The Woman in Valencia Read online

  At night, too, she will be haunted by the outline of the woman’s body—that skin and that blonde hair. The unrelentingly hoarse and garbled voice will penetrate her nightmares. And when she’s running—months, even years after the trip to Valencia—she’ll sometimes feel a dull throbbing, a jarring sensation in her heel bone. Never again will she be able to hear the word Valencia without thinking about the woman, without reminding herself: While on vacation in Spain, you let someone die.

  II

  RETURN TO VALENCIA

  (THE HOSTILE POINT ON THE HORIZON)

  THINGS TO DO BEFORE YOU DIE

  I remember my mother running.

  I think about her often, sprinting like she was trying to escape from us, run away from us at top speed.

  Since arriving in Spain three days ago, I’ve been carrying around the same soft-cover notebook with the mustard-yellow binding. I run my hand over its smooth surface; I’m too scared to read it again. I’m keeping my distance.

  Over the years, my mother amassed countless of these slim notebooks, which she bought from a Japanese stationery store in New York City. When I turned eighteen, my father gave me a pile of them, most of them identical, all of them dog-eared to varying degrees. There’s a rectangular sticker on the cover of one of them, the same kind she used to label our school workbooks and Duo-Tangs. In the blank space framed by a thin blue border, she’d written in cursive, in black ink: “Trip to Spain.” Tucked between the pages, on a sheet of paper folded in four, I found a list of bullet points, all starting with an asterisk and lined up neatly under the heading “Things To Do Before I Die.”

  I’ve read that list from the late 2000s several times in the past few months. I was still in elementary school back then. It’s weird to think about her adding an item that involved me: “Run a marathon with one of my kids (maybe as my fiftieth-birthday present from them?).”

  In my first apartment, near Little Italy, where I grew up, I hung a large, glossy 11 x 17 photo. In it, I’m six years old and there’s a P’tit marathon de Montréal bib pinned to my dark grey hoodie. Two long braids are splayed out in midair around my face, which is screwed up in effort. My eyes are fixed on the finish line, my forehead determined, my fists clenched. My mother, who’s running next to me, isn’t touching the ground; she’s suspended in a ray of light, her Adidas hovering over the asphalt and a carpet of dead leaves. She’s smiling at me proudly, as though she considered running a state of grace. There’s something unreal about your mom in this picture. Everyone who dropped by my place was struck by my rosy-cheeked, floating mom in motion—from her dazzling smile and ferocious look to her muscular calves emerging from form-fitting, electric-blue capri pants—every inch of her screaming: Run, sweetheart, you can do it!

  I keep her many finisher medals from the Paris, London, Tokyo, New York City, Berlin, San Francisco and Boston marathons in one of my dresser drawers, hidden under a jumble of underwear. Whenever I’m rummaging around, half-naked, for a pair of nylons or flimsy lace panties, my fingers get caught up in the satin ribbons and the medals all jangle together. The clinking and clanging might as well be the sound of all the years that have passed, marked by a jeering brass band. I run my hand along the bottom of the drawer, finger the metal one more time, just to make sure the mementoes are still there—cold, sonorous disks buried under piles of white cotton and satin bras. I press them against my palm: the miniature skyscrapers of Manhattan and Tokyo, the Brandenburg Gate, Big Ben, the Golden Gate Bridge. When the medals rub up against one another, the embossed designs emit a shrill sound, like the singing of a cicada, filling my room with a preternatural cry, insistent and hypnotic.

  My mother, fifty this month.

  We didn’t set off fireworks over the lake like we did for her fortieth. But, in a few minutes, a starter’s pistol will be fired into the milky sky, and that burst will signal the start of the 2025 Valencia Marathon.

  I will run this marathon—my first—as though my mother were next to me the whole time.

