She descends the stairs on legs as nebulous as smoke, picking her way down the five-hundred-year-old steps like she was walking through water, haunted by the terrifying, stomach-lurching vision of the fall the whole way down. Her attraction to the void is just one of the obsessions she’s been battling since childhood, on top of her bizarre impulse to stick a needle in her eye and her disturbing compulsion to jump onto the metro tracks or throw herself out of a speeding car while riding shotgun down a highway.
WHERE TO SLEEP?
She’d booked a room at the Valencia Palace for the first three nights. For the rest of her stay, she’d created an account on couchsurfing.com at the last minute, to prove to herself that she was still capable of handling the unknown, of travelling like she did in her twenties, of going with the flow, of sleeping anywhere. For her profile, she’d picked a Slavic-sounding first name, chosen a good picture of herself—sparkling eyes and mysterious half-smile—filled out the questionnaire conservatively, emphasizing her extensive travels, areas of interest and flawless Spanish.
During her travels, Claire had let many a toothless old man take her in his arms. Mothers had pinched her cheeks with squeals of delight, handing over their bare-bottomed babies for her to dandle on her knee during interminable and inconvenient connections. In the capital cities of southeast Asia, in two-dollar-a-night guest houses—windowless rooms, mattresses on the floor reeking of pest repellant, ceiling fans spinning lazily—she’d shared quarters with heroin addicts and prostitutes, smiling at them without making eye contact. At nineteen, she’d promised herself she’d never end up like them, even as she feared she’d never be able to keep that promise.
She sometimes thinks about other travellers she’s crossed paths with over the years. Some had come on to her, inviting her to cross North America with them on the back of their motorbike, others had made love to her under the sky, taught her the ropes of stargazing, sent her postcards, sung her sad songs, bought her beers and trinkets. Strangers had taken her into their homes, held her hand while crossing Stalin-era boulevards in bleak Eastern European cities, keeping her safe as they would a child. All the while she’d been a prideful young woman in her twenties, carried along by her sense of freedom and wanderlust, by her curiosity and cravings, wanting much more from the world than it had to offer.
As Claire Halde had grown older, she had grown out of the habit of falling in with groups of fellow travellers. Or at least that’s what she tells herself as she stands in front of the oversized mirror in the bathroom adjoining her room, wiping the makeup off her eyes, bloodshot from the contact lenses scraping against her eyeballs—goddamned dry eye syndrome—the sun, and her flaking mascara.
In bed, she checks her Couchsurfing inbox, where she finds several replies to her couch request, mostly from men. Some just want to take her out for a drink, like Juan Carlos, or meet her for a short run. One offers to pick her up at the train station, another to put her up for a few nights at his seaside apartment in El Perelló, twenty-odd kilometres outside of Valencia. Manuel has attached pictures of the sunset and a table beautifully laid for breakfast on the patio—Italian coffee pot gleaming in the sun, orange juice in stemmed glasses, croissants and a glob of jam in a soup plate, white tablecloth—assuring her she’ll have her own room and that he’s very excited to meet her, that it’ll be an honour for him to have her in his home. She accepts his invitation because he’s the first to reply to her with so much enthusiasm and because, if the photos are to be believed, the horizon in El Perelló, with its blue sky and flat, waveless sea, promises to bring her some sense of peace.
KILOMETRE 21.1
… I can see the arch and the time clock signalling the half-marathon, one hour fifty-nine minutes, all good so far, I’m matching my breathing to my pace, with each step I take, I slowly exchange the air in my lungs with the air outside, no pain, just a perfect rhythm that evens out my movements, head straight and determined, focused on the action of running, lungs and heart in sync on my course across Valencia, I bear down on the port, the ships in their moorings stand out sharply against the sky, hulking metal monsters, I run toward the most hostile point on the horizon, the beauty of sea ports, departures, trips, they’ve always filled me with apprehension, before you were born, Laure, your mother would take off at every chance she got, she was always like that, we couldn’t get her to stay put…
… my father had loved her, among other reasons, for her urge to travel to the farthest reaches of the planet, and when I read Flaubert, in French class in college, I’d automatically replaced the him in Sentimental Education with a her, hoping she’d be back—she returned home—memorizing that passage like a supplication that might one day bring my mother back to me, it’s crazy, I still remember the quote word-for-word from my literature class:
She travelled a long time.
She experienced the melancholy associated with packet-boats, the chill feeling on waking up under tents, the dizzy effect of mountains and ruins, and the bitterness of broken sympathies.
She returned home.
… she did not return home, she still hasn’t come home, all that remains are the photos from
