Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

The texture and scent of the air inside took me by surprise, though: it was complex, and laborious, and although it didn’t quite suggest dirtiness, it was saturated with the notes of the most well-lived-in rooms. In the background, the Top 40 were playing very softly on a transistor radio I couldn’t locate.

Scents and music all coalesced into a single effusion that pervaded everything: the furniture and the upholstery, my clothes and even my skin. It made me think of all the objects and all the skin, now invisible, that had gone into creating it year upon year. Rather than me invading this man’s privacy, in the end it was his unwanted, uninterested, overpowering privacy that invaded me. I forbade myself from attempting to break the strong-smelling air down into its constituent parts. But before I could stop myself, I thought I caught a scent of the depths of childhood and of boiled milk.

And there indeed, on top of a pot-bellied dresser I don’t have in my room, were a small electric stove and a milk pan with an off-white rim that I don’t have in my room, either.

I could have taken in the room at a single glance, and the little saucepan was really making me want to get out of there that instant. The man gestured toward some armchairs of nobler build than those in my room. As he sat down he announced that, unfortunately, he didn’t drink alcohol and so couldn’t offer me a nightcap.

It wasn’t just the armchairs — the curtains, the headboard on the enormous bed, and the floral wallpaper were all different, too. The man pointed out the desk to me. He remarked without much zeal that it could well be the one the Scottish poet had used. I’m not so sure it’s the same furniture as back then, and in fact, I don’t think he really believed it, either. But it did obviously belong to an earlier period in the hotel, as though it had escaped various redecorations and general renovations.

Perhaps he saw the doubt in my face. He took a small, framed photo, more yellowing than sepia, down from the wall — an antique print with an undulating, decorative border. It showed the rear facade of the hotel and the recently planted garden: a few puny shrubs overshadowed by a riot of nineteenth-century statuary. There were cheap, painted storks, white plaster busts, and even a little grotto complete with an Our Lady of Fátima. For a second I was gripped by the feeling that I had seen all this before. Then I realized suddenly: it was the same image that had been scanned in for use as the screen saver on the computer downstairs.

“Look, you can see the poet there. It’s the only photo of his stay that still exists.”

He pointed to the miniscule figure looking out one of the windows. It was so blurry that only with a generous dose of goodwill could you make out the famous goatee beard and goat-like smile: the same ones as on the fronts of the hardcover books they sell at reception. They also preside, in enlarged format, over the breakfast room. It must have been him, although I would hardly say that the beard or the smile were unmistakable — all his contemporaries had that same style and flashed those same teeth.

“Can you see him? He’s standing at this very window.”

I thought I had done with all that last night. But I confess that today, after breakfast, I went out into the garden with my notebook and sat down on a bench under the rear facade. From here, it isn’t hard to locate the window of the room I visited last night: it’s the only one that still has curtains with an older print than the rest, and they’re still drawn even though it’s now eleven thirty. So my night owl host is not an early riser. And in fact, it looks to me as though the window is much further to the right than the one in the photo. Perhaps I don’t have such a good photographic memory, perhaps the rooms were bigger in the poet’s day, perhaps he was just standing at another window. And now that I think about it, the whole thing with the shepherd children of Fátima was several decades after his stay at this hotel. I ought to cross-check the dates.

But I’ll never do that, and I’ll never know for sure. It doesn’t matter enough to me to find out, nor could it be said to matter in a broader sense, really. It’s the same as with the desk the poet supposedly wrote at, the same as with the headboard under which he theoretically rested his little bearded head. It’s enough to believe that that was his room, that he wrote his letters at that desk, in order to feel the shiver of recognition, or to feel as though you’re feeling it; it’s almost the same thing.

I felt it last night, I’ll admit, when I saw the photo and thought about how the man and I were just on the inside of that same wall; how the legs and shoes you couldn’t see in the photo had, years before, stood at this very windowsill. They were the same legs and shoes that I would have seen if I had sat then in the armchair I was sitting in now.

I thought to myself that that room was similar to the rooms the woman collects for her website: in it, just like on her site, everything that had ever happened was always happening. All down to suggestion, of course.“Well obviously! Just like everything else!” they would have said if they could talk — the photo, the windowsill, the armchair, and everything else in that innumerable army of unflinching things that will never speak, that know nothing other than the eternal present of objects and are oblivious to our obsessive urge to imbue them with a past.

The man with the slippers replaced the photo on the small table that sat between us, then spoke to me with the assumption that I was a great connoisseur of the poet’s work. I didn’t want to disillusion him.

“I, on the other hand, after all this time living in his room, haven’t read a single line of his. And don’t think it’s out of laziness. Actually, I prefer it this way — it’s better I don’t find out too much about him. It would be unnerving to feel I was just passing through or that the man might return at any moment to take back what’s his. It’s silly, I know.”

This man had the gift of being quite disconcerting without losing his composure for a second. I asked him how long he was planning on staying.

“Oh, didn’t they tell you at reception? I live here.”

He had for years, he added, without saying how many. He had come for work, liked the place, and decided to extend his stay. Bit by bit, he had grown accustomed to it, developing routines and arranging with the kitchens for some very simple, very homely meals, developing a taste for the hotel life and its comforts. Like a summary, or an outline, of the life he had lived before.

He had always been, he told me, a man of very little practical sense. Of unprotected tenancy agreements and few possessions and bullyish landlords. Once he had done some calculations and negotiated a bit with the hotel management, he saw it made sense for him to move in. Via a now rickety superstructure of agents and managers, the family that owned the hotel granted his request: lifetime occupancy, at a reasonable price, of the poet’s room — which at that time was being kept empty as a sort of miniature museum, with his chamber pot, inkwell, and penholder in small glass cases. The family only asked that he show the historic room to tourists every now and then. The hotel was under financial strain at the time, and this offered them a way to get a reasonable return on the room. With his retirement and a few small annuities on top of it, he could afford to pay the full-pension rate they had negotiated.

“As you will have noticed, I added a few things. And I took away the glass cases, of course. Anyway, that was all a load of junk — all of it fake, or almost all of it. We agreed that this room would be left out of any refurbishments, and I brought in a few bits of furniture that I liked from the others.”