The Woman in Valencia Page 3

  Valencia: sounds, voices on a cassette in Spanish class, and oranges. That’s about it. No music, no visuals. The foggy notion of a paella and a vowel-heavy adjective that rolls off the tongue: Valencian. Nothing specific in the way of architecture except for a few impressive examples of Gothic structures, which don’t particularly interest Claire Halde. None of the originality of Gaudí in Barcelona or the appeal of the museums in Madrid, no Goya or Velasquez to contemplate during never-ending museum visits, no trace of Picasso, none of the mysterious charm of the Moorish buildings of Andalusia, not even any real mountains to speak of—you have to go north for those, to the Pyrenees, another elegantly written word, with all those e’s and that y. The mystics and the trekkers won’t find any pilgrimages here; the city doesn’t have much in the way of attractions, or at least that’s what the tour guides used to say, but that’s changing now at the turn of the century, with the City of Arts and Sciences springing up at the mouth of the old Turia riverbed, a daring architectural feat, all fish and ocean floors, glass and waterlily-inspired roofs, and a seventy-five-ton steel eyelid. Alright, time to explore Valencia.

  STAYING IN VALENCIA:

  THE VALENCIA PALACE HOTEL

  A taxi drops Claire Halde and her family off in front of the Valencia Palace Hotel. Claire pays the fare while Jean hoists the suitcases out of the trunk. The children wait obediently as their luggage is piled up on the sidewalk. The lobby is bright, with windows on two sides, one of which overlooks the congress centre designed by Sir Norman Foster, where there seems to be absolutely nothing going on; the deserted building appears almost frozen in time, snuffed out in the Valencian summer. Dead leaves rustle on the ground in front of the glass entrance. The fountains are dry.

  At fifteen storeys high, the towering Valencia Palace casts a shadow over the building next door. It’s like a giant cruise ship run aground in the middle of the city, in the middle of nowhere, its triangular prow bearing down on Avinguda de las Cortes Valencianas.

  They’d chosen it for the pool, for the four stars, to make the kids happy. Even though they’d known it wasn’t in the best of locations, they’d given in to the temptation of a summer deal. They couldn’t have predicted that their bargain trip would become a catalyst in the demise of their relationship.

  At the front desk, they’re given a key card for room 714, where they set down their bags. Claire’s first impression is that the decor is cold and impersonal.

  She remarks to Jean that they could be in any city, anywhere in the world. The windows don’t open; there’s no whiff of city air, no warmth, no noise. And they’re nowhere near the sea.

  The room is dark and gloomy. The thick, heavy, floral-patterned curtains will stay drawn for most of their visit. Claire and Jean look out the window at everything happening below: cars driving through the roundabout, taxis pulling up, doors opening and closing, smoke rising from a distant chimney, and a Leroy Merlin warehouse store, rectangular and white, sitting next to a highway. They won’t touch the curtains again after that, because nothing about their immediate surroundings, about the drab, boring Valencia outside their window, holds any interest for them.

  The pool is on the fourth floor, on a rooftop terrace tucked into the shadow of the looming hotel with the square windows. There’s a sign on the wall: No Lifeguard on Duty. Further along, there’s a line of potted plants and leafy green hedges that pass for a natural privacy screen, a few spindly trees chosen for their wind resistance and, in the way of furniture, deck chairs—mostly empty—lined up along the edge of the pool.

  There’s little shade to be found around the pool. The afternoon sun makes you screw up your face and squint your eyes and turns sensitive skin a delicate shade of pink on the tips of noses, foreheads, bare shoulders and tiny toes. The city below is invisible from the rooftop terrace of the Valencia Palace Hotel, giving the impression that the terrace itself is propped up in the sky, suspended high above Valencia.

  If they’d been on a romantic getaway, they would have probably booked less extravagant accommodations, like a B&B or a quaint hotel in the Old Town. The furniture would have been dark wood, worn to a sheen and scuffed in places, and the bedsprings might have squeaked. The windows would have opened onto the street and the curtains been faded in the folds. The smells and sounds of the city would have permeated the room. Valencia would have seemed less cold.

