WORTH THE DETOUR:
THE VALENCIA INSTITUTE OF MODERN ART
As they’d agreed in their messages on couchsurfing.com, Manuel and Claire would spend the day together before heading to the apartment in El Perelló. Astonishingly, it turns out she knows Valencia better than he does. He’d spent every summer since he was a little boy in the apartment twenty minutes outside of the city without ever really exploring it or learning his way around. He had only vague memories of his visits and doesn’t know the names of the cathedrals or any good places to eat. She never lets on otherwise, but Claire secretly views this lack of curiosity, this travel apathy, with contempt. She gives him an indulgent smile and pulls out her city map, smoothing out the wrinkles with her fingers.
“I’m from Madrid,” he apologizes. “A Madrileño, born and bred.”
So, she guides the Madrileño through the winding streets of Ciutat Vella, introduces him to the murals painted by an Argentinian artist, navigates them to the Valencia Institute of Modern Art, tells him about the Nan Goldin photos that made such an impression on her during her last visit that she went to see them twice more in New York. To see them strolling together from painting to painting, whispering about their likes and dislikes, you’d never guess that they’d only just met at noon that same day. They stand next to each other, shoulders touching lightly, transfixed by that famous scene from Battleship Potemkin—the black-veiled woman, her face contorted with pain, and the runaway baby carriage with the oversized wheels barrelling down the Odessa steps for what feels like an eternity—projected in an endless loop on a wall of the exhibition hall.
The hours pass in silence. They wander from the Dadaists to the Surrealists, then to a collection of posters dating from the Franco dictatorship, where they don’t linger. This wouldn’t really interest you, he asserts. She doesn’t force the issue.
NOT TO BE MISSED: MERCADO DE COLÓN
After touring the museum, they walk over to the Mercado de Colón to meet up with Juan Carlos, a man with a strong jaw, bright gaze, hair as short as his fingernails. While mostly a homebody, he gets a kick out of meeting other travellers. He’s the unofficial doyen of couchsurfing in Valencia, always proud to show off his city, host strangers, cook a paella for his new friends.
The trio orders cocktails. The conversation flows easily. Juan Carlos asks Claire what brings her to Valencia. I’m here to write a screenplay, she lies with surprising ease. They look at her with interest, eager for more details. For effect, she adopts a serious tone and launches into detail: The woman is blonde and injured, the sky is hazy, the scene a stifling rooftop terrace of a hotel, there’s an atmosphere of unease, worry, mystery running through the film, we don’t know who the woman is, and we never find out, she ends up jumping off the roof, we don’t know why. Manuel and Juan Carlos put forward hypotheses: Maybe she was this, or that, you need to invent a life for her.
“I’ve never met a filmmaker before,” Manuel marvels. Claire smiles modestly, looks down at her sandals, answers that, at the moment, there’s no actual movie, only a screenplay.
“Obviously, it would make a great movie,” Juan Carlos adds. “It’s got everything: mood, drama, mystery, setting, you’re on to something here.”
Claire smiles again, amazed at how well she’s keeping up the lie. Juan Carlos starts talking about a neighbour, a Valencian who jumped out a window the month before and landed in front of the kiosk belonging to the flower seller, who had to be taken to hospital for shock. Everywhere, at all hours of the day, people are killing themselves, taking their lives.
Claire doesn’t elaborate on her plans or her personal life: “The children are staying with their father for ten days. We haven’t lived together for four years.” Juan Carlos corrects her when she stumbles over her Spanish verb tenses or flubs a subjunctive. She studies him closely, blown away by his confidence, his calm expression, the large hands of a fluid mechanical engineer. She’s almost sorry he didn’t offer to put her up and wonders if she wouldn’t have been better off staying with this utterly decent, impeccably groomed man, accustomed to taking things in hand, to solving problems, to studying the behaviour of bubbles and whirlpools.
“They may seem straightforward, but bubbles are often unpredictable, in both the shapes they take and their trajectories,” he explains to them. “A little like people, like chance meetings, Anna,” he adds, smiling at Claire. Even though they’re both forty, next to Juan Carlos, Manuel looks like a ragamuffin or an overgrown teenager. And it’s too late now for a change of plans.
IN THE CAR
It’s late when they finally get back to the car after parting ways with Juan Carlos, at the end of a leisurely meal of Andalusian tapas. Claire and Manuel had to run to catch the last metro, which lets them off near the Valencia Palace.
Manuel is nervous. His phone is dead, and he doesn’t know his way out of Valencia. His phone charger is frayed, so he asks Claire to hold it at a certain angle to keep the wires together. She can’t get the hang of it. The GPS keeps flickering on and off.
“Left,” she says, consulting the screen.
“Here?”
“No, the next one.”
Too late. He turns left down the first street.
“The next one! You were supposed to take the next one.”
On her right, she notices a sign, a circle with a diagonal line through it. Everything is happening very quickly. The headlights glint off a set of rails on the ground.
“The tramway! We’re on the tram tracks!”
Above their heads, a set of parallel 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. 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 morning jog, sweeping sand off the floor tiles.
Manuel is still sleeping. Claire slips on a pair of shorts, a tank top and running shoes, and straightens her hair. The sweat is already beading on the back of her neck. It’s going to be a hot one. On the table in the entryway, she finds the set of keys, which she stuffs into her shorts pocket along with a twenty-euro bill. She leaves the apartment, closing the door softly behind her. She doesn’t leave a note on the table; let Manuel worry if he wakes up.
*
She runs in a straight line, parallel to the sea. It’s quiet here; the people she passes look hale and hardy, tanned and relaxed, like nothing in this vacation village could faze them. Bit by bit, the stiffness drains from her body, and she lets herself be lulled by the ocean air, the dazzling sun. Her jaw softens.
What an amazing machine the heart is, Claire has thought ever since she first started running a few years ago, coming to the sport at the age of thirty-three, marvelling at the sheer power of the organ, which she’d never really overtaxed up to that point, not even as a small child or a teenager.
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