Jean-Philippe Toussaint - Reticence

I’d gone to wait for the owner at the top of the low flight of steps leading up to the entrance, and after a moment I saw him trudge down the hall to come open the door. His pajama pants hung down his thighs and his step was slow and cumbersome. He’d left the door of his room open behind him and switched on the yellowish night-light in the hall, which cast a pale shimmer of light onto the walls of the ground floor. He crouched down at the base of the glass door to unlock it and, opening one of the double doors to let me in, he told me that my son had been crying, that he’d heard him crying a little while ago. I looked at him without moving. And now, I asked in a low voice, he’s gone back to sleep? He didn’t answer right away, and I examined his face in the feeble light. I don’t know, he said, I didn’t go up, I thought you were with him. I started immediately up the stairs to my room and, as I arrived on the landing of the second floor, I heard a door close in the hotel and the light went out almost simultaneously in the hall. A time switch then kicked in and started reverberating in the darkness, and there was no sound in the hall apart from its regular mechanical buzz.

When I opened the door of my room I immediately saw my son lying in his travel cot in the dim light. The little blanket and sheets were all tangled and he was holding his stuffed seal against his chest. His breathing was slow and peaceful and his hairline was covered in a few tiny beads of sweat. I had an urge to take him in my arms, but I contented myself just to caress his forehead softly, standing beside him for another moment and watching him sleep. He must have had a little nightmare and woken up in the middle of the night, and now he was sleeping with his mouth open, my little guy, his face relaxed and his eyes shut. After covering his chest with his little blanket, I went over and lay down fully dressed on the bed. I stayed like that on my back and didn’t move, my eyes open in the darkness. There wasn’t a sound in the hotel, and I thought that the port must also be completely silent now, its smooth, quiet waters undulating peacefully in the half-light with the deceptive tranquility of dormant water.

It was a little past nine thirty when I left my room the next morning. Apparently all of the guests had already left the hotel because the hallway was perfectly silent when I started up the little stairway leading to the top floor. It was a very narrow staircase that doubled back on itself and led up to a long, dark hallway covered with threadbare carpeting. Four doors led onto the hallway, the first of which was partway open revealing a sort of walk-in closet where several chairs were stored in the darkness beside an old mattress lying on the ground. The other doors, closed and silent, must have belonged to guestrooms because there were white plastic numbers glued to all three. So there were rooms on the top floor after all, numbers fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. Still standing in the hallway I looked at the three closed doors thinking that Biaggi was staying in one of these rooms. Because Biaggi, now I was sure of it, must have come to stay at the hotel a couple of days before my arrival. In fact he’d always needed such isolation to work, and even if I couldn’t be sure he’d already taken a room in Sasuelo in the past, I did know he had a habit of working in hotel rooms in other cities for more or less prolonged periods of time. But above all, I thought, where had Biaggi been last night if not at the hotel? Because last night — this I knew for sure — Biaggi hadn’t been at home.

I’d gone down for breakfast, and the owner didn’t even look in my direction when I came into the dining room. Leftovers still covered the tables, small half-finished packets of jam and butter lay on the plates, and here and there wrinkled napkins were rolled up into balls and abandoned on the tablecloths amid a scattering of crumbs. Four tables had been occupied, which intrigued me because it seemed to me that there hadn’t been so many guests on other days. Could it be that someone who didn’t normally eat breakfast in the dining room came down today for the first time? Could it be that Biaggi — because I immediately thought of Biaggi — had come down to have breakfast in the dining room this morning? But if it was Biaggi, I thought, why had he come down precisely today for the first time? Why, if he was at the hotel, didn’t he have his breakfast brought up to his room as he must have done on the other days? Was he now indifferent to whether or not I knew he was staying at the hotel, or had he realized I’d cottoned on and given up trying to hide altogether?

When the owner brought me my coffee, setting it on the table without a word, he lingered for a moment at the sliding window and looked out at the deserted terrace. It was drizzling, and a transparent plastic tarp had been thrown over the little rock wall that was being built a little farther off, its corners flapping in the wind from time to time. A couple of masons’ tools lay nearby in the mud, and water dripped slowly from the branches of the surrounding tamaris. The owner was still standing next to me, looking outside without paying the slightest attention to me. You didn’t sleep too well last night, right? he said without turning, as if he were talking to someone on the terrace, and suddenly I felt very uncomfortable. I didn’t respond, pouring my coffee instead, and he didn’t insist, nodding thoughtfully and clearing the tables onto the tray he’d brought my coffee over with. He moved off, loading the dirty cups onto the tray as he went along. I didn’t sleep well either, he finally said, and, clearing the tables all the while, he started telling me about the insomnia he’d been suffering from for some time now, which obliged him to read very late in his room before falling sleep. In fact he never went to sleep before two or three o’clock in the morning, he said, and he slept so lightly that the slightest noise in the hotel woke him up. He looked at me. Was he trying to tell me he knew perfectly well it wasn’t the first time I’d left the hotel in the middle of the night?

Because it wasn’t the first time I’d left the hotel during the night. Two nights earlier, in fact, I’d left the hotel and gone into the village. A short while before leaving I’d stood for a long time at my window listening to the murmur of the sea close at hand, which had eased my senses and my mind, but when I’d gone to bed I hadn’t been able to get to sleep, turning over and over in my mind the reasons for the initial reticence I’d felt on the first day at the thought of going to visit Biaggi. Finally I’d gone out to get a breath of air and clear my head, and I’d walked down to the port and onto the jetty. I was wearing a dark coat, I remember, a gray suit and plain tie, and it was perhaps this very image of me that Biaggi had seen that night as I walked out in the night on the stone wall of the jetty, a silhouette in a dark coat and tie walking slowly in the port under the moonlight which was identical every night, always exactly the same, with the same black clouds sliding across the sky, or perhaps he’d only seen me later, bending down over the cat’s body at the side of the dock, as the beam from the lighthouse lit up my face intermittently before plunging it once more into darkness.

After breakfast I went discreetly to the hotel reception, making sure no one saw me in the hall. The room was very dark when I went in. The bluish lights of an aquarium reflected onto the walls and floor, and several fish swam in silence amid miniature rocks and carrageen moss. A banged-up couch stood against one wall and a telephone and a couple of telephone books lay on the old wooden counter in the dull light. I slipped silently behind the counter and took a close look for a moment at the little keyboard hanging on the wall, seeing that while the keys to rooms fourteen and fifteen weren’t there, the key to room sixteen was hanging on a nail. I took it from the corkboard and hurried up to the top floor of the hotel.