The Woman in Valencia by Annie Perreault (book recommendations website txt) 📗

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