The Woman in Valencia Read online

  The woman smokes for a minute next to the bushes, looks down at the ground nervously, and skirts the greenery along the edge of the rooftop like she’s looking for something. Then she shuffles back to Claire, who tries to hand the bag back to her.

  “Keep the bag, keep the bag!”

  Her tone is harsh, annoyed. She mutters something, a question that Claire doesn’t catch. She becomes agitated and she’s having trouble forming her words. Claire thrusts her beach towel at the woman and points her toward a blue door to the right of the pool. The stranger staggers off in the direction of the ladies’ changing room, mopping up the blood on her arm as she goes.

  Perched on the edge of her deck chair, Claire can almost feel her nerves thrumming. She tries to get Jean’s attention—surely he’ll recognize the fear in her eyes or notice the look of panic on her face. She wants to call out to him for help, but she’s gone mute. The danger is setting off alarm bells inside her. Her body is firing off a series of signals that are coursing through her: nerve impulses, a surge of adrenaline, a quickening of her heartbeat, sudden dry mouth, waves of nausea. Primal instincts kick in. Her brain is foggy, and she’s tensed like an animal ready to pounce. The balance between Claire Halde’s sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems is about to give way.

  She remains there, motionless, petrified, the purse resting against her bare thigh, watching the closed door of the ladies’ room. It’s midnight blue and scuffed up near the bottom, and Claire has no idea what she’ll see when it finally swings open, but then it does, and the woman emerges.

  A blonde bag of bones, those are the words that come to mind when Claire sees the woman in Valencia once again making her way across the patio. Skin, too, waxy, grey skin. Narrow hips, a tight, flat stomach, scrawny arms, a sinewy neck that’s nothing but skin and bones propping up a head of washed-out blonde hair. The look in her eyes is dark and empty, devoid of all light. Her body moves jerkily, like a marionette with invisible strings that are holding up her head and controlling her arms and legs, which carry her to the edge of the roof and over the railing in a scissor-like motion. She crouches down and rests her bottom on the ledge for a moment—a few seconds or a few minutes, who can say, time seems to stand still—and then the woman gently eases herself into the void.

  On the boulevard far below, passersby scream.

  *

  Presumably, the body—under the combined effects of adrenaline and helplessness, overcome by disgust and impotence, filled with dismay and anger—might simply give out: dizziness, a sudden drop in blood pressure, retching, disorientation due to emotional shock, or even a momentary loss of speech, which can happen sometimes.

  Some people’s teeth chatter, others start to shake uncontrollably, like they’ve just emerged bone dry from freezing cold water. Others experience an emotional short circuit, flipping the switch on pain—theirs and others’—numbing themselves to their feelings as a means of self-preservation.

  The shock can sometimes be followed by night terrors, mystery rashes—the skin talks, after all—or clumps of hair falling out in handfuls to block the bathtub drain, floating in the soup like dead flies. No one is immune to sudden baldness, the kind that leaves the scalp riddled with unsightly and glaringly obvious bare patches. And yet, nothing. None of this happened.

  *

  Claire strides purposefully toward the crowd gathered near the ambulance. She says what she has to say without hesitating. She states her version of the facts in carefully enunciated Spanish.

  Her skin most likely gives her away. She doesn’t realize it (and won’t until the next time she looks in a mirror), but she’s deathly pale. There’s a horrible pasty taste in her mouth, her heart is racing, and a mental fog is creeping in, clouding the scene and blocking out any immediate thoughts.

