The Woman in Valencia Page 4
When the elevator comes to a halt and the doors slide silently open onto the bright lobby, decked out with green plants and charcoal leatherette loveseats arranged around a patterned rug, Claire presses the square metal button embossed with the number 7. She presses so hard her fingertip turns white, like that will make the automatic doors close any faster as they come together in a perfect seal, like the stabbing motion will speed up the cables or the cabin, or make the light move quicker—first floor, second floor, third floor, where a man steps forward and asks in a British accent, Going down?, then takes a quick step backward when he notices that the arrow above the door is pointing up. Claire never once takes her eyes off the tote bag, which is cutting into her wrist, as the doors slide smoothly back into place with an abrupt whoosh. Bag resting against her hip, Claire waits for the 7 to light up before stepping out of the elevator and walking toward her room.
When Jean asks her a few hours later why she didn’t go back downstairs to turn the bag over to the hotel staff, when he demands to know what came over her when she instead went back to their room, rolled the purse up in a towel and stashed it in her suitcase, she’ll answer him clearly, with the cold detachment of a rehearsed speech: The woman said keep the bag; I respected her last wishes.
THREATS AND EMERGENCIES
A human body part, shredded muscles and ligaments, shiny cartilage—that’s what Claire sees as she walks toward the paramedics. The fragment of heel bone, the size of a not-altogether ripe apricot, is some three feet from the body. It must have taken a bounce, like a rock in a game of hopscotch leaping along the concrete, leaving unsightly scratches on the delicate skin. It’s just lying there, a repulsive piece of bone surrounded by flesh, barely bleeding, a perfect match to the foot injury. The woman is on her back, her legs twitching on the sidewalk.
Claire will carry the mental image of the shattered heel bone with her for a long time, and she’ll think back on it often. In trying to imagine the pain that must have followed the impact, she’ll conjure up the collision between bone and concrete a thousand times in the weeks to come. She’ll even look it up: There are more than seven thousand nerve endings in a single foot.
She will relive the fall in her head. It would start with feeling like you’d been slammed in the stomach with a brick or an iron bar as you plummet through the void, like a punch in the gut that cleaves you in two.
Claire is familiar with that winded feeling: When she was ten, she’d fallen several feet while trying to nail a board into her new treehouse. In the blink of an eye, she’d toppled out of the tree, hammer in hand. She can still remember the pain of the bark scraping against the tender skin of her pale belly and the angry red streaks left behind. She’d lain on the ground, the wind completely knocked out of her for a few seconds, embarrassed by her clumsiness, blood in her mouth and pine needles matted in her hair.
But right now, Claire Halde is breathing freely, standing upright, trying to process the information swirling around the body—the different textures, the concrete and the sky, the bricks and the trees, the dwindling procession of sounds, the damping of decibels, the botanical sigh of the grass swaying in the wind, the comings and goings of the traffic around her, speeding up and slowing down. It strikes her how calm the hotel employees are; one of them lights a cigarette, inhales, then blows out a cloud of nicotine, blue curls of smoke hanging briefly in the air.
Out of the corner of her eye, she notices an old woman on the median in the middle of the boulevard crossing herself as a paramedic bends over to drape a thermal blanket over the chest, shoulders and exposed, delicate neck of the woman in Valencia, leaving only her face uncovered. She fixates on the sweat beading on the nape of the man’s neck, running down his back and soaking the collar of his pale shirt. Claire doesn’t dare ask him if the woman is dead. She imagines she must be, since no one is trying to revive her. There’s no blood—or very little, at least—no red pool forming under her skull, but maybe that’s because her hair is soaking it up. Claire has seen more blood on her son’s sheets when he wakes up with a nosebleed in the middle of the night. She examines the stranger’s legs, focusing on the thighs, knees and calves sticking out from under the reflective blanket, unable to linger on the mutilated foot for more than a second. She’ll never forget the woman’s skin. It looks so smooth, so flat, inanimate. The exquisiteness of flawless skin, or maybe it’s just rigor. It’s hard to tell if she’s wearing ultra-sheer pantyhose or if her skin really is that lustrous and perfect. There’s no redness, no glow, no tan lines. Just a horrifyingly even texture, bizarre and deathlike, unreal. It’s more like faux flesh, the kind you’d see on the mannequins displayed in a shop window or the wax dolls that old ladies keep locked away behind glass.
