Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

I wonder if she, too, writes her own texts.

It may come as a surprise, but beneath Leo’s muscles and angelic face there lies a timid soul. And who would have guessed that the sweet-natured Karinne could get so angry … So this time around, things took a while to heat up between our two new recruits .

It went on to explain that Karinne had just fought with her boyfriend, that Leo had been anxious to play his role well, and that in the end he decided he’d like to perform a solo session. A “session filled with fits and starts,” it said, giving no other explanation.

As I read it, I felt like I was back at the Imperial, once again breathing in its carpeted air, which would forever be the perfume of the woman in the next room over. I wonder if that phrase “fits and starts” included me, or if it might even have had me in mind as a possible reader. I liked to think that it was a joke at my expense. She seems like the type who would make them like that: sharpened so finely as to be almost invisible.

I looked at details of the girl’s body (she seemed taller again, as she had when I first saw her, in her panties, sitting on the bed): draped over his body; lying on one of his arms, up on her hip; a single hand; a forearm and a dark biceps.

I could also see a corner of the bed, and the beige bedspread on the floor, tangled around the girl’s feet. There were photos of scenes reflected in the entryway mirror. The room that could be mentally pieced together from these fragments looked very different from the one I remembered. I changed positions in my seat and waited for the videos to load.

“Good evening.”

I’m not sure whether I really jumped in the chair when I heard the voice behind me. But that’s how I remember the scene. The cursor, suddenly rebelling at the worst possible moment, took an eternity to obey me, to move to the upper corner and close the window. My heart was pounding, and I must have been either very pale or else blushing brightly when I turned around. Standing in the doorway, smiling at me, was a man I hadn’t seen before around the hotel. But his face was familiar. He could have been an unhealthy sixty, or else an enviable seventy. He had a dark silk scarf tied at his neck under a white shirt and a V-neck sweater. All respectable clothes, of course, although their years of wear were evident. I found the scarf disconcerting and even a bit suspicious: a silk scarf around the neck always is. In his case, it exaggerated his get-up almost to the point of looking like the costume of a film director or a hotel manager or even the owner of the whole place. He hadn’t stepped into the little room, but he gave the impression of being able to do so without asking permission, of being at all times the legitimate master of or imminent heir to everything around him. In fact, he dressed as the retired Englishmen bumbling around the place ought to have dressed: with the air of an autumnal summer vacationist, inhabiting his role almost to the point of looking misleading.

“They told me at reception that I’d find you here.”

He was still smiling, without looking at the computer, which (possibly already too late) was displaying a harmless screen saver with an old sepia- and blue-toned photo of the hotel. It showed the facade overlooking the garden, with a man at the window. At the time, I had no doubt he had seen the porn site perfectly well. Although, thinking it over now, I may be wrong. Rather than tact, his vague look may just have signaled the slightly coy technological confusion that afflicts people at his age.

I was surprised that they should be so well informed at reception of the comings and goings of their guests. They hadn’t given that impression, and the lounges and the bar aren’t exactly overstaffed with employees keeping tabs on everything. There was an awkward silence. It may only have been awkward for me — he looked unflappable. There was something a little threatening about his sangfroid. In the end, I got up and asked him if he wanted to use the internet.

“No, no, not at all.”

I thought this man might be some new breed of hotel detective, charged with keeping a moral eye on the webpages visited within the establishment. Another unlikely profession, of course; but then, I had never looked at porn sites in a hotel before, either.

My first reflex was the guilt of a child caught red-handed. Then I forced myself to adopt the opposite attitude: to defend — like the responsible adult that I am, or that I at least have the right to appear to be — my right to visit whatever sites I like. He spoke before I could say anything.

“I gather you wanted to visit my room.”

I moved to sit down again, taken aback. Then utter confusion descended when, as I was taking my seat, I noticed his shoes. Now I think I ought to have examined them the moment I saw him. I always forget to look at people’s shoes, and that’s a mistake. They save time: they tell us everything.

He wasn’t walking around in socks, but he wasn’t far from it: he was wearing felt slippers. Perhaps by sheer chance — but perhaps not, and the detail was moving — they matched the scarf around his neck. These slippers were practically from the post-war-era, the backs collapsed inwards by years of use. He must have realized I was looking at them, but he was in no hurry to allay my confusion. That, or he didn’t notice it, or else didn’t even imagine I could feel any. In the time we spent together, he gave the impression of having forever lost his capacity to feel surprised, as well as the ability to recall or recognize the feeling in others. It transpired he was staying in the famous Scottish poet’s room. The truth is, I had completely forgotten I had asked at reception whether I could visit it. When they told me there was someone in it, I didn’t want to insist, so I left it at that. I could have pretended I was a student or a devotee of the poet, but the thought of piling another lie on top of all the others that come with this job wearied me.

The man with the scarf explained that he seldom left his room during the day. The receptionists had mentioned my request to him. Usually, he made excuses and wriggled out of it. But this time he felt guilty refusing, knowing how interested I was. If it wasn’t too late in the day for me, now was a good time to visit. There wasn’t, he wanted to warn me, all that much to see.

I thanked him with more enthusiasm than I really felt. Actually, what I was gladdest at was the idea of getting out of that little cubicle, where every flicker of the screen was an accusing wink. The door to his room opened noiselessly, its hinges as unobtrusive as the low lighting inside. He went in first. He had also gone up ahead of me on the stairs leading to his room. Without turning around to speak, he looked at his key in a way that was strangely self-absorbed — as though he was hostage to a tour guide’s routine or to the guilt of the caretaker who exhibits the household’s intimate secrets during his masters’ absence.

I also looked at his key on the way up. Or rather, at his key ring, which is different from, and more wieldy than the thick, metal medallions that hang by the dozen in the case at reception and give a sinister weight to the keys of the other rooms. They’re so heavy that there’s something supernatural about them — as though they came from outer space, or were handed down from a lost civilization. All the way to his room, I could feel my own key striking ominously against my thigh.

Before going into the room, I prepared to be confronted with and deflect the shock of another person’s privacy. The impression of a head on the pillow; the clothes thrown — or worse, folded — on a chair; the accusing puddle collected in one corner of the bathroom. Details that are twice as painful in other people’s hotel rooms, and which I have learned to be ready for.