The Woman in Valencia Read online

  I look down at my watch: five minutes thirty-nine seconds per kilometre, bang on, so far, so good, my legs are strong, my shoulders relaxed, I’m smiling, I’m exactly where I want to be,

  making my way through the streets of Valencia, a shiver of excitement like an electric shock sets the hair on the back of my neck on end, stray strands frizz wildly, a thin sheen of sweat forms at the roots, my heart beats steadily, the sky is overcast, ideal,

  you used to worry about passing out in the sun, but it makes no difference to me, I like the sun and the shade equally, on my left looms the El Corte Inglés department store, massive and triangular, we’re about to turn right onto a street leading to the marina, I’ve memorized the beginning and the end of the course, the middle is more of a blur…

  KILOMETRE 3

  … I’ve been following this woman in the “Cancer Survivor” T-shirt for a while now, I almost feel bad passing her, I smile at her, nod my head in encouragement, she looks so strong and determined, it’s hard to imagine her succumbing to a disease, maybe some people are just tougher than others, everyone thought that my mother—who didn’t seem afraid of anything, who travelled solo and ran marathons—was stronger than she really was, but we were all wrong, so terribly wrong, you’d never have guessed how fragile she was to look at her, that’s what everyone told me, she was an expert at bottling up her emotions and masking her pain, even when she was on the verge of cracking, when she felt like she was being impaled by a cold, hard spear of anxiety through her chest, she ran a marathon full-tilt, finishing first among the women in her age category…

  … yet, every time she held a knife to cut carrots for our school lunches, or drove on the highway, or ran over bridges, or stood waiting on the platform for the metro, or stared out the cottage window at the thin ice on the lake, she was thinking about death; she was gripped by anxiety attacks at all hours of the day, picturing herself dying from cancer in the next three months, imagining herself being run over by a car while out biking; she could hear the crackling of electricity in the walls, the buzzing of high-voltage power lines, she lived in fear of a short circuit that would burn down the house in the middle of the night; in her journal, she wrote that the feeling would most likely pass, that it was the incident in Valencia that was messing with her head, that she would never do anything stupid, that it would go as quickly as it had come, that it was best not to frighten her family and friends with her morbid thoughts, this too shall pass, she told herself over and over, keep going, no feeling is final…

  … I was just as bad, I didn’t say anything, didn’t raise the alarm, it didn’t matter how often my father would say that I was just a kid, that I didn’t understand what was happening, I felt my mother slipping away from us bit by bit, I felt her melancholy penetrating my tender little girl’s skin, but I didn’t have the words to tell her any of this; sometimes, I’d surprise her while she was standing at the stove stirring a pot of soup, her eyes brimming with tears, sniffling discreetly…

  It’s just the onions, Laure.

  I cut up a hot pepper and rubbed my eyes by accident.

  Oh, it’s nothing, I burned my hand putting something in the oven.

  … I’m running toward the Valencia Bridge, toward the first of the aid stations, near the Veles e Vents building, I can see the four horizontal rectangles of the strange pavilion, I’ll have to turn left soon, it’s a shame the course doesn’t run along the ocean, which is right nearby, I think about that picture of you running on a beach in the Caribbean, your form is perfect, you’re gazing off into the distance, almost like nothing else exists but the movement of your body and the peaceful horizon…

  KILOMETRE 4

  … I spilled my drink all over myself, my tank top will dry, I look at my watch, so far, so good, I’m on pace, not tired, I’m breathing calmly, going with the flow, the picture of patience and determination,

  the street is narrower here, the buildings create shade, I weave my way into a pack of focused runners, one of the men is breathing noisily in time with each stride, a gross-sounding wheeze that I won’t be able to stand for much longer, we move forward, all characters in the same story, in the same corridor of air and asphalt, wearing down our soles layer by layer, engaging the same muscles, sweating under the same sun, suffering from the same thirst and exhaustion, aiming for the same horizon, a few palm trees here and there, the odd pastel facade, I take it all in, but my concentration is focused on my arms and legs, I let myself be carried along, I don’t think about anything in particular, but I need to think about my mother, pay my respects, my mother, my mother, my mother and her motto, running = calm, she wrote it everywhere in her running journal, her entries would always start with a weather report…

  Cloudy and humid today.