  GETTING AROUND VALENCIA

  They end up isolated from the touristy part of Valencia, in the mostly forgotten and out-of-the-way neighbourhood of Beniferri, between the Old Town and the business district, north of Campanar, which they visit by subway, bus and tram. They consult their colourful tourist maps, but there are absolutely no points of interest to speak of; they stare indifferently out the windows at the succession of nondescript streets rolling by.

  Early in the evening, after a dip in the pool, they head out to explore Ciutat Vella, promising the kids that if they don’t act up or argue on the bus, they’ll take them to the Horchatería Santa Catalina to dunk fartons in horchata. They cram onto the N3 bus, breathing in the rank smell of the other passengers’ sweat after a day of work, their citrusy perfumes lingering at the napes of their necks and in their hair, and the fresh scent of toddlers squirming in the aisle and on the moulded plastic seats.

  DAY 2 ITINERARY:

  THE MAIN ATTRACTIONS

  The next day, Claire, Jean and the children slip on sundresses and breezy shorts. Feet shod in strappy sandals, they set out on their itinerary for day 2: the City of Arts and Sciences in the morning for an exhausting visit to the Oceanogràfic, a quick lunch in the port district, followed by a mid-afternoon stroll by the seaside.

  They take their time at the aquarium, admiring the countless fish swimming behind the glass. They do their best to catch a glimmer in the beady eyes set among the scales, to lock watery gazes with the tiny black marbles embedded in the wriggling bodies. But, each time, the fish switch directions as one, darting off to the side or hiding among the seaweed. They’re both fascinated and awed by the unpredictability of the schools of fish and their slow-motion synchronized swimming, their impeccably choreographed moves, like flocks of birds. Every now and then, a big fish breaks ranks and swims toward the glass, and the children get all excited, only for it to do an about-face at the last second. It’s almost like a game, a planned fake-out designed to get a rise out of the visitors and make them think they’re actually communing with the sea creatures. The children spend a few minutes searching vainly for Balou’s distant cousins among the smaller fish.

  They line up for the dolphin show and “ooh” and “ahh” at the animals’ prowess. They marvel at the glow of the jellyfish and their languorous underwater movements, before deciding they’ve had enough of all the scales, tropical colours and quivering gills. After a few halfhearted attempts at building sandcastles, they stroll through the pedestrian-only streets until they come across a charming café, where they drop into the aluminum chairs on the patio for a drink. For a short while, they munch on peanuts and mouth-puckeringly salty olives, rolling the pits around under their tongues, before heading back to the hotel where everyone can’t wait to jump in the pool.

  WE MIGHT AS WELL FLY

  The woman in Valencia leaves a trail of blood behind her as she walks, a line of bright red dots on the wooden deck.

  She’s standing at the edge of the roof, relieved of her purse, one wrist sliced open. The powdery taste of the pills lingers in her mouth, burning her throat as they make their way slowly through her insides: One dose, two doses, nine doses penetrate the walls of her stomach and seep into her blood, gumming up her tongue and clouding her brain, short-circuiting her nervous system, turning her arms to mush, and setting her legs, lips and bony fingers trembling.

  She lowers herself onto the ledge, legs dangling over the side, vein pulsing, body riddled with poison, no rope to hang herself with, overcome by the need to end it all.

  W
e might as well fly.

  On impulse, she lifts her bottom, her death wish now an obsession. She spreads her arms open wide, reflexively, like a newborn baby who’s just been set down.

  She’s hoping for a dizzying fall, enough of a vertical drop to kill herself, enough sky to imagine herself gliding, gliding, gliding like a paper airplane, to experience weightlessness for a few seconds. All she wants is a few feet of freedom before hitting the concrete, like a breakaway in a cycling race, that thrilling feeling of slicing through the air.