  THE WEATHER OUTSIDE

  It’s a rainy Sunday, ten years earlier. It’s exactly noon, Eastern Standard Time, according to the radio, which has been broadcasting the National Research Council of Canada’s official radio time signal every day since the Second World War. The summer storm lashing Montreal is more violent than the meteorologists had predicted. Strong enough to uproot trees and cause the river to burst its banks. In the Laurentians, power lines are toppling like dominoes. Bits of roofing shingles are hurtling through the sky, which is devoid of planes, because they’ve all been grounded. Even more than the disgruntled travellers staring up at the departure boards, Montreal drivers are edgy and impatient. Cursing, they’ve been jammed up in detours for hours because a cycling event—which will be called off abruptly due to the high winds—has shut down traffic across much of the city.

  Seated in a tearoom, her back to the window and oblivious to all this, Claire slowly swallows her last sip of a cup of Earl Grey that’s gone cold. She’s sitting across from a girlfriend who’s got a better vantage of the sky.

  “It’s completely black out there now. We’d better get home quick.”

  “Yeah. Anyways, they’re waiting on me for supper.”

  Claire calls home: Put the water on, I’m on my way. She runs home at a clip, the tepid, murky water splashing up the backs of her thighs.

  She stops at a red light, sees her standing at the gas station.

  She’s wearing a skintight miniskirt and a tank top that’s sliding down one shoulder, revealing the top half of a braless, saggy breast. She’s gesticulating in the middle of the street, purse swinging from her wrist, paying no mind to the traffic. Drivers honk at her and brake abruptly, throwing a curtain of muddy water over her trembling figure. Cars swerve around her, then drive off again into the storm. Her hair is thick and black, like steel wool. Her arms are scrawny and restless, whipping back and forth wildly through the air and water, like the antennae of a frenzied insect. The rain streams over her eyelids, which are blinking open and closed like someone in the throes of an epileptic seizure. She’s obviously high. The jerky movements of her arms and legs and the spasms contorting her face trigger a sudden flashback of the woman on the rooftop terrace.

  Valencia. The feelings of impotence and imminent danger, buried deep inside her body for almost six years now, come rushing to the fore. Claire surveys her surroundings. There’s no one around. The rain-drenched sidewalks are deserted, no Good Samaritan steps out of his car or rushes out of the coffee shop across the street. The gas station attendant remains behind his bulletproof window, keeping an eye on his till. Claire and the woman are completely alone. Like a freak tidal wave, the memory of the Valencia Palace rises up and threatens to overcome her. For a moment, the horizon disappears behind a black wall of water.

  It’s not unheard of for an aftershock to be stronger than the original earthquake. Memories rise up with a force that threatens to drown her: a delayed reaction to a shock already several years old. She feels like she’s just been shot up with a thick, sticky liquid that’s turning her veins to ice and stopping up the walls of her throat, stomach and skull.

  Claire takes a few steps forward in the street, up to her ankles in water, lungs filled with lead. Her body is rocked by a powerful wave, like her brain is a gas pump and the automatic shutoff valve has just malfunctioned. She’s caught off guard, doesn’t see it coming. Maybe it’s toxic fumes slithering down her airways or fuel gushing up from the huge underground tanks under her feet, cracking the pavement and creeping up her legs, coating her from head to toe. I’m a seagull trapped in a slick, black tide, in the wrong place at the wrong time again. She wants to scream: Watch out! But great bubbles of oil and tar, and a pocket of air under her tongue, prevent the words from escaping, transforming the scream into some otherworldly sound.

  The woman turns to look at her and squints as though trying to place her. She walks
toward Claire. The stilted gait, the uneven swaying of the hips, the wobbly head, the immeasurable solitude in the face of danger: It’s all identical. Claire is reliving the events of Valencia at top speed. But she shakes it off. This time, she’ll say something. Do something.

  She motions to the woman to step back onto the sidewalk.

  “What do you want from me?” the woman screams as she approaches.

  “Come here, get on the sidewalk. No, not the street. Stay here with me.”

  The woman gives her a withering look, but Claire insists.

  “Please come here. You’ll be killed if you don’t get off the street.”

