Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

This business center isn’t just squalid, it’s positively unhealthy. It takes a while to grow accustomed to the tiny room’s stale smell of tobacco (never mind the fact smoking is forbidden, even the garden); it permeates the air, seeming to seep out of the computer itself. It’s practically an archaeological specimen at this point; it sends out silky electromagnetic waves like spider webs, which I tried to bat away from my face out of pure reflex.

I visited thehotellife.com, fearing they might have a firewall installed against porn sites. The business center doesn’t have a door, and anyone passing by would be able to see the screen. Maybe that’s the real firewall. The computer finally connected after an agonizing minute of hesitation. As I had done so many times in these last three days, I typed in the address without looking. Our fingers learn fast.

I moved the cursor arrow to the small keyhole in the padlock that appeared under the page’s name. There’s an unimposing warning for underage users and those connecting from less permissive countries. The padlock, as always, lit up and widened out to fill the whole screen. The five-second wait becomes more intolerable to me each time, almost insulting.

I entered the password she had given me. I wonder if I’m leaving a trail in the system that she can follow when I do this. I can’t tell if I find it exciting or embarrassing that she might know how many times I’ve visited her page these last few days, and how long I was there each time. And I’m not sure if it’s a relief or a disappointment to think that she may never bother to find out, that perhaps this tenuous line of communication between us only exists in my imagination.

Some years ago, the head of an important hotel chain commissioned me to write a prologue for an anthology of hotel-themed stories. They wanted to do a large run and put a copy on all the bedside tables in all the hotels in the chain. The idea wasn’t at all bad, and it was certainly less sinister than the Americans with their Bibles; but the guests kept stealing them, and in the end a literal chain came to be used: to tie the spine of each book to a bed leg.

I’ve forgotten all the stories — and the prologue, of course — except one: a man and a woman, both incurable consumptives en route to their respective sanatoriums, happen to spend one night in a pair of neighboring rooms in a roadside hotel. They never see each other or speak. But they cough and cough all night, and in their feverish, delirious half sleep they find themselves believing they’re holding a conversation or singing a duet together through the wall. Their hackings and convulsions are transformed into strains of love and promises of comfort. The next day, the man continues on his way and forgets it all. In her final days in the hospital, the woman can still recall the imaginary duet from that night.

There they were, following my open-sesame: the photos and frozen videos. There are hundreds; I’ve barely scratched the surface yet. I don’t know who Candy, or Steven & Susana, or Dani & Leo are; nor am I familiar with the adventures of Carnival Day in Rio or what might have happened on the White Nights in Saint Petersburg or on Bullfight Day in Ronda . But I already recognize Linda’s face and Lewis’s body, I know that Jennifer looks younger than she really is and what Joey & Billy did to celebrate their Thanksgiving with the Twins . I can reconstruct from memory the decoration — glimpsed only in the background of the videos — of numerous hotel rooms, spectacular suites and tiny cubicles, beach huts, balconies with clinical-looking Jacuzzis, views over the rooftops of hundreds of cities. And the beds — wide beds, narrow beds, round beds, double beds, beds with canopies, water beds, beds surrounded by mirrors; and the wallpapers, stuccowork, trompe l’oeils of varying taste, modernist glass designs, and the alternately dull and sophisticated furniture of room after room scattered all over the globe.

What she said isn’t true. Our work isn’t similar; in fact, we occupy opposite poles of the profession. I visit hotels, while she’s managed to build one immense, labyrinthine hotel out of fragments of thousands of others, tailor made to be just right for her, and just right for anyone. A hotel whose doors are all open, whose rooms are all occupied, a hotel with impeccable service, run with her professional touch, a hotel where one is tempted to stay and live forever.

Sometimes I think I recognize a room in one of her videos or I even seem to remember having found myself between those exact four walls. And then I see a mention of some city I’ve never visited. So either she’s lying, or she’s mistaken, or my memory is deceiving me. At least there can be no doubt about the names of the actors: we all take for granted and accept from the start that no one is using their real name.

I moved the cursor down to the bottom of the page and saw what I’d been hoping to see for three days. As though in solidarity, the computer itself seemed to hold its breath: it gave a sort of hiccup and choked down its radioactive whirring. In a newly-appeared thumbnail, right above the name that went with it (Karinne & Leo), I could make out a miniature image of the face of the quick-tempered girl from the room next door, the one who had struggled to put on her shirt as she walked down the hallway at the Imperial and who had insulted me (or had she?) as she passed. I waited a little before clicking on her picture. So — Karinne at last. I had started to think that the woman hadn’t managed to “cut anything good from it” in the end (I have just reread and confirmed in my notes that those are the exact words she used that night in my room).

But she had. There was the bad-tempered girl — Karinne, I was supposed to call her Karinne; besides, I didn’t have anything else to call her — looking into the camera and wearing exactly the same expression of feigned boredom I had seen on her the first time, on the other side of that cracked door.

I hardly recognized her; she looked prettier than she had at the time. Prettier, or simply more Karinne-like. I couldn’t say why or how the photo of this Karinne looked more like Karinne than the girl herself. It wasn’t because she looked better in the picture, and it wasn’t because the girl I imagined was disappointing in the flesh or because her memory was now permanently tainted by the photograph. It wasn’t that — because that always happens, it’s a given. People are always disappointing in comparison to their photographs.

I got tired of thinking about it. I’m starting to realize that growing accustomed to the mysteries of her site is so similar to solving them that it’s easy to be content with the former alone. I moved the mouse and dragged the cursor over to Karinne’s miniature head. The little, white arrow slid along smoothly and silently. It still amazes me, all this deftness in stringing together a series of silent consummations.

It eventually turned into a small hand that I settled over her face like a false nose. To buy some time — for what, I wonder now — I played around with it, touching each eye with the tiny index finger, tracing the outline of her lips with it. I waited a few more moments, and then I clicked.

Many more photos appeared on the screen, the entire series. And the accompanying text: something like a very short story, with just the right dose of a vulgarity that may not have been ironic. It reminded me of the subheads they write for my reviews at the paper — the same forced jocularity, the same robotic, disingenuous goodwill. I refused to write them at first. But eventually I gave in, and sometimes I’ll send one in already finished, mimicking their style. It’s an act of revenge that they may not even notice and certainly don’t mention.