  In the land of the living, to take to the air—to be everything that lives and flies, for once to be everything you’ve always wanted to be, to assume the shape of every creature whose acts of flight you’ve ever watched in amazement: a hummingbird suspended in midair, a falcon soaring on the wind, a butterfly and a firefly, a dragonfly skimming the surface of the water, a ladybug rising from the palm of a child’s hand, a bumblebee filled with nectar hovering over a patch of flowers, a snow goose or a Siberian crane set resolutely on its course, a great blue heron, a tiny chickadee, a gannet, a swarm of insects, a flock of geese, a flying squirrel, or even a flying fish, leaping above the horizon, its fins glimmering brilliantly against a slice of blue amid a shower of light, its body writhing in the air, between sea and sky, suspended, floating, but for gravity.

  Before hitting the concrete, to know what it felt like to fall through the air; then, from head to toe, to suddenly and completely shatter, and with a wet thud, to die.

  *

  It’s both easy and excruciating to imagine a body falling through the void. Something just doesn’t compute; the brain has a hard time seeing the action through to the end, picturing the violent impact with the ground.

  Falling from a height is an extremely common dream. We’ve all felt that dizzying sensation, that stomach-churning feeling of the midnight free-fall and the terror of jolting awake just before hitting the ground, as the brain slips back into the driver’s seat, the eyes fly open, and the fall is interrupted just in time. In our imagined scenarios of someone falling or intentionally jumping from a height, the body rarely hits the ground; it stays suspended. In dreams and movies, there’s never an impact.

  We can all picture scenes from action movies or old war footage of soldiers rocketing through the sky, spread-eagled, the instant before their parachute deploys. We also remember the morning of September 11, 2001. Claire had been sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, her thigh pressed up against Jean’s (that was before the kids were born), in a dingy postage stamp of an apartment with perma-stained linoleum. Like everyone else that day, she’d stayed glued to the TV, transfixed by the images of the people throwing themselves out the windows of the World Trade Center. We have jumpers, one commentator had said.

  It’s hard to forget The Falling Man, that iconic photo of the man, body perfectly vertical, one knee bent, falling head-first against the backdrop of the New York City skyscraper. There are no signs of flames or of the tragedy playing out several floors above; only a perfectly framed slice of architectural purity, a canvas of clean, dark lines captured just moments before the building collapsed, a silhouette suspended in the act of dying, of choosing his death. We might as well fly, is what might have crossed his mind as he made the final decision of his life.

  Claire doesn’t see the body of the woman in Valencia slice through the few square feet of air that separate the roof from the sidewalk. She sees the gleam in her eyes ten seconds before she goes through with the act and the subtle forward motion of her body, and in the time it takes to blink once, she imagines the rest: the fall and the impact, the bones and the concrete.

  Because she didn’t see it happen, there’s nothing realistic about the fall that she forces herself to picture over and over; it resists all attempts at reconstruction. When Claire thinks back on the scene, it’s not a real body that she sees plunging four floors in the space of just a few seconds. Instead, her memory conjures up images of crash test dummies. It’s a ragdoll, a fake body without bones or blood that Claire pictures flying through the air when she thinks about the woman in Valencia’s fall. A naked jumping jack, head round like an egg, with empty eye sockets staring out of a featureless face.

  *

  Then there are the famous photos of bodies sprawled out on the ground after “the most beautiful suicide.” It’s hard not to cringe at the thought of a fatal fall. Instinctively, we turn our head, squeeze our eyes shut. Yet we can’t help but gaze with fascination on the luminous beauty of Evelyn McHale after her leap from the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building, immortalized by Warhol in his “Death and Disasters” series. What possible explanation could there be for the peaceful countenance of the young accountant, entombed in the wreckage of the car she landed on, her unblemished body resting on its bed of crushed metal, draped in the elegant folds of her red dress, legs slender and feet bare, eyelids gently closed as though she were taking a nap on Fifth Avenue?

  *

  Frozen next to her lounge chair, the oversized tote bag dangling from her wrist, Claire can’t picture the brutal end of the scene. In disbelief, she replays what’s just happened on fast forward. Each time, she stumbles over the fraction of a second when, almost as bizarrely as the woman had approached her from out of nowhere a few minutes earlier, she’d disappeared violently from her field of vision with one final backward glance. In that indefinable amount of time—one second or three minutes, who can say—an entire life was upended.