  She’s on autopilot: calm and collected, saying all the right things, leg muscles tensed for action. She’s rock steady on her feet, which is hard to believe for someone who’s fainted more than half a dozen times since her teens. The first time, she blacked out suddenly on the scorching sand, beach chair folded under her arm, after reading Anna Karenina in the sun for hours. Then, when she was fifteen, in a case of history repeating itself, she passed out in a heap of smarting skin after exiting a tanning booth, naked and cocky. Next came the time, in her early twenties, when a stranger’s arms were the only thing that prevented her pale, limp body from hitting the floor of a crowded metro car during rush hour on the blue line. Years later, she was introduced to the term “vasovagal syncope” for the first time when, bare-assed on a paper sheet with a speculum between her legs, she emerged from a fog after a ham-handed doctor perforated her uterus with a copper IUD. Over the years, she’d come to dread what might happen if she stood up too quickly; she shrunk from heatwaves and developed an aversion to large crowds. But all the precautions in the world didn’t keep her from keeling over at a rave, dehydrated and fresh off a heartbreak, or from swooning after getting out of bed moments after having her second baby. Another time after that, she slumped to the cold, beige tiled floor of a suburban shopping mall after donating blood to the Red Cross. And as if that wasn’t enough, she managed to faint dead away in a snowbank, wrapped in a bubble gum-pink bathrobe, after stepping out of an overheated sauna in the middle of the Ural Mountains, the same place where a ten-ton meteor would blast across the sky a few years later. And, most recently, as her terrified kids pawed through the medicine cabinet in search of a Band-Aid for their mother, she dropped like a sack of potatoes after slicing her thumb open with a bread knife. And yet, despite this ridiculous propensity to fainting and her sensitive vagal nerve, she remains steadfastly upright on the sidewalk in front of the Valencia Palace Hotel.

  She stands frozen to the spot, her eyes glued to a chunk of heel bone that someone really should do something about.

  MONTREAL, SUMMER 2009

  Head under the sink, Claire gingerly picks up mouldy bits of old sponges, stiff and crumbling, wondering disgustedly why she even kept them in the first place. The same disdain is levelled at gnarled, rusty balls of steel wool, stained rags and the dregs of a bottle of Windex. Claire Halde scrubs or tosses anything that looks remotely sketchy.

  She checks her watch and sighs. Air France flight 347 for Barcelona is scheduled for takeoff at 7:45 p.m. Tonight, another family will move into their house for the summer. Catalan strangers will sleep in their beds, shit in their toilet, stand their toothbrushes up in the ceramic cup that Claire has soaked in bleach overnight to dissolve weeks of slimy stains and fine lines of black mould built up in the cracks.

  Jean is gathering up all the electronics—cables and chargers, batteries and cases, Bluetooth accessories and adaptors—which he’s organizing obsessively in a large bag full of pouches and compartments as though he were packing survival gear for a perilous Antarctic expedition.

  Noticing Claire ass-up furiously scrubbing the insides of their kitchen cabinets, he snaps, “Would you give it a rest? This isn’t the Ritz. They must be cool if they’ve agreed to a house swap. They’re not going to freak out over a bit of dirt under the sink.”

  “You don’t get it,” Claire retorts, letting loose great streams of Fantastik in an attempt to erase months of cutting corners in their weekly cleaning routine. “I don’t want them seeing any trace of us and our lazy-ass habits. It’s bad enough I saw a centipede last night.”

  “A what?”

  The night before, she’d scrubbed the bathtub with so much elbow grease and Ajax that tiny cracks had opened up across the knuckles of her index fingers. A thin crust of blood had formed around the edges of the deepest cut. Her dry, rough skin still smarted from the harsh cleaning products. Before going to bed, with an aching shoulder but a deep sense of satisfaction at the newly gleaming porcelain, she’d run herself a steaming hot bath, which she’d sunk into, her thoughts spinning with everything she still had to do before they left. Between the ammonia fumes
still lingering in the air and the clouds of steam building up in the bathroom, Claire had had trouble breathing. Relaxing her neck and shoulder muscles, she’d let herself slide deeper into the tub until she could feel the water lapping at the hair at the back of her neck. She’d closed her eyes but couldn’t relax. The heat wasn’t agreeing with her; her heart had begun to quiver strangely—a harmless cardiac episode, but worrying, nonetheless. She’d never liked taking baths. She’d straightened up like a shot when she spotted an ugly bug scurrying between the faucets and up the wall, its yellow carapace gyrating back and forth.

  “A centipede! You know? A house centipede.”

  She mimes the insect’s creepy-crawly legs with her fingers.

  “Like a millipede, but uglier—a hairy millipede. Think I should’ve killed it? It was moving really fast and skittering all over the place. God knows where it went.”

