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

lines hangs slackly. Manuel squirms in his seat, a mortified look on his face. He runs a hand through his hair, steps on the gas. We’re going to die, we’re going to die right here, just steps away from the Valencia Palace. They hit a curb. The noise is ominous: once, twice, the sound of grinding metal. Manuel jerks the wheel to the right, and the car finally frees itself from the tracks.

He pulls over a little further along, on a deserted, poorly lit street. He scrubs his hands over his face, presses his fingers against his eyelids. Claire isn’t sure what to do with herself. She stays frozen in her seat, strapped in by the safety belt, head turned toward the window and the blackness of the night beyond.

As though addressing her own reflection in the glass—that blonde figure she can’t quite reconcile herself with—she conducts a silent interview, summing up the situation dispassionately: It’s after midnight, you’re in a car with a man you don’t know, on the outskirts of a dispiriting city, and you could have just died together, mown down by a tram. Maybe, deep down, you don’t really care all that much if you live or die, she observes even more starkly.

Manuel grabs his phone and calls his mother on speaker. The confused voice of an elderly lady comes over the line:

“You woke me up. Where are you?”

“I’m in Valencia with a friend. She’s from Russia.”

Claire continues to stare out the window, into the blackness. She imagines the old woman in her Madrid apartment, in her nightgown, head covered with thick, dull hair, skin speckled with age spots.

“I’m worried about you.”

“Everything’s fine, Mama, I love you,” he answers, his voice breaking.

It makes Claire Halde uncomfortable to see this man, whose self-assurance had been so impressive seven hours earlier, now acting like a little boy about to dissolve into a puddle of hiccupping sobs, calling his elderly mother for comfort instead of turning to her.

He finally hangs up. He apologizes to Claire, tells her he feels terrible, that he understands if she doesn’t trust him anymore. She replies matter-of-factly, “It’s fine, but what about your car? We still need to get where we’re going, get out of this goddamned city.”

She wants to go to sleep, huddle up in bed, finally be alone for a minute so she can process this bizarre day. Manuel steps out of the car, gets down on all fours on one side, then the other. He sighs profusely, but his voice is steady. Everything seems fine. He doesn’t see any leaks. He slides back in behind the wheel, lets out another long sigh, wipes his forehead with his arm, then turns the key.

They ease back onto the road, finally finding the entrance to the highway on the other side of the Valencia Palace. I never want to see this place again, Claire Halde thinks as the car picks up speed.

GETTING ORIENTED

The car flies down the highway, and Manuel is still on edge. They’ve lost the GPS again, after giving up on trying to hold the cord just so. Without a signal, they’re navigating mostly on instinct. The silence in the car is oppressive. Claire hazards a question: Do you know where you’re going? Does anything look familiar? He mumbles something not at all reassuring. She keeps her eyes pointed forward.

The alcohol is mostly out of her system by now, and this whole business suddenly seems like a bad idea. Her jaw clenches. The Mercedes enters a roundabout. Manuel hesitates over which way to go—he’s obviously never been here before—and opts for an extra spin around the traffic circle. Claire feels dizzy, and the constant turning is making her queasy. She feels like their circular trajectory might never stop, like the car might keep going indefinitely, around and around this paved circle without ever finding a way out. She snaps out of it and reads the road signs out to Manuel, who finally takes one of the exits marked on the bright blue panel.

Darkness surrounds them, making it difficult to get their bearings. There’s not a building or a tree in sight, let alone any sign of human life; the glow of a distant streetlamp grows dimmer. Manuel accelerates, revving the engine. They pass a stretch of dull, colourless fields, like a steppe that’s suddenly sprung up on the outskirts of Valencia, in the precise spot where the guidebooks say they should see a freshwater lake surrounded by rice fields, orange trees, grapevines, almond plantations. They roll on in silence, unsettled by the gritty landscape, until the road ends abruptly. A row of concrete blocks bars their way. They’re surrounded by a sea of dry, straggly grass, and everywhere, dust. The night is filled with the sound of crickets chirping. A huge billboard advertises a water park some ten kilometres away: a bikini-clad mother, with tanned skin and impossibly white teeth, arms wrapped around her children, who are wriggling with excitement, their bottoms squeezed into oversized inner tubes. Okay, so this is where it happens, in this deserted field, this is where five men are going to jump out, rape you, and toss your body in the last clump of bushes around that hasn’t yet crumbled to dust, in the middle of nowhere, and burn your passport. The thought grows inside her, solidifies: You fell for it, you silly bitch, that’s what happens when you think you’re invincible. They’ll say: She asked for it, seriously, it wasn’t going to end well. A deep pit opens up inside her, like the night has just swallowed up a piece of her stomach.

Without a word, Manuel throws the car in reverse, drives back to the roundabout, takes a different exit this time. As they skirt Valencia, still not sure where they’re going, the skies open up. The rain starts to come down harder, the wipers punctuating the thick silence hanging between them with a steady swish-thunk. They’re beginning to second-guess the entire plan.