Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

“You think? I’d say we work for the pleasure of others.”

I laughed the strained laugh of our dinner companions from that other night.

“Or at least to facilitate it,” he added, no longer laughing, although it was just then that his eyes smiled for the first time.

“So, yeah. I don’t know how many stars you have to rack up before you can take a vacation, but I’ve got a lot of forks and a lot of seafood to get through this season. I’ve got bookings under my name all over the country the next six months, and I’m judging five different prizes. And I could yak on and on about all the talks I have to give. But actually, they don’t count, because I always rehash the same one — I just garnish it a little differently each time, so to speak.”

His boasting didn’t surprise me. Nor did I think any of it was untrue. I had rid myself a long time ago of the adolescent notion that people only show off what they don’t have. Vanity is independent of merit — that’s the mystery of the thing. Sometimes the former exceeds the latter, true; but sometimes it simply comes standard, out of sheer compulsion or habit. It’s not my style, but in cases like his, I admit I don’t find it wholly objectionable. Anything is better than false modesty — and modesty is always false when it isn’t superfluous.

What did surprise me, on the other hand, was that he had so many bookings under his name. Supposedly, it goes against the professional code of conduct. He must have seen it in my face.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it. The hotel’s PR rep is on her way over, you don’t want her finding out who you are. I know you’re a big believer in staying incognito.”

I don’t know how he knows. Gossip at the paper, maybe, although I understand he goes into the office even less than I do.

“I hope your minibar’s good and stocked, because I’ve got nothing I can recommend to you for dinner. They’ve really taken to heart the idea that ‘sauces are back.’ Or maybe they just never knew they’d gone.”

He maneuvered his chair with precision as he spoke. In a flash, he was already more than halfway to the other end of the bar. He turned back a little once more before disappearing.

“And good luck with your work. I don’t think either of us would ever end up here for pleasure.”

The guffaw he let out doubled as a greeting to the cluster of people that was heading toward him.

I went up to my room after having been run aground for an hour in the reading room, which was also deserted, and which had been reupholstered in coordinating shades of aquamarine. There were no stuffed bulls. What had survived, however, in a similarly comic vein, were the bell jars of wax flowers that I had missed in the lobby. In times past, they must have held solemn sway over the room.

The place was deserted, and there was not a single shelf, or book, or anything else in the room — except the sign at the door — that conjured the idea of reading. An ancient and vaguely familiar waiter came in a number of times to ask me what I wanted to drink. I could just hear the distant strains of the epicures lingering in the bar. Now and then, a chorus of laughter would play counterpoint to the immediately recognizable laugh of my page neighbor.

I can now admit to myself what I didn’t want to put into words when I was downstairs. I stayed there in the reading room in the hope of catching sight of my other neighbors. From the armchair I was in, I enjoyed a commanding view of the elevators, through the large archway that formed the entrance to the reading room. At any moment, the boy or the girl or both of them might have appeared, either on their own or accompanied by the owner of the voice who had shut the door in my face without knowing it. Perhaps I would have followed them out into the street or to the dining room; perhaps I would have chanced a conversation with them, from one armchair to another. But the elevator doors didn’t open once, and the hubbub from the bar was affecting my mood. I didn’t care much, just then, if they were truly having a good time or if all the guffawing was false. I was envious: it sounded like quite the party.

The waiter kept incessantly changing untouched ashtrays. I’ve just realized, as I write, why he looked familiar. Nothing to do with childhood memories. He was one of the maître d’s from the old photographs in the elevator, now with a lighter moustache. Apparently, he too had survived the remodeling of the Imperial.

I barely made it around the awful horn of that awful hour. Every so often, I would stop writing, look up, and check the clock; the elevators and the clock hands would be exactly as I’d left them. In the end, a soggy feeling of despair soaked through my body. There is no traveler who doesn’t carry it with him in his suitcase, and no hotel where it doesn’t come free with the room. We’re old acquaintances now, and I’ve had to confront the feeling on my own more than once. I prefer it that way, to tell the truth. There is only one melancholy worse than that of the solitary traveler: the double melancholy of traveling companions, each aware of how his own is made worse by the other’s attempt to hide what he’s feeling.

But I notice I’m feeling less brave today. Travel and all its private, asinine little dilemmas (how much shall we pay? where shall we eat? when should we sleep?) can degenerate into a creeping feeling of sadness, into that distinctive, identical desolation that lies in ambush in every room in every hotel in the world. Ten years ago it all felt less dangerous, more subject to objections, to bargaining; in those days, that hotel-room desperation was scarcely even a rustling noise behind the curtains or a claw reaching out from inside the minibar. It would come and then disappear again quickly; and in those days, deep down, I awaited its arrival eagerly, and even relished the thought of it circling hungrily around me, because I knew I had the battle won before it was started.

The distant tinkling of glasses in the bar — drowsier now, my neighboring columnist having perhaps gone home — and the underwater silence of the room of abandoned readings made me think about shipwrecks again, as though I were already under water, sitting on one of those armchairs bolted to the deck on the Titanic . It was better to jump ship while I could still break the spell, and the bell jar in the wax-flower-filled room; before the greenish armchair swallowed me up in its depths, or my notebook, irrevocably blurred, began to float away. I felt nostalgic for the little bedside lamps in my room. The same nostalgia that a man overboard must feel as he sinks, yearning for the ballroom chandeliers and the deck of an ocean liner, all embers and violin chords now and retreating into the pitch-black night.

And sure enough, here are the little lamps, all lit up, and the rain is tapping on the sidewalk. The room next door is still dark; they must have either turned the television off or drawn the curtains. Someone has replaced the almonds in the minibar, taken the bedspread off, and turned down the top sheet on one side of the bed. Double room, single occupancy — a good title for memoirs that nobody will ever ask me to write.

Everything is in order — only they’ve put two mournful little chocolates on the pillows, in the exact spots where two guests would rest their hypothetical heads. It’s a classic trap, and I know exactly what to do in this situation: grab one of them, tear open the wrapper, kick off my shoes, lay down, and pop it in my mouth. I’ll rest my head, in fact, on the exact spot where the chocolate was.

A domestic flight less than one hour long, a regional airport that beckoned to you, as they all do, to stay there and let the lives of others flow sweetly past as you keep watch over your newsstand. Before that, a pit stop at the house to change suitcases and somehow finish off the review of the Imperial. And now: another room, another hotel. A whole lifetime, you could say, condensed into just three days (and their three long nights).