  Claire turns her head toward her children and the worried face of her daughter, who’s running in her direction. In her mind’s eye—that of a panic-stricken mother—the woman’s glance is superimposed by another image: her daughter running carefree toward her, then freezing, stopping dead, alarmed by what will become a childhood memory, a recollection of their trip to Spain. Later, Laure would come to understand that she had seen a woman die.

  Claire will not explain anything to her six-year-old, who is staring at her with wide, dark eyes, eyebrows arched, baby-smooth brow furrowed with worry. Standing there dripping in her pink polka-dotted bikini, she asks her mother again: But why did that lady jump? Why? Why do you have that bag, Mama?

  *

  When retelling the story afterwards, Claire will come to say, “The sky was grey.” She’ll become fixated on the greyness of the sky, even though she could have sworn the sun had been blinding that day as the woman walked toward her.

  She definitely seems to remember that they were both squinting as they stared at one another, that the harsh afternoon light had chased away all traces of shadow, heightening the contrasts between objects and bodies, like in the glaring light of an operating room. She’d been cemented to her deck chair, her brain addled—sun stupid, she’s convinced. In the days that followed, she even remembers thinking about Meursault’s argument in The Stranger, when he claims at his trial that he killed the Arab because of the sun. It’s possible that the weather had turned suddenly, that the sky had clouded over and the air cooled off; in fact, it’s not inconceivable that the clouds had rolled in late in the day and that the steel-grey sky, pregnant with the promise of a storm, had become an indelible part of her memory. The sun had played its part, then exited stage left, like a traitor, and Claire had begun to shiver. Or maybe she had simply imagined the grey sky, the cold and the chills.

  Something freezes over in her mind when she pronounces the four syllables of Valencia. She flashes back to an ashen sky, an unmemorable room, a pool, an air-conditioned gym with treadmills and a long, mirrored wall that she runs in front of without breaking a sweat. Claire has forgotten the temperature of the Mediterranean; she’s forgotten the train station and the Valencia Cathedral, but she remembers with clinical precision the feeling of freezing on the rooftop of the Valencia Palace Hotel as the woman walked over to her, handed her the purse, then threw herself over the edge.

  *

  Claire keeps a cool head. A blizzard rages
in her veins, slowing her circulation to a crawl despite her mad dash to the elevator. It’s just her and the purse in the metal cage as it makes its way down, and her heart—that four-chambered hollow organ—is pounding furiously in her chest.

  Claire eyes the zipper on the tote bag, reluctant to open it before handing it over to the police. A woman’s purse is a sacred vessel, a repository of memories and secrets: a brainbox, only pliable.

  She thinks about her own purse. She wouldn’t want a strange woman rummaging around in it, seeing the mess, pawing through all that junk: scraps of paper, keys, forgotten bank statements still in their envelopes, tattered receipts, little girl’s drawings of bright yellow suns, chewing gum, cellophane-wrapped peppermints or fruit candies, Playmobil knight’s helmet, tampons, crumbs from old snacks, stray raisins ground into the lining, torn movie stubs, pen caps, tubes of lipstick that may or may not have gone rancid, child’s tiny sock, shredded old tissues, souvenirs kept for no particular reason, like the outdated Cape Cod tide chart, a dull pocket knife, a handful of messages from fortune cookies whose predictions never came true. Claire Halde has nothing to hide, other than the shame of the boring mess that has become her life.

  Claire gazes at the worn leather, stretched out in places, and wonders whether anyone will miss the woman, whether somewhere children, a lover, a pimp or a boss is waiting for her.

  Opening the zipper would no doubt solve the mystery of the stranger’s identity: first and last name, address, age, nationality, height, eye colour, mother’s maiden name. Perhaps that had been her last wish, which she’d conveyed by handing Claire the purse: not to die in anonymity. Or maybe it was the complete opposite: to shed her identity, to die incognito by leaving the purse behind. The numbers in the elevator light up one after another—third floor, second floor—and Claire still hasn’t decided whether she should look inside the bloodstained purse.