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

the act of dying, of choosing his death. We might as well fly, is what might have crossed his mind as he made the final decision of his life.

Claire doesn’t see the body of the woman in Valencia slice through the few square feet of air that separate the roof from the sidewalk. She sees the gleam in her eyes ten seconds before she goes through with the act and the subtle forward motion of her body, and in the time it takes to blink once, she imagines the rest: the fall and the impact, the bones and the concrete.

Because she didn’t see it happen, there’s nothing realistic about the fall that she forces herself to picture over and over; it resists all attempts at reconstruction. When Claire thinks back on the scene, it’s not a real body that she sees plunging four floors in the space of just a few seconds. Instead, her memory conjures up images of crash test dummies. It’s a ragdoll, a fake body without bones or blood that Claire pictures flying through the air when she thinks about the woman in Valencia’s fall. A naked jumping jack, head round like an egg, with empty eye sockets staring out of a featureless face.

*

Then there are the famous photos of bodies sprawled out on the ground after “the most beautiful suicide.” It’s hard not to cringe at the thought of a fatal fall. Instinctively, we turn our head, squeeze our eyes shut. Yet we can’t help but gaze with fascination on the luminous beauty of Evelyn McHale after her leap from the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building, immortalized by Warhol in his “Death and Disasters” series. What possible explanation could there be for the peaceful countenance of the young accountant, entombed in the wreckage of the car she landed on, her unblemished body resting on its bed of crushed metal, draped in the elegant folds of her red dress, legs slender and feet bare, eyelids gently closed as though she were taking a nap on Fifth Avenue?

*

Frozen next to her lounge chair, the oversized tote bag dangling from her wrist, Claire can’t picture the brutal end of the scene. In disbelief, she replays what’s just happened on fast forward. Each time, she stumbles over the fraction of a second when, almost as bizarrely as the woman had approached her from out of nowhere a few minutes earlier, she’d disappeared violently from her field of vision with one final backward glance. In that indefinable amount of time—one second or three minutes, who can say—an entire life was upended.

Claire turns her head toward her children and the worried face of her daughter, who’s running in her direction. In her mind’s eye—that of a panic-stricken mother—the woman’s glance is superimposed by another image: her daughter running carefree toward her, then freezing, stopping dead, alarmed by what will become a childhood memory, a recollection of their trip to Spain. Later, Laure would come to understand that she had seen a woman die.

Claire will not explain anything to her six-year-old, who is staring at her with wide, dark eyes, eyebrows arched, baby-smooth brow furrowed with worry. Standing there dripping in her pink polka-dotted bikini, she asks her mother again: But why did that lady jump? Why? Why do you have that bag, Mama?

*

When retelling the story afterwards, Claire will come to say, “The sky was grey.” She’ll become fixated on the greyness of the sky, even though she could have sworn the sun had been blinding that day as the woman walked toward her.

She definitely seems to remember that they were both squinting as they stared at one another, that the harsh afternoon light had chased away all traces of shadow, heightening the contrasts between objects and bodies, like in the glaring light of an operating room. She’d been cemented to her deck chair, her brain addled—sun stupid, she’s convinced. In the days that followed, she even remembers thinking about Meursault’s argument in The Stranger, when he claims at his trial that he killed the Arab because of the sun. It’s possible that the weather had turned suddenly, that the sky had clouded over and the air cooled off; in fact, it’s not inconceivable that the clouds had rolled in late in the day and that the steel-grey sky, pregnant with the promise of a storm, had become an indelible part of her memory. The sun had played its part, then exited stage left, like a traitor, and Claire had begun to shiver. Or maybe she had simply imagined the grey sky, the cold and the chills.

Something freezes over in her mind when she pronounces the four syllables of Valencia. She flashes back to an ashen sky, an unmemorable room, a pool, an air-conditioned gym with treadmills and a long, mirrored wall that she runs in front of without breaking a sweat. Claire has forgotten the temperature of the Mediterranean; she’s forgotten the train station and the Valencia Cathedral, but she remembers with clinical precision the feeling of freezing on the rooftop of the Valencia Palace Hotel as the woman walked over to her, handed her the purse, then threw herself over the edge.

*

Claire keeps a cool head. A blizzard rages in her veins, slowing her circulation to a crawl despite her mad dash to the elevator. It’s just her and the purse in the metal cage as it makes its way down, and her heart—that four-chambered hollow organ—is pounding furiously in her chest.

Claire eyes the zipper on the tote bag, reluctant to open it before handing it over to the police. A woman’s purse is a sacred vessel, a repository of memories and secrets: a brainbox, only pliable.

She thinks about her own purse. She wouldn’t want a strange woman rummaging around in it, seeing the mess, pawing through all that junk: scraps of paper, keys, forgotten bank statements still in their envelopes, tattered receipts, little girl’s drawings of bright yellow suns, chewing gum, cellophane-wrapped peppermints