*
Claire doesn’t wait for them to take the body away; she goes back upstairs to join her husband and children at the pool. Their daughter is demanding to be taken to the park, which they’d promised her earlier that day.
She’s jumping up and down impatiently, waving her arms and legs in the air: A picnic, I want a picnic! Claire swallows slowly, then meets Jean’s worried gaze with a level stare. In a flat, even voice, she says: Okay, let’s have a picnic, let’s go up to the room and fix the sandwiches and veggies. In their hotel room, she throws up bile in the toilet while Jean tries to distract the children.
They set out together for Benicalap Park. They walk around the left side of the hotel, toward the back of the building, to avoid the spot where the woman hit the ground. They take the long way to the park, hoping the motion of the stroller will coax their son to sleep for his afternoon nap. They don’t speak. The silence is broken only by the squeaking of the stroller wheels turning on their rusty axis. The area is mostly deserted, with nothing but indistinct plots of land, a vacant lot, a rundown building covered with graffiti. It’s grey, dirty, overgrown. There are a few traces of human life lying around: scraps of fabric, empty beer cans, cigarette butts, a discarded chair. Claire wonders if the woman came from this hostile no man’s land. It’s no place for tourists or a family stroll, with a six-year-old girl trailing by the hand and a toddler nodding off against the bright orange canvas of his stroller, which, along with his sister’s fuchsia dress, is the only splash of colour anywhere around.
When Claire thinks back to that picnic, the taste of raw carrots is the main thing she remembers. A mouthful of dry, stringy bits sliding around under her tongue, knocking against her molars, breaking up under her canines, and finally rolling toward her uvula. The pieces of carrot stick in her throat, scratch the roof of her mouth, cut off her air supply.
Months, even years later, miles away from Benicalap Park, whenever she bites into a carrot, Claire Halde will still be thinking about the woman in Valencia as she chews. It hurts to swallow; even after all that time, she comes perilously close to choking.
*
Back from the picnic, after bathing the kids and putting them to bed, Claire goes to the hotel gym, just off the pool. She’s not brave enough this time to go for a run in the city.
Claire Halde puts one foot in front of the other, closing in on eight kilometres running in place in front of the mirror in the deserted gym. This is her first time running on a treadmill. She’s wobbly at first, thrown off kilter trying to adjust her pace to the regular, mechanical motion under her feet, but she eventually hits her stride, finds a certain confidence. Don’t slip, don’t trip, don’t fall. On the smooth, unbroken black belt, with just enough cracks and crevices to give it some grip, she eats up the miles. Claire pushes an arrow and the machine beep, beep, beeps like an oven timer; the black belt spins faster, there’s a whooshing noise, a loud revving like a plane taking off, her shoes skim the surface and the rubber squeaks. Run, run, run, keep moving. She watches her time and pace on the chest-high screen in front of her, between her fists, which she swings back and forth like a boxer, level with her pounding heart, which is pumping blood in quick, steady beats.
There’s a message scrolling by in narrow green electronic lettering: Wellness significa equilibrio mental. The motor hums like the drone of a sewing machine or the frenzied thwack-thwack of windshield wipers on high speed, and Claire’s soles hammer the treadmill sharply while a tubby cleaning lady chases dust bunnies behind her. The gym is closing soon.
She has no clue that I let another woman die, thinks Claire Halde. She forces herself to smile at the housekeeper in the mirror. In the past few hours, smiling has become a chore. The hotel employee turns up the corners of her mouth by way of an acknowledgement. Her eyes are slanted, her movements slow. Maybe she’s the one who had to mop up the blood and scrub down the washroom on the fourth floor, Claire thinks, upping her speed another notch.
