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

aisles. It’s early afternoon in August, six years after the encounter on the roof, and the train will be pulling into the station momentarily.

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

When it comes to the sea and the beach in Valencia, Claire Halde remembers them as being completely grey, a remarkably dreary landscape scoured by a wind that numbs all feeling. Valencia is blanketed by a thick layer of fog. Claire can’t help but be reminded of the scene in the Antonioni film Red Desert, where the ship is quarantined in the misty port, and the characters are all standing some distance apart from each other, silent and still, as the fog rolls in between them on the dock, gradually engulfing them until they are swallowed up completely. Even though she knows full well that the movie is set in Italy, Claire overlaps the two different moods and lights, jumbles the sets, confuses the halftones. In her memories of Valencia, her hair is thick and lush, and it’s plastered to her face exactly like the actress in the movie when the wind blows. And there’s the same sadness in her eyes, the same sombre expression; her face is etched with a heavy weariness. In her mind’s eye, she’s Monica Vitti, staring off into the sky, gazing out over the sea in Valencia on a day that’s windy and grey, utterly grey, the light too weak to penetrate the dense fog that hangs over the shore. For Claire Halde, the Valencian seaside will forever be enveloped in a cinematic mist.

KILOMETRE 11

… I’m not the type to commune with a city while I’m running, the monuments elude me, the trees blend into the background, I forge ahead along straight lines and around bends, from time to time picking out a face, a waving hand, a child’s smile, a vista of a park or a boulevard, a bridge up ahead, it’s like I’m running through Valencia without actually seeing anything, blankly scanning everything in my path—buildings and intersections, people walking, striding, standing still, pavement and scraps of sky the odd time I decide to look up—I focus on nothing except moving forward and my determination to not quit, not slow down, not quit, not end up on a stretcher, I know what it is I don’t want to find in Valencia, but I’m not exactly sure what it is I came looking for,

maybe I’ll figure it out tomorrow, when my muscles are tired and aching, maybe I’ll feel defenceless and exposed the day after this marathon and maybe that’s what it’ll take for me to fully absorb Valencia; I’ve felt tense and nervous ever since I got here, I blamed the marathon and my fear of missing the start time or my legs giving out on me or my stomach acting up, I put it down to my fear of failing and getting injured and disappointing everyone back home in Montreal glued to their screens, tracking my progress, watching the clock and the kilometre markers tick by, but I also know that my stiffness stems from something more insidious, a deep-seated fear—I don’t want to come back from Valencia with a belly full of my mother’s misery…

KILOMETRE 12

… at first, I’d talk to you non-stop in my head, a secret dialogue, a daydream in which you were very much alive, I’d become hopelessly tangled up in sentences that I’d analyze endlessly to myself, I was somewhere else entirely, I have no idea now why I had so much to say to you, at an age when the last person kids want to talk to is their mother, but not me, I was constantly drawn back to that conversation in my brain, I’d fill you in on my days at school or what I ate, but other times our talks were more serious, about my disappointments, my heartbreaks, my unrequited loves, then, as time went by, the exchanges fizzled out, that was no way to spend my teen years…

… our conversation struck up again when I took up running, I started talking to the runner you once were, to the woman I’d have liked at my side, for all those kilometres that we couldn’t run together; it’s a more resigned sort of conversation now, I’d have liked to have a mother who was bright and present, a mother without any cracks, not an unreal mother floating in a ray of light, set for all eternity against an autumn backdrop, face frozen in a mysterious expression…

KILOMETRE 13

… almost one-quarter, no, one-third down, and each step brings me closer to the finish line, I run straight ahead, no zigzagging, following the white line painted on the ground, so far, so good, relax your shoulders, I think I need to pee, but I don’t want to stop, don’t think about it, it’ll pass…

… this too shall pass, you used to say to me, Mama, when I was upset as a kid, and then there was that verse by Rilke that you’d pinned up over your desk: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

… beauty and terror, that moose on the deserted, snow-covered highway, blood flowing from its flank, majestic, eyes moist, an enormous creature materialized from the forest, the screeching of the brakes, the violent lurch of our bodies and the miracle, the car skidding and coming to a stop mere inches from the animal, which took off at a gallop, leaving a trail of blood behind it in the snow, its antlers wider than a child lying on its side, and you, screaming in terror, pounding your forehead against the steering wheel, and me, so small in my car seat, reassuring you: But he’s not dead, Mama, we’re not dead, it’s okay, you didn’t kill him…

KILOMETRE 14

… when I’m running, I allow myself to surrender to the movement, to my linear progression