Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

The elevator rose noiselessly to the ninth floor. The doors retracted to reveal a dimly lit hallway that stretched away to infinity, its far end lost in shadow. Although this looked unpromising, I hadn’t altogether lost the sense that things were conspiring in my favor at last.

Or perhaps they weren’t, or they were trying far too hard to do so. At first I thought there must be a large mirror at the end of the hallway, because I hadn’t gone more than about fifteen feet in before I became aware of an approaching silhouette that, when I stopped, stopped too. But it wasn’t a reflection. I saw the face in the glint of a wall lamp, and it was wearing a look of surprise — not the same as mine, I expect, but exactly the same as the one it had assumed in the café the day of the appointment. Good old Pedro.

He reacted faster than I did. He strode toward me mutely. And perhaps worst of all, he was smiling now. I took a couple of steps forward. Then I stood stock-still, as if my own immobility could check his advance.

And indeed he halted, a couple of yards away. It was an odd distance, neither far nor near, and plainly improper for holding a conversation. Perhaps it was a way of drawing an invisible line that I should watch I didn’t cross.

He addressed me in the same tone as in the cafeteria: that of a man who had lost all capacity for surprise a long time ago. He seemed to be picking up at the exact point where we had left off before, as though we were still sitting at the same table, in the same city.

“The kid’s already told us. He saw you getting into that cab.”

He was still smiling, and his voice boomed in the empty hallway. But now it was his lack of formality that unnerved me.

“I told you before, it’s not worth it.”

The smile faded. The undertone of tiredness in his voice was the same as last time, too.

“What is it that you want?”

Besides the weariness, I thought I perceived a genuine interest, verging on solicitude. As though he were in a position to grant me whatever I asked, provided I was capable of asking. It infuriated me not to have an answer ready (and, in keeping with his sudden affability, perhaps even a sincere one). She had asked me the same question, of course, when this whole business began. Since then, I’d been all over the place without getting any nearer to an answer. I felt as stymied as I had that first night at the Imperial. Some people chase what they want, and others have to make do with chasing the answer to that question.

But now wasn’t the time to go into all that. A pathetic impulse — probably the same one that had inspired me to hide, that first night at the Imperial — prompted me to make an about-face and go back into the elevator. I pressed L for the Lobby. The doors closed just as I turned to see old Pedro approaching at a leisurely pace, smiling once again.

The descent seemed interminable. Surrounding me was the uncaring hotel, and surrounding the hotel were the glacial night and the petrified snowfields of the summit. My pursuit had turned into flight, and all I had left was the animal reflex to seek haven in the human company and unreliable solidarity of the receptionist.

I emerged into the lobby in dread of seeing the man already there, waiting for me, magically materialized outside the elevator. I made it to the desk ten paces away, forcing myself not to break into a run.

Managing to return the receptionist’s smile, I uttered an absurd “Good evening” that threatened to take us back to square one, to condemn us to repeat the entire ritual of the registration, the real name, and the vacant room.

He didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“I was just preparing to call your room.”

I must have stared at him like a lunatic, but he didn’t bat an eye.

“I neglected to inquire whether you wished to meet with your colleague. He arrived yesterday.”

It was then that I found my legs and the ground beneath my feet giving way — sure enough, my colleague from the paper, my section neighbor and probable usurper of my page, had just jabbed me in the back of the knee from his wheelchair, exactly as he had done days or months or centuries ago, with an identical blow that really did send me right back to square one and to the night of our encounter at the Imperial.

I spun around to face the same steely eyes, the same inexorable smile.

“Evening, neighbor.”

I gathered from his tone that we could talk as much or as little as we liked, but that everything was already settled. That he wasn’t about to drop any hints as to whether he had heard at the paper about my mysterious disappearance or been intrigued by the interruption of my column. He had never commented on my pieces to me; he may never have read them. He might not even miss them. Either way, he was going to chat to me exactly as if nothing had happened, as if we’d just seen each other the night before and had once more overlapped here by some coincidence of work. On top of this, he was going to act as if our encounters truly were frequent and habitual. And, to cap it all off, as if they were welcomed by us both.

I couldn’t tell, though, whether he was taking this line out of shrewdness or out of self-absorption. Just as I had that night at the Imperial, I wondered if his bonhomie was a matter of calculation or of routine. A bit of both, perhaps — they weren’t mutually exclusive. They might be blended into some routine calculation, or some calculated routine, designed to alleviate the inevitable unpleasantness of living in the world.

The elevator doors closed behind us, and the gentle whirr of the ascending cabin could be heard. I couldn’t bring myself to break the spell by withholding the reciprocation which my colleague’s tyrannical good manners took for granted. More to the point, I hadn’t a clue what else to do.

One part of me remained up there with old Pedro, who was waiting for the elevator and would shortly be coming down to where we were on the ground floor. It occurred to me that the food critic might actually be here on my account, as an emissary or spy sent to find out what I’d gotten myself into. When you’re following someone, it’s very easy to start feeling followed, yourself. I had spent so long looking at things through the woman’s eyes, maybe I’d ended up letting someone else look through mine.

I returned his greeting as best I could and listened to his spiel with one eye on the progress of the little red light on the elevator panel. It ceased blinking for a few interminable seconds, then resumed, indicating that the doors had closed and it was on its way.

My colleague was here for one of his award ceremonies; he was heading the panel of judges for the famous gastronomic encounters the Piolet Palace had been organizing for thirty years. The competition was due to take place tomorrow, it seemed.

Although the receptionist had, discreetly, moved away from the desk, my colleague moved his chair to the middle of the lobby before continuing. I thought for a moment I’d been mistaken — that his initially casual reaction to seeing me there was a ploy and that now that my guard was down, he was going to spring questions about the reasons for my presence at the hotel, after all.

The elevator doors opened and old Pedro came into the lobby. In the time I’d had, I had sworn privately not to look at him. Needless to say, I glanced up and sought his eyes with mine at the exact moment his smile left his face.

The food critic glanced over as well, without interrupting his genial torrent, to which I was no longer listening. He looked at the man for the space of a second or much, much less, then back at me; but whatever he might have been reading in my eyes remained opaque to me in his.

Old Pedro, losing momentum or else redirecting it, banked to his right and drifted toward the low tables at the other end of the lobby. He took up a newspaper and remained standing while he flicked through it by the light of the dying embers. He was in the shadows again, reduced to an indistinct silhouette. It was hard to tell if he was looking at us.