For a split second, almost like a hallucination, a pair of waxy legs flashes across the mirror, tricking her into thinking someone has just walked into the room. Claire jumps, startled, and the legs disappear. She glances behind her, then clamps her eyes on the mirror like someone surveying the sky after thinking they’ve just seen a flash of lightning, tensed for the next bolt. She clings to the machine as the cleaning lady watches her surreptitiously, makes eye contact in the mirror, then lowers her gaze back to her rag. Her face is round, shuttered, focused on her work, which she does with indifference, as employees often do when forced to carry out repetitive tasks.
She approaches with her aerosol can, shaking it vigorously. The metal cylinder rattles like it’s filled with nails. Claire flashes back to her childhood, in a time before the hole in the ozone layer: the satisfying machine-gun sound when she would help her mother clean the windows, her father’s chin covered in shaving cream, her and her sister fighting over who would get to spray the fake Christmas tree with canned snow. Rat-a-tat-tat, followed by a long hissing sound and a cloud of particles released into the room, floating through the air, sticking in Claire’s throat. The foam cleaner, thick and white, expands and froths on contact with the mirror. The breathless runner’s reflection quickly disappears behind a snowy cloud of chemical foam.
*
Claire Halde goes back to her room, where she steps under the powerful jets of the rainfall showerhead, directly under the large disk dotted with tiny pinholes. She looks down at the rectangular bar of soap nestled in her palm. On contact with the water, fragrant, olive-green suds form on its surface. She’s relying on this late-night shower to calm her down and ease her into sleep. She relaxes slightly, rolls her shoulders, squeezes her shoulder blades together and releases the tension in her neck under the scalding water. The urge to cry hits her as violently as the need to sneeze; she thinks she might pass out in the suffocating steam, but she doesn’t care. The water plasters her hair to her forehead in hot, ropy clumps, but she doesn’t push them away. She has trouble opening her eyes against the force of the jets. The water runs into her mouth, gets up her nose, pools at her feet. In a sudden fit, Claire attacks her body with the miniature bar of soap, leaving her skin red in places. The sharp ridges of the soap rub painfully against her less fleshy bits: armpits, neck, backs of knees, anklebones, shins and wrists.
THE HOTEL AT NIGHT
It’s nighttime now. The day began with the intricate ballet of the phosphorescent jellyfish, the pirouettes of the dolphins, the amazement of the children—mouths agape, little hands pressed up against the glass of the tanks, dwarfed by the giant sea creatures, screeching with joy whenever a school of fish glided by—and it’s ended with the death of a woman replaying in a loop, sleep that won’t come, guilt, waves of nausea.
The images of the blonde woman twitching on the sidewalk have snuffed out all the magic of the Oceanogràfic. Her breath coming in gasps, Claire dissects the afternoon’s events minute by minute, from the stranger’s arrival at the pool to the chunk of heel bone lying on the pavement. Claire sees the woman walking toward her in slow motion, like a psychedelic catwalk performance or an actress in a film noir—Lynchian, Hitchcockesque. Her skeletal frame, her posture, shaky and distraught, a flash, then the sequence on fast forward: blonde hair, hoarse voice, waxy legs, white cotton square, oversized purse, hand struggling with zipper, cigarette trembling between lips, blood soaking through dressing, dripping down wrist onto blue towel, body slipping over edge of roof, scream trapped in throat, lungs devoid of air, elevator ride, spasms on sidewalk, chunk of bone and apricot-coloured flesh, ambulance siren, emergency blanket, sign of cross on median, taste of dirt in mouth, little girl hopping up and down, vomit, raw carrots.
