Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

In any case, after a short silence, she let slide the fact that I was avoiding the question and carried on talking. I can’t tell if she was being a little more or a little less astute than me at that point.

“Right. Today was a disaster. They were useless. We’ll have to see if we can cut anything good from it.”

“What happened after that? Why did the girl get angry?”

“Well, you must have seen she’s got a temper on her. She was nervous, and the kid wasn’t doing a great job. And I’ll admit that I don’t have a lot of patience anymore. Sometimes I forget that, for the actors, every session is the first session. Well it’s too bad for her. She left before getting paid.”

“Paid?”

She laughed again.

“Of course. The models get paid. It’s one thing for them not to have done this before, but it would be another one entirely if they didn’t get paid for it. I’m upfront with them about that before we get started — it makes things easier. And she was the one most interested in the money, too. The kid just wanted to be in a movie.”

“Didn’t you pay him?”

“Yeah, sure, of course I paid him. But he wasn’t really concerned about the money, although he pretended it was really important to him. It’s like that with a lot of them, although it ought to be the opposite; they think the fact that there’s money involved cleans the whole thing up. That it makes it all a bit more noble — or less sordid, anyway. So.”

A silence followed. Perhaps, if I’d answered her question, if I had made an effort to say whether I’d liked what I’d seen (or what I had liked of everything I’d seen), the conversation would have continued down that road and we would have gotten to philosophizing. But I doubt it — that didn’t seem to be her style, and now it seems even less so. But she appeared to notice that my precautions forced her to take some of her own. It made me angry to think that I might have disappointed her. Or rather, it made me angry that it made me angry — my being in the position of the person who will either satisfy or disappoint decisively gave her the upper hand.

But she already had the upper hand, anyway. That’s clear to me now that I remember how, when she said “So” again while brusquely getting up from her chair, I suddenly felt a burning desire for her to stay, a desire free from doubt or precaution, a silent groan that surprised even me.

And she did stay. She walked over to the desk and turned to look at me.

“I’ve got an idea. Do you have a pen? There aren’t any here. These new hotels have lost the good old habits.”

I held out to her the one I am writing with now. With a smile, she jotted a few numbers in the margin of one of the hotel brochures.

“Here’s a password to get into my site. It’s like a universal subscription, and it won’t ever expire. You can get into any of the sections with this, including the paying ones, of course, which are where the good stuff is. Like the master key they gave you at reception. It’s the one I use, and a few other special members, and now you.”

She handed me the slip of paper, and I left it on the bedside table without looking at it — it would have been like counting a tip. I didn’t thank her, but only because I was caught off guard. That really irritates me now, even though I don’t think she thought much of it; she smiled and suddenly seemed resolved to start liking me, or else to keep liking me, come Hell or high water. I didn’t like that, either because it was less than I had hoped for or because it slyly reintroduced the question of who had the advantage. Apparently, liking me would be her revenge.

“It’d be an honor if you returned the visit. Even if it is just virtually. It seems only fair — I’ve got the advantage, after all.”

I must have looked taken aback. She hadn’t read my mind, but apparently we were thinking in the same terms. She smiled.

“Because I ’ ve read you , you see. It doesn’t make much sense to sit here talking to you about what I do if you haven’t seen it. And as you know, it’s truer in my business than in any other that a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s what it’s all about, in the end.”

She sat down again.

“Even if I never was interested in offering just the photos on their own. It’s odd, but they’re not enough. You always need at least one line, a carefully chosen little paragraph. That guy, the web designer? He hadn’t read a book since he left school, he listened to me talk and talk and then ignored everything I told him. And yet he’s still a subscriber after all these years. He’s practically the oldest customer. So I imagine he’s worked out by now that what I write does matter, in the end. It’s what sets us apart.”

Her passion for clichés caught me off guard again. She sat up and laughed.

“So, you know, if you need a bit of extra work.”

We both laughed. Then we both took a long sip from our drinks at the same time, then we laughed again. I give her all the credit and admit she had a knack for cunningly working a new note into the conversation. We talked about my work, about the hotel, about hotels in general. Like me, she enjoys the big ones, and any that have a long track record. And failing that, she would always choose an impersonal establishment over a charming boutique hotel. We agreed that it’s a scourge, charm. I provide the charm, I remember her saying. She chose the hotels carefully when she was preparing her work trips — she liked to handle that part herself. For her own enjoyment and for practical considerations: she would rather the staff be efficient than friendly, that they have enough experience to have seen a few things, that they be discreet, and not keep track of all the people coming into the room or knock on the door every five minutes. We both lamented the progressive extinction of that particular species of hotel professional.

And she thought that at least some, if not all of her subscribers appreciated her careful choice of the right hotels. She had had emails applauding her taste in selecting a particular room, or a view just visible through a window in the background. So porn, too — porn especially, perhaps — had its connoisseurs.

And it’s for them that she really does her work. She doesn’t give the names of the establishments, she told me, nor does she shoot anything outside the rooms (although they had, on occasion, ventured briefly out into a hallway to film a preamble at the door into a room). And she’s never had a complaint addressed to her from a single hotel — either no one working there has seen the site; or if they have seen it, they don’t recognize the hotel; or else they recognize it but prefer not to let on.

She likes to imagine they’ve decided that it can’t be bad publicity for the place, in the end. She’ll never know, though, because she never goes back to a city or a hotel.

“If you go to the site, you’ll see that when I visit a city where you’ve reviewed a hotel, I tend to stay in that one. Our work isn’t all that different, really.”

I smiled. It had just occurred to me that, like me, she must make reservations under a fake name. They were similar in that way, too.

“You think so?”

“Yes. Although I can see from your face that you don’t agree. And that’s not all. Sometimes after reading your articles, I’ve wanted to take up a few things with you. I remember a horrible write-up you gave to a hotel in the Azores that I had liked a lot. You spent half a page attacking the ‘cosmetic freebies’ in the bathroom. I could have killed you.”

I laughed. I remembered that review. And she was right: the hotel was excellent. It had a garden that was practically a park, and a steaming, sulphurous hot spring filled with yellow water, inside a bathhouse covered in faded mosaics. But I arrived there off the back of a long, chaotic trip I had made for a special edition paid for by the Portuguese board of tourism. A half-hearted fling across a string of islands, a fling forged from silly coincidences and scant enthusiasm, had finally fallen apart there, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Throughout that stay, I had felt at my back the same threat of ferocious sadness that had raised its head in the reading room that night and that I could almost hear pacing around the door to the room now, waiting for her to leave.