Javier Montes - The Hotel Life

Flying affects the memory, too; it’s not just a lot of ground that airplanes put between things. I’m surprised by the clarity with which I remember everything that happened in the Imperial that night, because it seems like three years or three centuries have passed. It’s as though two identical suitcases got switched on the conveyor belt and I came away with the memories of things that happened to someone else. I feel like I ought to worry about being privy to so many compromising details, and as I comb back through them, I feel the embarrassment, bordering on disgust, of one who finds himself accidentally riffling through the lotions and nail clippers of another person’s toiletry bag.

I can already see that this one notebook isn’t going to be enough. The computer is useful for articles, but it’s been such a long time since I’ve written anything else that I had forgotten the drawbacks of the blank screen: it makes my mind go blank, too, and discolors my memories. I went out to buy another notepad this morning, in a furtive expedition to the nearest stationery shop.

I’m not familiar with this city, so I followed the directions they gave me at reception. And I haven’t set foot outside since then. It’s odd, though, in a way: what was it about it that made it seem so furtive to me and made me write that just now, if it was done in broad daylight and with intentions that couldn’t possibly be considered by anyone to be anything other than honorable? And who was this “anyone”, if not a less sympathetic version of myself, whose disapproving gaze I had felt burning into my back these past three days?

It’s an ugly, schoolkid’s notebook with a motorcycle rider on the cover. It was the first one they offered me, the cheapest. I didn’t want some sophisticated journal, one of those ones that suggest that what is being written in them (and, by extension, the person doing the writing) is important. They didn’t have any in that everyday stationery shop, anyhow. I’m under no illusions — I bought the most insignificant notebook in the world in order to hide the significance of having bought it.

I don’t know if I slept a long time or hardly at all that afternoon at the Imperial — I had sunk into a black sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, the moment its bogus, bleach-smelling solace washed over me. I opened my eyes and was blinded by the lamplight. I shut them again, and a negative of the room danced around me in the darkness. My tongue came unstuck from my palate only reluctantly, and as it did so, I became aware of the taste of the little square of chocolate that had still not completely dissolved. Reality took some time to recompose itself: the rain outside; the bathroom; and the whole city around the hotel, too; the hotel; the room next door; the people in the room next door. I can remember that I was having an unpleasant, violent dream: someone was shouting threats into my ear and hitting me.

But someone really was hitting something, someone was shouting. Almost in my ear, in fact, but really it was in the room next door. I sat up, wide awake. On the other side of the partition, a girl — perhaps the one I had seen in her underwear earlier — was shouting. I could hear the voices of the boy and the man who had shut the door, too. I sat there at the edge of the bed. Silence fell. Suddenly the girl cried out — in terror? in rage? — and there was a sound like a whole tower of furniture collapsing against the wall. The head of my bed shook. And that marked a shift: what was happening in the next room over was starting to have effects in mine, and I decided that the aftershock in my bed and the blinking wall lamps gave me license to investigate. I leapt up and quickly found myself in the hallway. It was as deserted as before, and once again in silence. I feared that it would all end there, that the silent hallway and the closed doors would push me back into my room, alone yet again.

But the door next to mine opened and the girl walked out. Not in her underwear — she was wearing a short skirt, and as she walked toward me down the hallway, she was pulling on a T-shirt that obscured her face. She tripped on a crease in the carpet, struggled with the tight T-shirt, and finally managed to get it down over her head. It was indeed the girl I had seen earlier. Now that she was standing and I could see her from close up, she was surprisingly slight, even petite. She looked at me, looked away, then fixed me with her gaze again and didn’t let it drop. She seemed angry. She came toward me as though she knew me well and had something to throw in my face. I opened my mouth to say something, even arched my eyebrows. To be honest, it strikes me now that I must have looked like an idiot. But she said nothing at all; she walked past me without stopping, making a beeline for the elevator. I turned around. She didn’t even look at me.

“Fuck you.”

Fuck you , or fuck him ? Or fuck them ? I didn’t hear her properly, and a moment later she had stepped into the elevator, which was still stopped at our floor where I had left it. Perhaps I hadn’t slept much after all, or perhaps there really was no one else staying in the whole hotel. The indifferent doors took five endless seconds to close. This didn’t suit her at all. I could just hear her before they closed in front of her.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, come on.”

She had left the door to 206 half open. No sound came from the other side, only a light that was identical (just like the doorway, just like the crack in it) to that seeping out of my own room. I stood looking at the two doors; they seemed to invite each other’s company. I knew that a moment later I would start to have second thoughts, so I strode forward and opened the one that led to my neighbors’ room.

Across their little entryway, in their bathroom, all the lights were on. The boy was sitting on the edge of the bathtub with a towel around his waist. A man was holding his chin in one hand and blowing into one of his eyes.

“I don’t see anything.”

The man whose voice I had heard, clearly. He was older, or at least older-looking, than his voice had made me think.

“But you’ve got to be more careful. Anything can end up in your eye. It’s like an open wound.”

I wasn’t expecting this quasi-pastoral, even playground-like scene. It didn’t match the horrors I had assumed were unfolding in there; I realized then that I had spent the whole afternoon convincing myself something unspeakable was happening in that room. There’s a reason I’m not a writer. I realized by the time I was twenty, when I gave up for good on the novel that was so typical of my age, and left it in a drawer: I have a headstrong, trivial imagination. It can’t be relied on for serious work. It will dream up convoluted routes for arriving at hum-drum situations, then dive head-first into cliché when something unusual happens (if it really does happen).

In this case, I had my second-rate stock shots at the ready: red streaks all over the mirrors, black puddles on white marble. But the girl in the hallway had no visible wounds, and there was no blood on the bathroom tiles. I couldn’t see anything wrong with the boy from where I was standing, either. I stood quietly in the doorway. Neither the boy nor the man turned around. Now, looking back, I’m not sure if they didn’t realize I was looking at them or just chose to pretend they didn’t. I could hear my heart pounding.

A woman’s voice stopped it cold. She sounded perfectly calm.

“What do you want?”

Its owner was coming out of the bedroom. Tall, my age or a little younger. She had on a purple sweater that somehow both invited and repelled the touch of a hand to confirm its color. She spoke without looking at me, balancing on one leg as she fastened the tiny strap of a green leather sandal. She did this — held one leg up and bent back, her long, expert fingers working the clasp on her expensive, almost invisible sandal — with a composure that it was impossible not to admire. These past three days, it’s been the first image that comes to mind whenever I think of her.