Julieta Gómez Peña

Julieta Gómez Peña is a physiotherapist at the Gómez Clinic and the daughter of Dr Gómez. Known to patients as Nurse Sunshine, she is at once a trained practitioner and a beneficiary of her father’s influence. Her work with Rose Papastergiadis makes illness something to be examined and recorded, while her later conversations with Sofia Papastergiadis turn names and family histories into a more personal point of connection.

Identity and Background

At the clinic, Julieta is first introduced under the affectionate, conspicuously cheerful title Nurse Sunshine. Dr Gómez explains that her real name is Julieta Gómez, and says that she is his daughter. She is celebrating her thirty-third birthday. Her professional standing is substantial: she trained in medicine in Barcelona and is described by her father as Spain’s most respected physiotherapist. In a country where he cites unemployment at 29.6 per cent, that reputation marks her out as unusually fortunate to have secure work.

That security is not presented as merit alone. Dr Gómez boasts that he can be a little corrupt and use his position to obtain a job for her in his marble clinic. The admission complicates the praise of Julieta’s credentials: she has professional training and distinction, but her access to the clinic is also shaped by family patronage. The novel gives this contradiction to her father, not to Julieta herself; it does not show her asking for special treatment or explain how she regards his intervention.

The nickname has its own family history. Julieta tells Sofia that her mother died when she was a teenager and that she herself never smiled. Her father’s name for her, Nurse Sunshine, was meant to cheer patients and, as Julieta puts it, sort of works. The bright professional persona therefore carries a trace of bereavement: its cheerfulness is something her father names and puts to use, rather than a simple account of her private nature.

Clinical Work with Rose

Julieta’s clinical role is shown through the clinic’s effort to make Rose’s complicated condition into a history. She takes Rose’s case alongside Sofia, who has spent much of her life trying to interpret her mother’s symptoms. Julieta explains that a case history begins with family and treats illness as a history rather than an isolated complaint. She guides Rose to a chair in the physiotherapy room, sits opposite her, and prepares a small black device used for the clinic’s confidential audio archive. She records basic particulars, including the date, time, name, age, weight, and height.

The procedure meets a story that will not stay in chronological order. Rose’s account moves among her present illness, childhood illnesses, and earlier family history; the symptoms do not arrive as one complaint, or even as a neat sequence. Sofia recognizes the work as resembling ethnographic practice: Julieta will later transcribe Rose’s words and author a case history, while Sofia has been trained to interpret accounts of lives and symptoms. But Sofia also withdraws from the encounter, putting on headphones and turning to a video on her damaged laptop. Julieta is listening to Rose while the daughter present in the room is, in Sofia’s account, not truly present. The scene makes the difference between collecting a history and being able to bear hearing it.

Julieta’s manner is not merely procedural. When Rose speaks in a way that leaves her point unclear, Julieta gives the wheelchair a deft kick with her trainer and asks her to clarify what she means. The gesture is brisk and direct, cutting through the diffuse movement of Rose’s account. It does not resolve the underlying uncertainty: Rose later reports that Dr Gómez knows little about chronic pain and that her pain is magnifying each day, while her feet are numb rather than painful. Julieta’s work takes place within a clinical process that seeks to record and interpret symptoms without making them yield an easy explanation.

Family and Professional Authority

Julieta’s position is closely bound to her father’s authority, but the clinic also gives her an identity and standing of her own. Dr Gómez introduces her proudly to Rose and Sofia, openly connecting her employment to his influence. He also touches her shoulder in a familiar, public gesture before removing his arm so she can handle the watch pinned above her breast. The exchange places father and daughter together at work, where affection, professional display, and the practical demands of the clinic share the same space.

The contrast between Julieta’s training and her father’s candid admission of favoritism echoes the wider uncertainty around Rose’s treatment. Dr Gómez investigates her medication, asks which pills she is attached to, and seeks to compare clinical evidence, while Rose and Sofia have their own accumulated understandings of her body and its changing needs. Julieta’s role is part of that institution: she takes a history and provides physiotherapy, but the available scenes do not show her independently diagnosing Rose or resolving the disagreement about what the symptoms mean. Her professional competence is clear; the limits of what the clinic can explain remain equally visible.

Connection with Sofia

Julieta’s connection with Sofia develops beyond the clinic’s formal encounter. After the case-history session, she gives Sofia a card and invites her to visit her studio in Carboneras. The invitation opens a different setting from the marble clinic: Julieta’s studio occupies a small warehouse at the end of a cobbled mews, with bare brick walls and canvases leaning against them. There she is dressed casually in jeans, a T-shirt, and trainers rather than the clinic’s more formal clothes.

At the studio, Julieta tells Sofia how to pronounce her name: “Whoolieta.” She also explains that her full name is Gómez Peña. The exchange follows Sofia’s admission that people repeatedly struggle with the surname Papastergiadis and that she has often wanted to change it. Julieta suggests that, since Sofia has kept the name, perhaps it interests her. The conversation does not settle what either woman’s name means to her, but it shifts the subject from difficult pronunciation to the possibility that a name can remain compelling even when it is burdensome. Julieta’s own explanation of her family name and nickname gives Sofia a reciprocal opening into her history.

Narrative Significance

Julieta stands where clinical record-making, family obligation, and individual identity meet. Her case history gives Rose’s symptoms a formal structure, yet the interview’s movement across past and present resists a simple medical chronology. Sofia’s professional training as an ethnographer sharpens that parallel while her emotional retreat shows that observation does not free her from the family history she is trying to understand.

Her characterization also rests on contrasts rather than a single definitive portrait: the respected physiotherapist whose job is secured through her father, the daughter called sunshine because she once did not smile, and the practitioner who invites Sofia into a space outside the clinic. These details make Julieta more than a supporting medical presence. She is one of the people through whom the novel tests what a history can explain, what institutional authority can provide, and how a personal exchange may begin where professional listening reaches its limits.