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

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.

GETTING AROUND BARCELONA

After arriving in the Catalan capital, Claire wades into the August heat; it’s early afternoon and the last patrons are making their way off the patios, restaurant owners are pulling down their steel grates, people are sluggish from too much meat, wine and dessert, full up with small talk. The sidewalks are sizzling, and the air is heavy with humidity. Claire’s feet are dragging, and her shoulder is aching from pulling her bag awkwardly behind her. Her fingers grip the sticky handle of the rolling suitcase, a medium-sized receptacle that holds everything she’ll need for her trip. Dresses and paperbacks, shampoo and sandals, a few running outfits, a bathing suit, sunscreen, a light sweater for the cool evenings. Every now and then, the case bumps over a stray pebble, a crack in the sidewalk or an uneven paving stone and teeters like a woman who’s had too much to drink.

She has an appointment at three o’clock to pick up the keys for a tiny room she’s booked through Airbnb. She’s hungry and tired, already tired, and the trip is just getting started.

WHERE TO SLEEP?

Claire had laid the full weight of her eyelids on hundreds of pillows in her years as a traveller. Between sheets worn thin by other bodies, she’d woken up to the sound of the muezzin calling the believers to prayer, the cacophony of howler monkeys, the strident wake-up calls of roosters, the admonishments of mothers scolding their brood. Her memory had eventually dimmed on the string of nights and rooms, the exact moments of drifting off and waking up, and even the dreams—the succession of chills, nightmares and sweats in borrowed beds. Only vague impressions remained of laundromat smells, damp, creased cotton, springs creaking and insects scuttling about in cheap rooms, rough woollen blankets rasping in sleeper cars. But she clearly remembered the obese rats scurrying in the ceiling, the throat-clearing, coughing and spitting in the adjacent rooms, sometimes accompanied by shameless cries of ecstasy, and she could still see the white mice darting past her feet, their red eyes gleaming, gnawing at the walls and leaving piles of droppings behind in the dresser drawers.

During her nights plagued by insomnia, she’d been hyper-aware of the slightest sounds: the gurgling of the radiator, the whirling of the fan, the creaking of a door in the hallway, the breathing of travel companions with whom she’d shared rooms, beds, or ships’ cabins on long ocean crossings. Yes, for years, Claire Halde had preferred changes of scenery to life in one place.

WHERE TO EAT?

The metal implements click against the porcelain, blade slicing back and forth, fork spearing a pea. Staring across the checkered tablecloth at the empty chair across from her, Claire spins the delicate teaspoon counterclockwise, an idle movement designed to kill time. Her neighbour to the left is doing the same thing, sawing away with knife and fork at a particularly sinewy bit—seems the stew on the menu of the day wasn’t such a great choice, after all. He dips his knife into the dainty butter dish, tears apart a roll in a shower of crumbs, and butters his bread meticulously. His chewing is ill-mannered, his bites man-sized, clearly the appetite of a guy who’s worked all his life, who earns a living from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., then again from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. He checks his watch often and looks at Claire only once, out of the corner of his eye; he smiles vaguely and turns his attention back to his flan, jabbing it repeatedly with his spoon, polishing it off in four bites. He raises his hand to call for a coffee, then to summon the bill. Claire is still stretching out her dessert, a berry sorbet, which she nibbles through pursed lips, like someone who’s not crazy about cold food or fruit. Time passes in a succession of tiny bites, and the sorbet melts. After all that, it’s almost 3 p.m.

NOT TO BE MISSED: CULINARY DELICACIES

During her travels, Claire Halde had sampled a variety of foods with either curiosity or indifference: exotic fruits; traditional dishes; bland, pasty gruels; local sweets; Turkish delights that had stuck to the roof of her mouth in the streets of Istanbul; assorted confections; Italian ices; and myriad varieties of rice, kasha, flatbreads, fried breads and soft breads. In the port city of one of the Maluku Islands, she’d savoured a pineapple that she’d never forget, its juices running down her wrist while she waited for a cargo ship that was taking its sweet time docking. On the Trans-Siberian Railway, she’d drunk countless cups of tea and eaten a pot of rhubarb jam (a gift for the train ride to the Urals) with a tiny spoon. In Warsaw, she’d downed her first-ever cup of coffee, a bitter Turkish brew, in one gulp. Somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, she’d been laid flat by seasickness, puking up her meal over the railing: salty noodles in a greasy broth, the lone menu item on the Ambon-Surabaya crossing. And again, years later, head pounding and pinned to her bed in the middle of a storm on an expedition through the Patagonian fjords, she’d choked down her