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

At this point in the night, a distance, a feeling of mistrust even, creeps into the vehicle, between their two surly selves. Manuel asks: Does it bother you if I smoke in the car? She shakes her head no, go ahead and smoke. They roll down their windows a crack, enough to let in a stream of cold air, a few drops of drizzle. Claire lights up her own cigarette, coughs a little. A tendril of smoke drifts up to her face, burning her eyes and throat. She would have preferred something other than a Marlboro to calm her down—a scotch, maybe, or a sleeping pill.

Outside, everything is magnified and amplified—the movement of the windshield wipers, the rain drumming against the window, the howling of the wind, the carbon-paper blackness of the night—while, inside her head, her thoughts are swirling in slow motion, as though she were sliding into a drug-induced sleep, her pulse growing weaker. Her lungs feel like they’re filling with white glue. Claire closes her eyes, tells herself everything will be fine, they can’t be that lost. Keep going, no feeling is final.

EL PERELLÓ

We’re here, he says. The headlights light up a street covered in water, deserted at this time of night. They look for a parking space, get themselves turned around for a brief minute. He points triumphantly to the building where they’ll spend the next three nights, but they keep driving, finally coming to a stop some two hundred metres from the front door.

They grab their luggage and make a break for it, getting their feet soaking wet. They end up with hair plastered to their foreheads, ankles and calves splattered with warm, dirty water. Finally, Manuel pushes open a door, lets Claire walk through ahead of him. It’s a building right on the sea, with a spacious lobby covered floor to ceiling in tiles, complete with tiled mural. There’s a potted plant in one corner and a lone lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, around which insects buzz incessantly until they drop to the ground from exhaustion.

They step into a slow, tiny elevator, so cramped their hips are touching, the suitcase taking up one-third of the available space. On the sixth floor, he lets her out first, motioning her to go right with a jerk of his head. He brings a set of keys up to his face, explains how the lock works. The keys jangle, and the door swings open into a dark apartment. A dank smell permeates the air, laced with bleach and musty towel. A whiff of salt air, too, embedded in the wallpaper.

He flicks a switch, and the yellow glow from a bare lightbulb illuminates the outmoded decor of an apartment frozen in time.

So, this is my family’s summer place, he says. One by one, he gives her a tour of the rooms where he and his brothers spent their vacations as children. She chooses one and sets her suitcase down at the foot of a colonial-style bed draped in a dusty rose duvet. There’s only one opening in the wall for ventilation, a window as narrow as an arrow slit, which looks onto an empty, paved square shared with the neighbouring apartments. Claire sticks her head out. She looks up—she can’t make out the sky, it’s dark and murky, stifling—then looks down: The sight of the concrete six floors below makes her dizzy. In a flash, she pictures her body pitching forward over the edge, like a carp leaping through the air, then disappearing. She takes a step back, her face betraying nothing of her disturbing thoughts.

She follows Manuel into the kitchen. A fluorescent light buzzes on the ceiling, the empty refrigerator hums. The counter is bare save for a jug of water and a percolator; not much to see. Manuel switches off the light and asks Claire not to turn it on if she comes into the kitchen at night: It bothers the old lady next door, who’s a light sleeper, and she’ll find any excuse to complain. There’s a balcony off the living room that overlooks the beach, the sea and a starless sky that’s barely discernible, engulfed in a summer rain.

*

The sun first thing in the morning is already blinding. Claire moves silently down the long hallway leading to the balcony. The French door was left open all night. The air is fresh; the sea, a flat, dark line. The metal chairs gleam on the patio, the concrete looks even whiter in the bright sunlight. The rain from the night before has evaporated without a trace.

Claire looks left, then right. The beach is completely empty—no vegetation, no greenery, no birds—and bordered by a cement wall; a beach so colourless it might have been dipped in peroxide. The town at dawn is so completely silent, you’d think it had been drained of all life, razed by the whiteness emanating from the sky, by a blinding flash, a dagger of light.

She approaches the railing, grabs onto it. Her fingers curl tightly around the metal, turning pink like delicate parrot’s feet on an incandescent perch. She needs something to lean on for support, to be able to peer six floors down. Ochre- and cream-coloured tiles form a mosaic on the ground. She takes a step back. There’s that feeling again: calves giving out on her, muscles dissolving into a puddle, ankles wobbling—the feeling like she might lose her footing at any minute. Claire sits down, the chair searing hot under her thighs. In an attempt to banish the mental image of her body shattering on the ground six floors below, she stares off into the distance, tracking the odd holiday-goer already up and about in the sleepy resort town. Life at dawn moves in slow motion, to the muffled sound of the waves, the background music to the luxurious laziness of summer vacation. She sees a few people, elderly for the most part, out for their constitutional on the beach, walking their dogs, going for a