The Woman in Valencia, Annie Perreault [parable of the sower read online .txt] 📗

quiet: museum trips and meals taken on the patio, all-you-can-eat patatas bravas and churros for the kids, afternoons at the beach, cava and tinto de verano, miles of late-night runs for Claire and Jean, each one in turn, and masses of Iberian ham. The nights all meld into one, indistinguishable. They barely make love, but the act has become so mechanical that it doesn’t even register with Claire anymore. When she thinks back on it, Claire Halde can’t picture herself climaxing between those sheets, in that unremarkable room. She seems to recall a flowered bedspread and white furniture. There were French doors that opened up onto the patio, but she’s forgotten what the sunlight looked like in the morning, when the first light of dawn would filter into the room and she’d open her eyes with indifference at the prospect of another day spent playing tourist.

LEAVING BARCELONA

That July, not a single drop of rain falls on Barcelona. Since they’re not in the habit of spending their summers in the Catalonian capital, they don’t notice anything out of the ordinary at first. Seasonal temperatures, they tell themselves. But it doesn’t take long before Claire and Jean are wilting under the blazing sun, seeking out shade at every opportunity.

The mounting string of days without rain becomes the reason for everything that disappoints, disorients and discourages them: their exhaustion, their lovers’ quarrels that are a sign of things to come, the shops and museums closed for the annual summer holiday, their lack of enthusiasm for planning outings, the price of vegetables, the blandness of the strawberries. In a way, it’s even why they end up in Valencia—the need to get away from the stifling heat of Barcelona, if only for three days.

Their little side trip gets off to a bad start. It’s the first week of August, and the car rental places have nothing left but stick shifts. They look at each other sheepishly, embarrassed that neither of them knows how to drive one. As they leave the rental agency, to get a laugh out of Claire, Jean hums, “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me?”

So, they book four train tickets to Valencia departing from Barcelona Sants.

AT THE TRAIN STATION

Claire Halde and her family leave Barcelona at 9:44 a.m. from platform 12, destination Valencia. She has no way of knowing that she’ll make almost the same trip again six years later, only alone. At the moment, she’s pushing a toddler in a striped romper, leading a little girl by the hand, rushing a man who doesn’t like to be rushed. The purse slung across her chest is banging into her hip and digging into her belly uncomfortably as she makes her way across the concourse. She’s sweating and she has the look of a harried mom who desperately wants to be on time but fully expects to be sidetracked by last-minute pee emergencies, squabbling kids and distracted husbands: Honey, have you seen my passport? She leads her crew single file across the uneven concrete like a toy sailboat cutting a course through the glassy waters of a park pond.

ON THE TRAIN

Outside the train window, the countryside flashes by in an endless, unremarkable blur, a monochromatic sea of yellow. Buildings are few and far between, and the light is pooling spectacularly in the furrows of the barren fields. Some of the passengers are staring at the passing landscape with waning attention, losing the battle with sleep. Others, riveted to their mobiles, engrossed in work or a book, don’t even look up at the stunning scenery and coastline.

Claire resists sleep. The view soothes her, and her eyes linger on the landscape. Her eyelids are drooping; her son’s head is resting in her lap, hair damp at the back of his neck. The train seems to cleave the earth, moving forward over the miles and hours in a numbing rolling motion. All sense of time and space disappear, and the line blurs between inside and outside. The train follows the tracks—all that steel, assembled by men from another century who toiled hungrily for countless hours under the fierce sun so that she, Claire Halde, soon to be thirty-four, should find herself here on this summer day, in second class, compartment 7, comfortably ensconced in a navy blue upholstered window seat with hygienic headrest cover, headed to Valencia for a few days’ stay at a hotel.

DISCOVERING VALENCIA

Valencia: citrus groves, the coastline, neither north nor south, but somewhere in the middle of Spain’s east coast, in the centre of the horta. Claire Halde had only a vague notion of the geography and she’d had to look it up on a map at one point. Or maybe it’s the high school Spanish classes coming back to her, particularly the lesson on train stations and train travel: ¿ A qué hora sale el tren por Bilbao por favor? She remembers the stern voice of the man on the recording who’d repeat each sentence twice, followed by the sudden, loud click of the teacher pressing the tape recorder button. She recalls the problems she’d had wrapping her lips and tongue around the jota, hesitating over the tonic accent, stumbling over the guttural sounds and cursing the Castilian letters g, j, and r—consonants and syllables that thumbed their noses at her and seemed to clatter clumsily against her teeth, wet with saliva, when they should have bounced suavely off her palate and sprung forth with agility and confidence from her vibrating vocal cords. She remembers feeling like she’d swallowed the sounds rather than spit them out (without the spit, of course). With jaw tired and aching and feeling like a marble-mouth, she’d longed for silence, hiding behind an insipid smile and the intense and mysterious gaze of a precocious teenager, as much as to say, why waste my breath, leaving people wondering whether she was stuck-up or just shy.

Valencia: sounds, voices on a cassette in Spanish class,