  Ran to the mountain with M.

  20 km and a bit.

  We invented a new fartlek:

  you speed up every time you pass another runner.

  Oh my god, did we laugh.

  No pain.

  Just calm.

  … I only just recently figured out what you meant, what the calm was that you were referring to; what I still can’t figure out is why you were so desperate for that calm…

  KILOMETRE 5

  … my mouth is dry, thank god for aid stations and sugary drinks, now we’re running past a fenced-in soccer field that feels never-ending, on my right I notice the tram tracks lying in an ochre bed on the ground, a long, slightly raised strip, I wonder if it’s the tram line that leads to the Valencia Palace, another shiver runs down my spine,

  I can’t stand it when my skin crawls that way, maybe I should slow down a little… for a second, I catch a glimpse of the sea in the distance, then I’m forced to turn my back on the Mediterranean,

  in a sudden flash, I see you screaming, your head pressed against the steering wheel, the moose on the snowy highway, like an apparition brought forth from the forest, I’ll never forget your scream,

  stay focused, the course veers off, hairpin turn, I haven’t seen the beach yet, I’m almost at aid station 5, tables on either side of the street, volunteers bustling about, pitchers in hand, others holding out paper cups, smiling, making eye contact, I grab one on the fly—¡ Gracias !—I pinch the rim together to stem the flow of the liquid, chug the contents in two or three gulps, bright orange drink, salty and citrusy in my throat, then toss the cup on the ground…

  TRAVELLING LIGHT

  Claire is balanced on a step stool, stretched out precariously on her tiptoes. She gropes around on the top shelf of her bedroom closet, pushing boxes out of the way, feeling around till her fingers land on the supple leather, which she grabs and pulls toward her. In a slithering motion, the bulky mauve purse slides off the shelf and onto her chest. Claire almost topples over.

  She sits down on her unmade bed and stares coldly at the bag on her lap. Her eyelid twitches as she pulls open the silver zipper.

  She dips her hand into the bag and pulls out what she initially thinks is a piece of raw meat, warm and smooth against her palm. Claire doesn’t need to press her ear to the glistening mass to hear the pulsing sound that’s getting louder, rising toward her, reverberating through the room like a ringing in the ears or the droning of a horsefly. A human heart. She examines it, recognizes arteries, aorta, vena cava, atria, dissected like on an anatomical diagram. The muscle quivers in her hand, pumping and circulating an increasingly large amount of blood, which soon overflows her cupped palms, runs down her forearms, and soaks her skin, the purse, and the pearl grey sheets under her thighs.

  In the hallway, Laure is pounding on the door, rattling the doorknob, yelling at the top of her lungs. “Mama! Maaamaaa!”

  As Claire goes to shove the heart back in the bag, it begins to swell, a gelatinous blob that takes on size, that she can barely contain. She lets out a scream when the heart slips between her fingers and flops to the bedroom floor.


  “Mama! Mama! Get up! There’s blood all over the floor. Léon’s nose is bleeding again. And he used up all the milk for his cereal…”

  WHEN TO LEAVE?

  “Jean, I need a vacation,” Claire declares a few hours later, her fingers gripped tightly around the phone receiver. “I really need a change of scenery. I’d like you to watch the kids for ten days.”

  They’re both silent for a beat.

  “Um, and you’re going where, and with—”

  Claire cuts him off. “None of your business, Jean. I need some time to clear my head.”

  A longer silence this time. Jean doesn’t understand, starts to protest.

  “It’s a bad idea. If I were you, I’d—”

  “I’m not asking for your opinion, Jean. I’m telling you that I’m leaving.”

  “Just like that? Without consulting me? So, what? I should just say bon voyage, off you go, have a great time?”

  Claire raises her voice.

  “Seriously? And what about all your diving trips, your Venice Biennales, your weekends in New York City with your architect buddies, your week-long hunting trips up north?”