*
In the hotel room, three sleeping bodies and her own rigid, restless one. Three bodies that have been inside her own: the two babies she carried in her belly, grown into small children slumbering in the wide hotel bed, little cheeks pressed up against an oversized feather pillow, the stiff, white cotton warmed by their moist breath; and the man who has caressed her, licked her, bitten her, penetrated her, made her scream and come, her neck, shoulders and pelvis spasming with brief and intense waves of pleasure. These three bodies have drifted off to sleep, while in Claire’s head, dark and terrifying fish slither through her thoughts. She sits motionless in the armchair next to the window, knees bent, heels pressed into her bottom, fingers laced around her shins, in a pitiful fetal position. Stomach still heaving, on the verge of vomiting at any second—a flashback to her first trimester with both kids—she digs her nails into the delicate skin of her palms, into the crevice between life line and head line.
She watches the children sleep, moved by the peaceful sound of their baby snores, comforted by the reassuring symphony of untroubled sleep. She’d know that breathing anywhere, that downy rising and falling that had soothed her when her babies had fallen asleep at her breast or dozed off in her arms for their afternoon nap, the tiny sounds of slumber and repose that have changed little over the years. Jean’s sleep, with its distinctive patterns, restlessness, and grunts and groans, is different. Unlike a milk-drunk infant, when he’s had too much to drink, his breathing gets loud and annoying. Claire elbows him in the side, but it’s about as effective as trying to shift an animal that’s been shot with a tranquilizer dart. The unyielding body next to her feels completely foreign.
Memories of nights spent nursing float to the surface. This is the same silence, enveloped in a deeper silence, the same kind of sleep that surrounds her now. She can picture herself walking into the kitchen in the middle of the night, parking herself in front of the fridge and opening the door with an exhausted jerk. After the predictable click of the rubber gasket unsticking and the lightbulb switching on above the top shelf, she’d stand immobile in the square of light, contemplating the contents, lulled by the drone of the motor. In this room, now, she feels like she did standing in the glow of that open door when, half-naked and famished, she’d eat yogurt straight from the container, hoping against hope that the newborn she’d just put down in the bassinette would sleep through the rest of the night without demanding another feeding. Those dimly lit hours of maternal solitude were much like the ones ticking by now in this hotel room; the night eddied with the same currents of worry and fatigue, and the feeling of not being a good enough mother, woman, lover, daughter. That numbness that pervades your whole body and clouds your vision, when your skin feels like it’s weighed down by a layer of clay, when staring into the soft glow of a lightbulb sends you into a trance, and you’re suddenly convinced of the need to take stock of your entire life, right there, in the middle of the night.
ROOM 714
In the silent room, in the hollow Valencian night, far removed from everything, as though the Valencia Palace has come unmoored and is now adrift on dark waters, Claire still can’t sleep.
In her insomnia, she recalls the pair of vacationers lounging on their deck chairs at the far end of the terrace. They never even noticed the woman in Valencia, never saw her bleeding or her body falling from the roof. They had no clue what was going on, Claire thinks, never heard her weak cry of horror. They’ll r
eturn home well rested, oblivious to what happened, happy with their trip to Spain. But why did she choose me? Those two could have probably helped her. And that’s when Claire finally starts to cry.
What follows are several nights of sharks and screams, the woman’s voice, the edge of a roof, her daughter’s hand slipping from her grasp, falls into the void, and sweaty jolts awake, with the woman’s dull, lifeless stare imprinted on her retina.
*
Claire lifts the stiff, heavy duvet and slides one leg out without disturbing the mattress. She’s an expert at getting out of bed without waking Jean. They’ve been on different sleep cycles for years now. They may share the same snug cotton cocoon, but they each have their own way of responding to the heat—Jean by sweating and Claire by waking up constantly. Nestled in this unfamiliar bed, where others have lain before them, enjoying the comfortable pocket-coil mattress and cursing the itchy feathers poking out of the hotel-issue duvet, they lie apart, not touching, curled up on separate sides of the bed. The years when they used to make passionate love, veering off hiking trails in pursuit of simultaneous orgasms in fields or on clifftops overlooking the river, waking up at night to start all over again, are nothing but a distant memory. Now, when Claire looks at Jean’s naked body, she feels resignation rather than desire. She makes love to him the same way she sorts the recycling and puts out and rinses the bin every Monday morning: out of obligation, like a household chore that needs doing.