Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

They’re my favorite guests, and every morning I’m afraid they won’t show up and draw their curtains. I like to know that they’re tucked up in their hotel during the day, and at night it comforts me to watch over their sleep in one of the rooms in mine.

At about the time they fall asleep, in the room next door to theirs, a child sharing the room with his parents starts bouncing up and down on his extra bed; he forces them to keep the cartoon channel switched on at all times and to steal kisses on the balcony in the rare moments he isn’t watching. In another, one floor up, a very well-dressed woman changed her earrings five times in front of the mirror one night, only to end up not leaving the room and disappearing the next morning, replaced by an endless succession of colorless guests with the defeated look of people getting off a long, overnight flight.

On the second floor is a middle-aged man who looks like a soap opera heartthrob and who will usually eat his breakfast — dissecting kiwis, drinking cup after cup of coffee in small sips — while talking on the phone. He has a range of glass bottles on the dresser and an army of suits in the closet. He leaves it wide open for the duration of the half hour or more it takes him to choose his clothes in the morning. By the time he goes out on to the street, a car is waiting for him. His chauffeur is either inspired by, or else inheriting, his ties.

In the middle of the morning, when the rooms are empty, a battalion of cleaning ladies arrives. At exactly the same moment, I can hear some bustling around in the neighboring rooms of my own hotel. They empty waste paper baskets and throw windows open, tidy everything in a flash; they debate whether or not to change sheets only used once, and sometimes decide not to. They greet each other with shrieks of laughter from one balcony to another, as they shake out the doormats and unceremoniously stir up the domestic atmosphere that has stagnated in each room — shaking it out, dusting it off, sweeping it away, rubbing it down, besprinkling it with their endless sprays — until it has no other choice but to retreat into the corners of the closets, into the very last dresser drawers where sometimes, by some miracle, a single shoetree, a book with a page marked, a restaurant card with a phone number scribbled on it, or an empty contact lens case has escaped the purge. Things like the ones I have found in the drawers in this room, and other rooms before it. Things that I now regret not having collected; they could testify to a whole hotel life that’s starting to feel like a long dream or a parenthesis pointlessly dragged out.

The other day, I came back to my room after breakfast to find one of the cleaning women, in her uniform, humming to herself as she changed my sheets. We both gave a nervous smile and then, like players in a music-hall sketch, both started to withdraw at the same time. After a pantomime of aborted interjections and reciprocal goodwill, I ended up leaving her by herself in my room. I can’t quite work out who was violating the privacy of whom.

One day, in the middle of the afternoon, a well-dressed man walked into one of the rooms and took possession of the place with a series of movements that spoke of years of experience. He opened the window by a very precise fraction, plugged in his laptop, and poured himself a drink from the minibar. He tested the lights and the box spring; he turned the television on, flicked through the channels without pausing on a single one, and turned it off again; he hung up a freshly-ironed shirt that was brought in to him.

Then he sat down to write. And then he did nothing. He kept staring at the computer screen, sipping his drink while the room grew dark around him and was eventually swallowed up in the glow of the laptop. I was moved by his expertise in solitude. His gestures reminded me of my own.

But I can also see the future from my room; I need only go out onto my balcony, which sits on the canted corner of the facade. The main entrance is five floors below me. And so it is I, before anyone else, who sees the free taxi coming up the side street to where the guests are waiting, weighed down with luggage; or the tour guide, running late, whose entire group has grown impatient to get out and visit the unlikely monuments that this city does conceal, after all; or the pair of secret, ante meridiem lovers, with a liking for novel-like arrangements, who, having agreed to arrive separately and wait for each other in the room, have been too punctual and have to pretend they don’t know each other as they run smack into one another at the front door of the hotel.

You need only a little patience — at times a surprisingly small amount of patience — to see those same couples part again at the door without saying goodbye. Like a wizard gazing into his crystal ball, I can see very clearly what happens next, and predict what will happen in the end — the way one or the other or both of them, on turning their corner, will cry dejectedly or light a cigarette or whistle or talk into their cellphone or look at their watch and break into a run as they forget the hotel and the room they’re leaving behind and everything that happened there.

I’ve been perfecting my powers, sharpening my sight. Even at night, in the light of the streetlamps reflected in the puddles, I can see what’s to come: the unconvincing bachelors from the personal ads will arrive alone, carnation in a buttonhole and newspaper in hand, and they will loiter around the door and end up either leaving or plucking up the courage to go in, and come out again either alone or paired up with someone five minutes or five hours later; the couples that kiss and pat each other on the back at the beginning of the evening and by the end of their dinner, before the others are even out of sight, are already badmouthing them with a venom whose vapors will reach all the way up to me here on the fifth floor.

And then, some bitter afternoons, I only see the present. The city absorbed in its rhythmic purr, the people coming and going like something out of an illustrated schoolbook: the grocer at his fruit stand, the builder with his bricks, the fancy lady looking at her reflection in the shop windows, the security guard with his nightstick. You can almost even see the young boy with a tray of buns balanced on his head who’s always crossing the street in one corner at the very back of all old photographs. I see myself in this tableau, too, of course — the man standing on the balcony with nothing to do, the character of no discernible profession or apparent contribution to anything, who fills a gap, and whom the teachers leave out of their explanations.

It’s more and more difficult, yes, but I still step out on to the street when I get tired of wandering along the hallways or whiling away the hours in the lounge, of looking out the window and hoping that, any moment, it will be her I see coming around the corner or getting out of a taxi or opening the curtains in a room in the hotel across the way. I go to a nearby café and kill time reading the local papers and keeping an eye on the passersby outside the window. I’m served by a waitress who looks just the type to appear on thehotellife.com. If she had seen her, she would have taken her on. The café is centrally located and very well known; everyone visiting the city ends up stopping in. And in fact, after a couple of days, I came to convince myself that she had already done just that.

In a place like this, four mornings are enough to make you a regular. By dint of sitting at the same table, giving good tips, and turning out a few obvious jokes, I had struck up a rapport with the waitress. Today, on the fifth day, during her lunch break, I waited for her in the corner of the café and we went upstairs to my room. She didn’t want the other waiters to see her with me, but she said hello to the hotel receptionists as we went past the counter.