  “Don’t start with that again, Claire. I’ve never held you back, I even encouraged you to go back to work, take on new jobs. Shit, enough’s enough. Maybe it’s time you get over the whole thing, you didn’t even know the wom—”

  Claire slams the receiver down. But she continues the conversation, raging at the kitchen wall.

  “Enough, Jean! Don’t you dare tell me how I should feel, you didn’t even goddamn care enough to hug me, you did fuck all to comfort me after she killed herself right in front of me, you piece of…”

  She pounds her fist against the door frame. Blood vessels burst under her skin. Behind her, a purple painted cat hanging on the end of a nail wobbles, and Claire hears it crash to the floor. Pieces of broken glass scatter in all directions, some disappearing under the stove. Claire examines the edge of her palm; the skin is turning red, like an instant sunburn or the kind of embarrassing injury you’d get if you were stupid enough to stick your hand into a flaming toaster.

  She grinds her molars together—two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch, her dentist reminds her at each checkup. When she finally unclenches her jaw, a pool of frothy saliva leaks out and a string of drool runs down her chin and falls to the slate floor. Three drops of rage among the shards of glass at her feet.

  AT THE AIRPORT

  The city has been in the grips of a heatwave for three days—five people dead already—and it’s early August 2015 when Claire sets her suitcase down on the conveyor belt at the American Airlines check-in counter. It’s been a long time since she’s wandered around an airport alone. In the air-conditioned climate of the Montreal airport, she fans the top of her dress to dry the sweat trickling down her back and between her breasts. She makes her way to the duty-free shop, where she spots a bottle of limited-edition Absolut Honey vodka with the message Honey, I’m coming home emblazoned on the bottle in stylized letters. She pictures a smiling woman paying for the alcohol and carrying it onto the plane, happy to be heading home to her sweetheart. Claire frowns and instead buys a bottle of microdistilled gin with a large parsnip on the bottle.

  She orders a coffee, watches the news distractedly: seventy-one bodies found in a refrigerated truck left on the side of a highway in Austria, near the Hungarian border. Fifty-nine men, eight women and four children. It’s more of an uneasy feeling than an actual image that forms in her head. It’s hard to imagine a pile of corpses: exposed necks, dark hair, sagging backs, legs splayed open, arms crossed over motionless chests. Her brain conjures up a formless heap, like in a mass grave, then quickly switches channels, unable to reconcile the mental picture with the humanity of each of the refugees decomposing in the truck, which was previously owned by a Slovakian poultry company and which the traffickers bought, registered in Romania, then abandoned on the highway.

  On the plane, she can hear babies crying—you can’t not hear them, their symphony of cries starts up well before takeoff. Those years are behind her. No more pacing up and down the aisles with a baby screaming in her ears. She noticed them earlier, standing at gate A50, the stressed-out wives and mothers with their anxious expressions, always on the alert, unable to relax. They never sit down, they stay standing the whole time, waiting for the boarding call, keeping an eye on the kids, criticizing the husband, sighing with exasperation. The fear of the delayed flight, the interminably long lineup, the impossibly heavy suitcase, the hyperactive child: They’re focused only on what could go wrong.

  TRAVELLING FOR A LIVING

  In her late teens, Claire had devoured the Work Your Way Around the World guide and piles of Lonely Planet, Guides du routard and Rough Guides travel books. She’d dreamed about writing guidebooks and had eventually wound up being paid to take part in organized tours, getaways, journeys, treks, expeditions and all sorts of off-the-beaten-path adventures.

  The years had passed, and Claire Halde had racked up passport stamps and published articles like so many victories and milestones on her personal journey toward becoming the woman who’d aspired to travel, write and, above all, feel free. But the trips weren’t like they used to be. Comfort levels had changed, and the tourists were changing too, as communications and connections—by land and sea, even in far-flung locations—became more frequent and better adapted to the obsessive Western quest for a change of scenery. As people began travelling more and all over the world, so Claire felt less inclined to help them on their way.