  Jean has never heard of centipedes and has a suitcase to zip up. Claire goes to their room, pulls all their clothes out of their drawers and stuffs them into big garbage bags, which she shoves in the kids’ closet. On their dresser, next to a mushroom lamp with a white polka-dotted red cap and a Lego armoured vehicle, a fish is wriggling in its bowl, on the surface of the water. Claire walks over to toss in a few flakes of fish food.

  “Kids, kids, come see this! Quick! Your fish has a…”

  Claire lifts her son up so he can get a better look at the fishbowl.

  “Balou has a new friend. A centipede. A house centipede!”

  But the centipede is just lying there, motionless in the bowl, plastered to the glass, head down in a perfectly straight line. Its body looks bloated.

  “Is it dangerous?” her daughter asks.

  “I don’t know. Anyways, it’s dead.”

  Claire picks up the fishbowl and carries it to the bathroom. With a net, she gingerly scoops out the tangled mass of legs, shakes the corpse out into the toilet and flushes. The fish begins to twitch nervously, seized with convulsions that quickly peak, then goes completely still. Claire taps the thick glass with her finger. The fish doesn’t react. She rocks the bowl gently. The water ripples, but the fish remains motionless, belly up in the water.

  “Jean…”

  Claire walks over to her husband, holding the fishbowl in her hands.

  “Maybe he had a heart attack. Or the centipede poisoned him. Or maybe it was a panic attack.”

  “Shit! He could’ve picked a better time. We’d better not tell the kids,” Jean sighs wearily. “We’ll deal with it when we get home.”

  Claire dumps the water and the fish into the toilet bowl, with the same coldness with which she’ll one day say, in a single breath, Jean, I don’t love you anymore. Go on, get out of here. She pulls the chain. Balou disappears into the sewers in concentric circles. She stows the empty bowl, the pouch of fish flakes and the net under the immaculate kitchen sink. She takes a moment to rip up the note she’d written in Spanish explaining to their guests how to feed the fish and clean the tank.

  At the last second, she grabs her travel journals in a panic from her nightstand and stashes them in a shoebox, which she hides behind a pile of blankets in the linen closet, only to promptly forget where she put them. Once home from their vacation, they will search high and low for that bloody shoebox full of Japanese notebooks with the tan covers, like a collection of bleak Soviet-era packages. Years of handwritten confidences, line after line of her life story recorded in a rainbow of inks and leads, a stream of cursive writing, frenetic and illegible in places, that will only be found a few years later when they are packing up to move—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The taxi has just pulled up, and chaos and confusion break out in an attempt to get people and possessions loaded and ready to go: two kids, two suitcases, one stroller, one blankie, and one carry-on backpack.

  Four passports? Check, confirms Claire Halde as she pulls the zipper closed on her purse. She closes her eyes, takes a few deep breaths, releases the tension from her jaw, and takes one last look back at their house. All is well.

  “To the airport, please.”

  Let the vacation begin.

  BARCELONA

  As they leave for Spain, they have no idea how their summer will unfold. They have five weeks of vacation and the keys to an apartment in the Sant Antoni district of Barcelona. They have no set plans for their summer in Catalonia, apart from taking things hour by hour, day by day, and wandering wherever their next adventure takes them. Time passes in a succession of days, then weeks, peaceful and quiet: museum trips and meals taken on the patio, all-you-can-eat patatas bravas and churros for the kids, afternoons at the beach, cava and tinto de verano, miles of late-night runs for Claire and Jean, each one in turn, and masses of Iberian ham. The nights all meld into one, indistinguishable. They barely make love, but the act has become so mechanical that it doesn’t even register with Claire anymore. When she thinks back on it, Claire Halde can’t picture herself climaxing between those sheets, in that unremarkable room. She seems to recall a flowered bedspread and white furniture. There were French doors that opened up onto the patio, but she’s forgotten what the sunlight looked like in the morning, when the first light of dawn would filter into the room and she’d open her eyes with indifference at the prospect of another day spent playing tourist.

