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