  She’d worked breaks into her travel itineraries, coming home at regular intervals. But, over the years and with the arrival of the kids, her enthusiasm had waned, and the wind had gone out of her sails. It didn’t bother her anymore to stay in port, to postpone her departures. The whole thing had lost its appeal, its charm, its novelty.

  She’d told her editors that she just wasn’t into it anymore, that she’d prefer to work at a desk than in the field, and that, no, she would not update a “tiny little” section of the upcoming new edition of Three Days in Valencia just because she “happened” to be on vacation in Spain.

  Yet, it’s what she’d pictured herself doing for the rest of her life. At twenty-five, fresh out of university, it had been easy to imagine that travelling and writing would be enough, that they’d fill up her days, that hopes and ambitions would be sufficiently satisfied to call it a life, a life deliberately chosen and lived to the fullest.

  It had been her roadmap.

  LANDING IN SPAIN

  Waiting at the luggage carrousel at Barcelona’s El Prat Airport, Claire stifles an exhausted yawn. She refuses to let her impatience and irritation show, refuses to pounce on every black, rectangular suitcase that looks like every other black, rectangular suitcase. Claire Halde remains stock-still, impassive, a little nostalgic for the years when she used to travel with nothing but a carry-on backpack. Standing in the middle of the bustling crowd, she downs the last few sips of her stale mineral water. So much for sparkling.

  THINGS SEEN AND DONE

  It’s fair to say that Claire Halde had travelled in her life. Since her first plane ticket—a return trip bought at the age of fifteen with the money she’d earned slaving away at her dishwashing job, spending every weekend up to her elbows in tepid water, rinsing greasy smears off stemware, washing fingerprints and lip marks off delicate goblets, scraping bland Neapolitan sauce and congealed cheese off plates at a tourist-trap trattoria in the Old Port—she’d seen a place or two.

  In the cities, she’d admired the worn stones of the cathedrals and the crumbling castles, never tiring of exploring temples or touring air-conditioned museums on days when the sweltering heat drove her indoors. She’d strolled casually through gardens and parks, where she’d picnicked, watched the pigeons and ducks, dodged aggressive monkeys roaming freely and dogs left off their leashes. She’d sat on wooden or con
crete benches, under trees in full bloom.

  She’d gotten lost in medieval streets, explored boulevards crammed with boutiques and tourists, where she’d window-shopped or bargained fiercely, always watching her step, avoiding the dog turds during the day and the giant cockroaches at night. She’d photographed panoramic vistas and bodies of water, countless ruins and architectural marvels, colourful facades, and faces that she’d found particularly inspiring, haggard, fresh or photogenic.

  She’d often ventured outside the cities to camp beneath the stars, meander through rice paddies, sail rivers and lakes in makeshift boats, cross deserts and canyons by train, spend bone-jarring nights on long bus rides, soar in planes and helicopters over four different oceans and the lands above the clouds, always attuned to the time zone, attentive to the movement of the hands on her watch, turning the tiny dial forward or backward between her thumb and index finger. She’d trekked through forests, snapping dead branches under her bulky Gore-Tex boots and jumping at the faintest sound on the trails, and she’d scaled mountains and volcanoes, barely flinching as she picked her way along the sheer rocky paths.

  Holding her breath, she’d swum through murky and crystal-clear waters alike; she’d forded rivers, water up to her neck, backpack balanced on her head, skin covered in leeches, which were later burned off with the lit tip of a cigarette. She’d asked strangers for directions, hailed taxis and tuk-tuks, hitchhiked on desolate highways in Borneo, Argentina, Mexico, Pakistan, Moldova, and her own province. She’d shared the padded bench of an eighteen-wheeler with a Kiwi travel companion, her ass planted on the hot, sticky leather next to a trucker on his first experience picking up hitchhikers. The same bench that they’d reclined come nightfall, somewhere between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, when the driver had pulled off into the parking lot of a big-box supermarket: We sleep here tonight. She’d closed her eyes, placing her trust all night long in the trucker, who had trusted her in return; no one had robbed anyone or touched anyone inappropriately, and in the morning they’d woken up to the glorious sound of birds singing in the trees, before hitting the road again.