  LEAVING BARCELONA

  That July, not a single drop of rain falls on Barcelona. Since they’re not in the habit of spending their summers in the Catalonian capital, they don’t notice anything out of the ordinary at first. Seasonal temperatures, they tell themselves. But it doesn’t take long before Claire and Jean are wilting under the blazing sun, seeking out shade at every opportunity.

  The mounting string of days without rain becomes the reason for everything that disappoints, disorients and discourages them: their exhaustion, their lovers’ quarrels that are a sign of things to come, the shops and museums closed for the annual summer holiday, their lack of enthusiasm for planning outings, the price of vegetables, the blandness of the strawberries. In a way, it’s even why they end up in Valencia—the need to get away from the stifling heat of Barcelona, if only for three days.

  Their little side trip gets off to a bad start. It’s the first week of August, and the car rental places have nothing left but stick shifts. They look at each other sheepishly, embarrassed that neither of them knows how to drive one. As they leave the rental agency, to get a laugh out of Claire, Jean hums, “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”

  So, they book four train tickets to Valencia departing from Barcelona Sants.

  AT THE TRAIN STATION

  Claire Halde and her family leave Barcelona at 9:44 a.m. from platform 12, destination Valencia. She has no way of knowing that she’ll make almost the same trip again six years later, only alone. At the moment, she’s pushing a toddler in a striped romper, leading a little girl by the hand, rushing a man who doesn’t like to be rushed. The purse slung across her chest is banging into her hip and digging into her belly uncomfortably as she makes her way across the concourse. She’s sweating and she has the look of a harried mom who desperately wants to be on time but fully expects to be sidetracked by last-minute pee emergencies, squabbling kids and distracted husbands: Honey, have you seen my passport? She leads her crew single file across the uneven concrete like a toy sailboat cutting a course through the glassy waters of a park pond.

  ON THE TRAIN

  Outside the train window, the countryside flashes by in an endless, unremarkable blur, a monochromatic sea of yellow. Buildings are few and far between, and the light is pooling spectacularly in the furrows of the barren fields. Some of the passengers are staring at the passing landscape with waning attention, losing the battle with sleep. Others, riveted to their mobiles, engrossed in work or a book, don’t even look up at the stunning scenery and coastline.

  Claire resists sleep. The view soothes her, and her eyes linger on the lan
dscape. Her eyelids are drooping; her son’s head is resting in her lap, hair damp at the back of his neck. The train seems to cleave the earth, moving forward over the miles and hours in a numbing rolling motion. All sense of time and space disappear, and the line blurs between inside and outside. The train follows the tracks—all that steel, assembled by men from another century who toiled hungrily for countless hours under the fierce sun so that she, Claire Halde, soon to be thirty-four, should find herself here on this summer day, in second class, compartment 7, comfortably ensconced in a navy blue upholstered window seat with hygienic headrest cover, headed to Valencia for a few days’ stay at a hotel.

  DISCOVERING VALENCIA

  Valencia: citrus groves, the coastline, neither north nor south, but somewhere in the middle of Spain’s east coast, in the centre of the horta. Claire Halde had only a vague notion of the geography and she’d had to look it up on a map at one point. Or maybe it’s the high school Spanish classes coming back to her, particularly the lesson on train stations and train travel: ¿ A qué hora sale el tren por Bilbao por favor? She remembers the stern voice of the man on the recording who’d repeat each sentence twice, followed by the sudden, loud click of the teacher pressing the tape recorder button. She recalls the problems she’d had wrapping her lips and tongue around the jota, hesitating over the tonic accent, stumbling over the guttural sounds and cursing the Castilian letters g, j, and r—consonants and syllables that thumbed their noses at her and seemed to clatter clumsily against her teeth, wet with saliva, when they should have bounced suavely off her palate and sprung forth with agility and confidence from her vibrating vocal cords. She remembers feeling like she’d swallowed the sounds rather than spit them out (without the spit, of course). With jaw tired and aching and feeling like a marble-mouth, she’d longed for silence, hiding behind an insipid smile and the intense and mysterious gaze of a precocious teenager, as much as to say, why waste my breath, leaving people wondering whether she was stuck-up or just shy.