta points to Sofia’s work on cultural memory and calls her the expert. The exchange unsettles a simple division between clinician and observer: Julieta has access to Rose’s recorded family history, while Sofia has a framework for thinking about how memory is transmitted across generations.

Sofia later spends more than an hour talking with Julieta in her studio. Julieta’s interviewing technique leaves Sofia examining her own habits as an ethnographer, including the occasion when she interrupted an informant who then walked away. Julieta can remain silent without becoming passive, and Sofia begins to regard her as a role model, while acknowledging that she could not match Julieta’s designer clothes, shoes, or vigorous beer drinking. The admiration is specific: it arises from how Julieta listens and conducts an interview, not from any claim that she offers Sofia a ready answer to her family’s history.

For Sofia, Julieta becomes a holder of secrets, especially the childhood memories Rose has confessed into the clinic’s audio archive. That archive gives private speech a durable form, but it also sharpens Sofia’s discomfort at being present while her mother speaks. Julieta’s practice thus sits between care and observation: recording can preserve what might otherwise remain unspoken, yet the act of making a record also raises questions about who listens, who interprets, and who has consented to be part of the account.

Boundaries and Professional Conduct

Julieta’s concern with boundaries is clearest when Matthew enters her studio without knocking, carrying wine. She tells him, "Never walk through my door without knocking first." A bell bearing her name is beside the door, she points out, and she objects not only to his unannounced entrance but to his shouting through the letterbox and behaving as though he can do as he likes. She then explains to Sofia that she needs to be alone with Matthew to teach him some manners.

The scene gives Julieta’s professionalism a personal dimension. She is working, and she treats access to her studio as something governed by her permission rather than by Matthew’s assumptions. Her response is direct: instead of smoothing over the interruption, she names the behavior and sets a condition for what happens next. The account does not specify what she says to Matthew in private, but it makes clear that she expects a boundary to be recognized before work can continue.

That insistence recurs in a different register on the beach. Julieta is there on her day off, having swum and taken shade near the caves. When she waves to Sofia, the invitation draws them together outside the clinic and its recorded consultations. Later, after Ingrid pushes Sofia beneath the water and a wave knocks Sofia off balance, Julieta is beside her, treading water. She then watches Ingrid hop across the sand after stepping on the medusas she had gathered in a net. Julieta laughs and tells Sofia, "Your boundaries are made from sand, Sofia." Sofia answers that she knows.

A Presence Beyond the Clinic

The beach encounter does not turn Julieta into a rescuer or make her the center of the conflict. Instead, her presence places her beside Sofia at a moment when emotional limits have become physical and unstable: Ingrid has pushed Sofia under the water, and the collected medusas have stung Ingrid herself. Julieta’s remark gives that instability a concise image, while Sofia’s acknowledgment suggests that she already understands the difficulty of holding a firm line. The scene echoes Julieta’s earlier insistence on the threshold of her studio, but does not equate the two situations: one concerns access to her workplace, the other Sofia’s shifting boundaries in an intimate conflict.

Julieta’s character is defined by this movement between attentive listening and clear limits. At the clinic, she helps turn a complicated, non-chronological illness history into a record without reducing it to a simple complaint. With Sofia, she recognizes expertise and becomes an influential model of interviewing. In her studio, she refuses Matthew’s uninvited access; at the beach, she offers Sofia a pointed observation without claiming to solve her conflict. Together, these moments make Julieta an important figure in the book’s treatment of care and memory: she listens closely, but listening does not mean surrendering control over her own space.