Javier Montes: The Hotel Life

I did suddenly spot the boy from the hotel, strolling out of the café while zipping up an enormous parka. He met my eyes for a second. Not in a shamefaced way, but not mockingly either; it was a friendly look, somehow, that suggested I should take things as they come and bow to the inevitable, like a good sport. He then got into a car that was double parked right outside the café. The windows were misted up on the driver’s side, but as it pulled away I made out the profile of old Pedro, grimly set. Not with the grimness of a kidnapper or a gangster — more the generic solemnity that comes over people when they sit behind a wheel.

I wavered between screaming insults at the top of my voice, racing after them in futile pursuit, stamping my feet childishly, and breaking down in tears. Desperate to avoid the latter, without thinking, I jumped into the road with not one but both arms aloft, and almost got myself run over by an unoccupied taxi. I opened the door and flung myself into the back seat. I knew there was nothing for it but to utter the fateful phrase, the most preposterous phrase in the world, the phrase toward which, as I should have divined long before, my quest had been inexorably propelling me from the start.

“Follow that car, please.”

The cabdriver chuckled, of course. Unsurprised, like someone hearing a stale joke that had once been funny (later he explained that it really was nothing unusual: not a week went by without him or a colleague being instructed to follow some car).

And follow he did, raising neither questions nor objections. We stuck close to our quarry’s taillights through the downtown streets, jammed with traffic at that hour, abuzz with stores that were still open and with last-minute shoppers. We crawled from traffic light to traffic light until we left downtown and its bustle behind. Everything slid in slow motion past the windows. People drive the way they are, and old Pedro drove deliberately and methodically, unimaginatively, without jumping a single yield sign.

The cabdriver soon grew bored with this dreary chase. He started reminiscing about similar cases, fortunately not angling for the details of my own. At first, I felt obligated to reply, as a matter of decency and also because I was terrified that he might simply up and decide he’d had enough and call the whole adventure off. As we approached the edge of town along ever-wider roads, we lapsed into silence. Once on the ring roads, the traffic thinned out; then, finally, we found ourselves on a deserted highway. It was easy to maintain the requisite distance from the other car, which continued to respect the letter and spirit of every article in the traffic code, signaling without fail every time it changed lanes.

Night had closed in completely. We cruised past residential suburbs, industrial parks, bars, and empty lots. With every white line the windshield swallowed up, the glow of the city lights grew fainter behind us. Markers slipped by on the right, keeping a monotonous tally of every mile put behind us. I began to count them in an attempt to blank out my thoughts, with relative success. At the thirty-two mark, the driver stopped the meter. When he spoke, it felt like the first human utterance there had been inside that car for centuries.

“City rates end here.”

This sounded positively threatening.

“It’s going to cost you a fortune.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty on me.”

I tried to ingratiate myself with some jovial sociability. But I didn’t sound very convincing, and the driver withdrew into an impregnable silence as somber as the night outside. I could feel his bad temper making the air inside the car unbreathable. I rolled the window down a little, then up again. Down and up, over and over, as we went several miles further into the increasingly solid darkness that hemmed the highway. By this point, there were hardly any houses or lights or anything at all to be seen beyond the ditch. I fastened my eyes on the taillights of the other car as if to magnetize them with my gaze and prevent them from vanishing into the murk without warning. Any moment now, on the basis of whatever flimsy excuse, the cabdriver was going to run out of patience.

And I thought that his chance for an excuse had arrived when old Pedro moved into the right-hand lane to take the exit marked by a sign a quarter mile ahead. I just had time to make out the icon of a skier over a superfluous caption reading “Ski Resorts”. The cabdriver hesitated.

“So, what do we do here?”

Desperately, I talked him into continuing, while practically turning the wheel for him with my eyes, or so it felt. I had more than enough cash, this was a matter of life and death, and taxis were a public service — once the meter was ticking we were bound by contract, if we were to turn back now, I would regard the entire fare as null and void.

On hearing this about the fare, the driver gave a jerk and braked. I was afraid he was going to argue, or throw me out of his cab then and there, in the middle of the frontage road. I was sufficiently fired up to fight him in earnest, to wrest the wheel from him, to leave him on the roadside or lock him in the trunk. After a few seconds that seemed like an eternity — the other car was getting farther away, its taillights now miniscule — he stepped on the accelerator. The speedometer shot up, along with the fare, of which he intended to collect every cent.

We made up for lost ground. Now we were climbing a narrow, extremely winding road, with no traffic coming the other way and no signs of life on either side. The headlights illuminated the identical trunks of tall mountain spruce trees beyond the ditches.

A drizzle began to fall. The road was still headed uphill, and the stray patches of snow gradually merged into a single mantle that gave off a feeble phosphorescence. The continual bends — right, left, right — the steady swish of the wipers, the rain, and the intermittent red winks of the other car eventually made me feel drowsy.

The city with the cheap hotel — not to mention the ones before it, and what had happened to me in them — seemed very far away now. Even the woman I was chasing was becoming fragmented in my mind. This time, I really was sure that I was on my way to meet face to face with her, and it came home to me just how little I’d believed that until now. I tried to picture her face but couldn’t. I started off well enough: I could see an oval form and some black hair, I could even sketch in eyebrows and nose. But the image kept derailing, and a different one would take its place — some strange, made-up face, or the faces of people I didn’t care about in the least and hadn’t thought about in years.

Far below, to my right, lay the miniature city — a sporadic sparkle behind the succession of tree trunks. As we rounded another bend, the tiny heap of trembling lights was swallowed up by darkness. I was happy to see them go. I wished, much as I had at the beginning of the journey, on my way to the Imperial, that this drive would never end, that the taxi would turn into a house where I could live forever. Stretching out my legs, I recalled the violent joy that would sometimes overwhelm me when I was little, in my bed, surveying the vast, virgin territory spread out around me beneath the sky of carefully tucked-in sheets. Perhaps, if it had been up to me, we would have driven on indefinitely.

But it wasn’t up to me. The slope was leveling out; the bends were increasingly separated by straighter stretches; the trees were becoming fewer and farther between; and the snow layer had thickened, pulsating with a glow of its own under a sky devoid of moon or stars. We rounded one last corner. And just when it seemed we could climb no higher and we were floating above all the mountains in the world, the sharpest summit yet hove into view. On its slopes glittered a fabulous extraterrestrial city, like a human outpost in the craters of the Moon, or Jupiter, or those nameless planets so remote they make the Moon or Jupiter seem almost like a second home.