Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

Sometimes it seems more like a race: a hundred years ago, a brand-new hotel would plant a piece of the future in a place where nothing had happened for centuries. Least of all time — time who discovered, to its annoyance, that it had to rush out to the small, provincial town or the clearing in the jungle that it had taken its eye off, thinking it already had things perfectly wrapped up there .

Occasionally, time will get even by giving a poisoned gift to hotels: it will set them to one side and then quicken its own pace until they become islands without ports, swamps where the years that have kept flowing cruelly by outside stagnate and start to smell just a little bit too sweet .

At first, this will appear to be a blessing: even the dullest door handle comes into the world with a secret deadline for redeeming itself. And an expiration date too, unfortunately: one fine day, the sad trap will spring that causes latches to jam, drains to clog, light switches to stick, and the air of lounges where forgotten liturgies were once held to become unbreathable .

The Reina Amalia Hotel has already half lost its own bet. It’s some time now since the main facade gave up the fight, and now it looks straight out at the miserable town that grew up awkwardly around it, ceasing to attract the picturesque, turn-of-the-century pilgrims. But the back of the building continues to impose its confused, Bavarian profile (which was either modern or absurd in its day, according to the taste of the visitor; then dated; and now inevitable) on the landscape .

The river that cut its groove millions of years ago and that runs dry for six months of the year; the barren, African plains; the unbroken sea that one spies doubtfully in the distance: thanks to highly precise happenstance, every housing development along the coastline is hidden by a hill that obscures it from the view of the hotel’s back-yard stroller .

It’s an unreasoning landscape, as though everything that had ever come to pass there since the Roman Empire — and everything that has literally passed it by — were a strange dream in a lingering siesta. After textbook battles, after incomprehensible schisms and councils, and whole centuries with nothing to write up, only the hotel has managed to make a mark on it .

The rooms at the front command a view of apartment blocks and the oasis of antennae that dominate the deserted parking lot. Clearly, our present is the future of the old, bewildered hotel .

I write to you from one of the rooms at the rear, and it wasn’t easy or cheap to get. But the sentimental traveler should be sure to ask for one — never was such frankly abusive overpricing so justified. From here you can see the overgrown garden and the same stark landscape that was surveyed by the Portuguese queen who inaugurated the hotel and gave it her name. She brought with her a whole train of Regenerationists, who saw the place as a symbol for a thousand and one things. Personally, I had never before seen anything so stubbornly resistant to symbolism as this charmless plain .

And, of course, there’s the Scottish poet who spent two months shut up in his room here, shocking half the continent with his grief-stricken letters. It’s a clear case of an author ahead of his time — how email would have helped him in his efforts to appoint himself poet laureate of his distant, doleful country .

At reception they tell me they’ve kept the original furniture in his room. There is apparently a different occupant, however; it’s not easy to visit, and as I write this week’s review (newspapers, as you know, do not wait), I don’t know whether I’ll be able to see it to tell the tale. I’m on the same floor, three balconies over. We can at least assume that I can see from my window more or less the same thing that can be seen from the window that was his .

And, of course, the very same landscape that the man himself must have seen. But not for long. And that is not because I am only going to stay for one night; nor is it because new housing developments are going to colonize every last embankment on this side, there being more than enough dull, featureless plain on the other .

Rather, it is because the hotel will cease to be a hotel; it will even cease to look out over this landscape. Here and there, I have heard tell of the possible closure and not unlikely demolition of the Reina Amalia. And so here you have me, filing this review ahead of the ultimate deadline. And wondering if this installment of “The Hotel Life” ought not to be called “The Hotel Death” .

Forgive the joke — for being morbid and, what’s worse, for being weak and far-fetched. But what can I say: almost all of them end up being like that, almost always .

I managed to salvage the review of the Imperial at the last minute, but only out of a sense of professionalism. And this one isn’t going to come out well, either. I can see it, and they’ll see it at the paper too, of course, although they probably won’t say anything. They never criticize or congratulate — one thing makes up for the other after all these years. It’s a bleak but efficient method. And the past guarantees my future; I’ve got some margin, some wiggle-room, I’d say, for a few bad articles.

Perhaps too wide a margin, too much wiggle-room. I thought I had chosen a trade with no expiration date, but I may have been wrong: this hotel’s fate may yet be mine own, too.

Now that I write this, it feels as though the five minutes I spent in her room were longer than the hour or so she spent in mine. I confess that I waited for her that night without ever quite thinking she would come, and I was surprised when she did. Oddly, it may have been even more surprising than it would be to hear her knocking at this door now that there are not just a few yards between us but probably hundreds or thousands of miles. I would pretend to be surprised, though, I’d fake a little start — for my sake as well as hers, out of simple respect for good form. But beneath that, I would feel it was the natural thing for her to do. And perhaps it was. Why pretend that we are privy to the laws that dictate what can and cannot happen, if deep down we all know that, ultimately, we collude in the consummation of everything, of the things we desire the most and the things we fear the most? We don’t even need to desire a thing much — sometimes it’s enough to simply think about it, in occasional snatches of free time, for a few days.

Of course, everything in my room was as it had been five minutes before: the lamps, the antagonizing chocolate, my shoes at the foot of the bed like little mausoleum dogs. It couldn’t have been any other way, but it somehow surprised me that these things had remained their identical selves, determined to prove that, indeed, only five minutes had passed. And that during that time they had neither done nor felt a thing.

I put my shoes on, checked there was enough of everything left in the minibar, and poured myself a whiskey. The alcohol warmed my insides and brought me back into the feel of the room. My hands still felt cold, but after the second sip, they stopped shaking.

I walked around the room, trying to look at it with the eyes of the woman who would soon be looking at it herself. The mattress in her room, obscenely on display; the rumpled sheets on the half of the bed where I’d slept; the other half smooth, with its turned-down top sheet and pillow, both immaculate: three stages of the hotel life that would inevitably have to be retraced. Or anticipated — perhaps my bed would end up like the one next door. I couldn’t tell if my visitor was on her way over here in order to end up lying in it. In truth, the woman hadn’t done anything that would give rise to the question. Apart from directing porn movies, that is ( Well, almost , she had said). That was no reason to assume anything, of course. But there are some questions that ask themselves, that cut to the head of the line instead of waiting as they would if they had any sense. At that moment, for example, I still hadn’t asked myself if I wanted to sleep with her. Now, that seems odd to me.