Walking and the legs

Walking and the legs is the novel’s recurring way of making Rose Papastergiadis’s unexplained mobility impairment visible while showing how deeply it shapes her relationship with Sofia Papastergiadis. At first, walking is a mystery to be investigated and a pace Sofia shares with her mother; later, the possibility that Sofia has internalized that pace complicates any clear boundary between Rose’s body and her daughter’s. The motif’s decisive reversal comes when Sofia sees Rose walking alone along the shore: mobility remains uncertain, but it can no longer be understood only through the daughter’s effort to keep step.

An Unresolved Condition

Rose’s leg problems bring the pair to Spain for an appointment at the Gómez Clinic. Sofia describes the paralysis as unexplained and says that it has been going on for some time. The uncertainty is not incidental: the journey begins another chapter in the history of Rose’s legs, but neither the family nor the clinicians can immediately give that history a definitive explanation.

The investigation carries substantial practical and emotional weight. Rose’s house has been remortgaged to pay for treatment at the clinic, at a cost of twenty-five thousand euros. Sofia has been trying to interpret her mother’s symptoms for around twenty of her own twenty-five years. She recalls first asking about Rose’s headaches when she was four; Rose described one as a door slamming in her head. Sofia’s long attention to bodily signs has trained her, in her own account, to read her mother almost as an ethnographer reads a field of evidence. Yet each apparent clue can be displaced by another symptom, another explanation, or another prescription.

That investigative habit gives the leg mystery the shape of an unsolved case. Sofia wonders whether the illness can be treated like a crime whose villain and victim have yet to be identified. The comparison conveys her desire for justice and an answer, but also the limits of her role: she can observe, interpret, and accompany Rose without making the symptoms yield a solution. Rose’s British doctors have prescribed antidepressants for her feet, reportedly to address nerve endings, while the family continues to seek an account that can make the shifting complaints coherent.

Clinical Observation and Fluctuating Mobility

The clinic’s observations unsettle the assumption that Rose’s inability to walk is constant. Dr Gómez tells Sofia that Rose walks when angry or perhaps aggrieved. He also reports that Rose tripped on the way to a restaurant without straining, spraining, or fracturing anything. On that observation, he says osteoporosis can be ruled out; what concerns him is the vitality Rose puts into not walking. He is unsure whether he can help her.

The distinction between what Rose can do and what she does at a given moment remains unresolved. Her walking is not presented as a straightforward measure of recovery, nor does the clinician’s observation supply a diagnosis. It instead places two realities beside one another: Rose sometimes walks, and her difficulty remains serious enough to organize treatment, travel, and family life. At another point she tells Sofia that she has described her condition to the doctor as chronic and degenerative, that he knows little about chronic pain, and that her pain seems to magnify each day. Asked about her feet, Rose says they are numb. Pain, numbness, and visible movement do not settle into one stable account.

Rose’s medical history also resists a neat timeline. As she gives her present illness history, her account moves among present symptoms, earlier illness, childhood, and possible futures. Julieta Gómez must later transcribe and organize the account as a case history, but Sofia hears more complaints than can be contained by a single presenting problem: she overhears twenty, and there are more. The narrative’s shifting chronology echoes that difficulty. Rose’s symptoms arrive as overlapping times and experiences, rather than as a clean sequence leading toward one answer.

Shared Pace and Reciprocal Care

At the clinic, when the receptionist calls for Rose, Sofia takes her mother’s arm and they limp together across the marble floor. Sofia is twenty-five, yet she describes their joined movement through the familiar arrangement of a child learning to walk with an adult and an adult child offering a parent an arm. Their shared pace is a practical accommodation, but it is also an image of kinship made bodily: Sofia does not merely accompany Rose; she adjusts her own movement to make forward motion possible for them both.

That closeness is set against Rose’s capacity to move without assistance. Earlier on the same morning, she had walked alone to a local shop to buy hairpins, without taking a walking stick. Sofia finds the memory difficult to face. The contrast does not cancel the need for support at the clinic; instead, it shows why a fixed account of Rose as either unable or able to walk cannot hold. Her mobility changes with the circumstance, and Sofia’s response changes with it too.

Their interdependence takes another form when Rose lets Sofia drive. Rose explains that she is concerned for Sofia’s safety, while Sofia is at the wheel without spectacles. Once they have set off, Rose adjusts the gears and tells her daughter that Rose will have to be her eyes. Sofia’s corresponding formulation is that Rose is her eyes and she is Rose’s legs. The exchange makes care reciprocal without making the two forms of assistance identical: Rose helps Sofia navigate the road, while Sofia’s legs have come to stand for the mobility her mother may need.

This language can sound like a declaration of closeness, but it also marks the pressure of the arrangement. Sofia has spent years monitoring symptoms and matching Rose’s pace; her mother’s needs affect where the family goes, how it travels, and what Sofia understands as her own responsibility. The metaphor does not erase Rose’s body or make Sofia a literal substitute for it. Rather, it names how care has organized Sofia’s sense of movement and obligation.

Memory, Habit, and the Daughter’s Body

The shared limp persists even when Rose is not beside Sofia. After walking across hot sand to cool her feet in the sea, Sofia finds herself limping, as though her body remembers the way she walks with her mother. She recognizes that memory is not necessarily reliable and cannot stand for the whole truth. That qualification matters: the limp is a felt habit, not proof that Sofia has acquired Rose’s condition. The novel keeps bodily imitation, empathy, and physical impairment distinct even as it shows how difficult they can be to separate in experience.

Sofia’s reflexive limp extends the idea that care is learned through repeated bodily adjustment. Her mother’s pace has become familiar enough to recur in Sofia’s own movement, outside the immediate act of supporting Rose. The pattern also complicates the idea of a single, stable present. Sofia’s body carries an earlier way of walking into a later moment, just as Rose’s account of illness moves among different periods of her life. The leg motif therefore links physical movement to the uncertain work of remembering: a repeated gesture may preserve a relationship without explaining its cause.

The Shoreline Reversal

Near the end of the novel, Sofia wades into the sea and realizes that she is crying. Looking back toward the shore, she sees Rose, aged sixty-four, walking along the beach in a dress patterned with sunflowers and carrying a hat. Rose appears content in her own company and does not see Sofia. For once, the daughter is not keeping pace beside her or lending her legs; she watches from a distance as Rose walks the length of the shore on her own.

Sofia considers approaching her, then returns to the water rather than be seen. Rose continues toward the shower on the wooden ramp, where tourists wash sand from their feet. The image makes the ordinary act of rinsing those feet newly striking: they are still attached to Rose’s body, moving under their own power. Yet the scene does not turn into a medical resolution. It offers no explanation for the earlier impairment and does not establish that Rose will always walk unaided. What changes is Sofia’s relation to what she sees. Rose’s movement belongs, for this stretch of beach, to Rose herself.

After sunset, Sofia swims back through a gathering of jellyfish and is stung on her belly and breasts. Once ashore, she searches for Rose’s footprints and draws a rectangle around the first two impressions in the sand with a stick. The gesture changes walking from an uncertain symptom into a trace: not a clinical answer, but evidence that Rose passed there on her own feet. The footprints preserve a particular moment without making it permanent. Across the novel, walking and the legs hold together impairment, observation, accommodation, habit, and independence, while refusing to make any one of them the final meaning of Rose’s body.