  Muttering nonsense, the stranger pitches forward and reaches out an arm to Claire, who takes a step back, afraid the woman might hit or punch her. Claire doesn’t trust her; she’s acting unpredictably, ranting and waving her fist in the air, not to mention that she’s two heads taller than Claire is. But the woman veers away and sits down on a cement block.

  Fingers trembling, Claire struggles to dial 911 on the wet screen of her mobile while never once taking her eyes off the woman, who gets up and staggers toward the busy street through the sheeting rain.

  The 911 dispatcher assesses the emergency, notes down the intersection. The woman throws herself in front of a car—Oh, my god! Get back here!—which just barely avoids her. Claire gestures at her wildly and tries her best to attract her attention while the dispatcher repeats his question impatiently:

  “Ma’am, ma’am, answer me: What is she wearing?”

  “Sorry,” Claire begins flatly, “it’s just that I’m trying to—”

  “Ma’am,” he cuts her off, “just answer the question. Describe her clothes for me.”

  “Black skirt and tank top, tall, dark hair. And she’s carrying a purse… Do I think she’s dangerous?” she continues, still watching the woman, who’s now rubbing her face vigorously. “Well, she might cause an accident or be hit by a car. I think she’s high.”

  “Someone else has already called this in. The police are on their way,” the dispatcher concludes, no less brusquely.

  Soon after, a young man runs up to Claire and explains that he went to get a patrol car stationed a block away for the cycling event. With the confidence of someone swooping in to save the day, which frankly blows Claire’s mind, he walks up to the woman:

  “Come sit down by the gas station, get out of the rain, the taxi’s on its way.”

  He’s soon joined by two friends, and they surround the woman, who sits down on a concrete curb under the gas pump awning. Claire explains that she has to go and runs off into the rain, which is picking up again in intensity, like the burning feeling in her stomach.

  When she arrives home, soaked to the bone, looking like a drowned rat, she notices that the kids have set the table, dished out the spaghetti, grated the parmesan, filled a pitcher with water. Claire isn’t hungry; she crawls into bed without even taking off her wet clothes and lies there trembling uncontrollably.

  I’m a mess, she thinks, for the first time in her life. The shakes and wracking sobs last for two hours; in the midst of it all, she’s horrified to realize she hasn’t cried like this in years, not since room 714 in Valencia.

  “Lucky Strikes,” she says a few hours later to the cashier at the gas station, after getting the kids to bed and slipping out. “You don’t have any? I don’t know then, the cheapest pack you’ve got. King size, with a lighter.”

  She slides a twenty into the slot between the window and the counter. “So, did they finally call an ambulance for that woman this afternoon?” she asks, jutting her chin in the direction of the street out front. The man nods and hands her the cigarettes. Claire, who’s never been a smoker, caresses the pack, runs a finger gently over the lighter, which is bright pink like the colour of corned beef.

  “It was you, on the sidewalk with her? I saw you. Good thing you were there. One less dead person today thanks to you.”

  Claire grabs her change and walks out without so much as a goodbye.

  2025 VALENCIA MARATHON:

  STARTING LINE

  All around me, the runners are jumping in place, double-knotting their shoelaces, sighing nervously, smiling at one another. According to the organizers, there are twenty-four thousand participants gathered at the starting line. They’re all just standing there, waiting; some are stamping their feet. They’re like a school of frenzied sardines, excited and anxious in their flashy, synthetic running gear. The Valencia Ciudad del Running banners flap in the wind. Off to one side, there’s the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, an ultramodern opera house that looks like it’s floating over the reflecting pools below. I think about my father, about see-through glass bridges. Santiago Calatrava is one of his favourite architects. On my right, the Hemisfèric stares down at the marathoners like an enormous white eye. Some tilt their heads from side to side to stretch their neck muscles; others shake their arms out by their sides, stirring imaginary water with their fingertips. Like a bunch of octopuses. I stand still, nervous but motionless, dormant at the bottom of a frozen lake.

  I conserve my energy; I focus on the impending start, on my belly breathing, on the plan: don’t start too fast, stay on pace, drink every three kilometres, take an energy gel every forty-five minutes, finish the race with a smile and, above all, think about my mother with each passing kilometre. I close my eyes, take a deep breath. The Valencian air flows down my throat; my ribs lift, my belly expands, then I slowly release the warm air through my nostrils.

  I’m all keyed up. I’m thirsty, even though I just drank, and I need to pee. I just want to get started already.

  I’m in the middle of the pack, two hundred metres behind the leaders, in corral 9, with the runners who expect to finish in four hours. On my left, there’s a man wearing a baseball cap with bunny ears. He’s holding a sign above his head that says “00:04:00.” Runners gather around him and will do their best not to lose sight of him for the whole 42.2 kilometres.

  Four hours—the barrier many amateur runners aim to break. It was also my mother’s goal for her first marathon. She didn’t make it. She finished the race in four hours three minutes, after fading in the last two kilometres and almost passing out from dehydration at the finish line. My brother and I went to find her with a bottle of water and chocolate milk. We’d imagined her standing triumphantly near the podium. Instead, we’d found her sprawled out on the concrete floor of the stadium, arms flung wide open, her face a sickly shade of green and her mouth ringed with vomit. Her legs were jerking with the force of an epileptic seizure. She’d grabbed on to us so tightly. A desperate embrace, fuelled, I imagine, by the fear of dying, by the terrifying feeling of her body giving out on her. My father had had to pull her to her feet. And yet, after all that, she did it again. Dozens of times more, she faced the marathon head-on, without ever again letting it get the best of her. A few years later, after losing weight and building up her endurance, she was running all her marathons in under three hours thirty minutes. She’d even speed up in the last kilometre, in a final sprint, triumphant in the face of pain. She’d clocked her best time in Berlin, in 2013: three hours eight minutes. Four minutes twenty-seven seconds per kilometre over 42.2 kilometres. I worked it out. I don’t know how she managed to be that fast. I can’t even keep up that pace over five kilometres.

  The announcer’s voice booms out excitedly over the loudspeakers, bringing me back to my own marathon.

  “Quinze segons. Fifteen seconds to go!”

  I’m ready. I’ve trained for sixteen weeks, four times a week: long endurance runs to train my body for fatigue, interval workouts to increase my speed, tempo runs, fartleks, hills, stretching, rest, and carb loading in the days leading up to the marathon. I followed the training program to a tee. My body took it all in, slimmed down, pumped up, adapted. Became accustomed to the constant abuse.

  Suddenly, the excitement ratche
ts up around me.

  “Cinc! Quatre! Tres! Dos! Un!”

  A shot rings out, and the human tide surges forward, trotting at first, docile and impatient.

  My heart swells as everyone begins to pick up the pace and move as one toward the starting gate.

  KILOMETRE 1

  I’m no longer jogging, I’m running, heading toward the Montolivet Bridge, I’m hanging back slightly, on the very edge of the crowd, five minutes fifty seconds per kilometre, the slow start I’d planned, I let the herd shadowing the pace bunny cross the starting line in one tight group, when it’s my turn to pass over the electronic mat, I press the button on my stopwatch, and with a tender smile, as though my mother were there with me, I murmur: Happy fiftieth, Mama… C’mon, let’s do it, let’s run this marathon…

  Go, go! You can do it, sweetheart!

  … my pulse quickens, it’s intoxicating, the excitement at the starting line, I run over the bridge, repeating don’t push it, don’t start too fast over and over, for hundreds of metres, the air pulsates with the sounds of people shouting, rattles shaking, whistles blowing, spectators lean up against the metal barriers, waving signs in the air, and down below, there’s el Río, the dried-up bed of an erstwhile river, lush gardens, I look straight ahead, breathe calmly, focus inward, I move forward easily, as though the wind were at my back, but it’s actually within me, and it’s not howling, it’s blowing gently, into the farthest reaches of my lungs, it carried my mother along, I know it won’t let me down…

  KILOMETRE 2

  … I’m moving forward, through the roundabout, I spot the “1 KM” marker, the crowd has thinned out, no need to zigzag around the slower runners anymore,