Joanna Walsh - Hotel

A hotel already knows there is something wrong with you. A spa hotel is a melancholy place catering to ordinary unhappiness, sanctioning the desires it treats. A sanatorium is a clinic, but is also luxurious. I’m not sure when a spa hotel becomes a sanatorium.

I have been ill several times in hotels, as though I chose to go there not to recover, but to be sick, to get rid of something, to have my illness out of the way of other people, and their interference. That way, I have kept well and sane a good deal of the time. What good did it do me? I don’t know. I only knew that not to be this way could have hurt others obscurely in ways they might not themselves have understood.

— Doctor, doctor, I think there’s something wrong with me.

(No, I meant to say I feel there’s something wrong with me.)

— Where do you feel it?

(The patient is always the straight man.)

— In lots of different places. What do you advise?

— Well, I advise you not to visit any of those places again.

Some aches become me. It becomes difficult not to sustain them. When I am sick, putting on clothes feels fake. Washing my body is washing something belonging to someone else. Where should my illness take place? I can hardly imagine an out-of-body experience, wouldn’t know where else to go. I could seek asylum in a hotel to get away from it all (as if I ever could), but there are diseases that strike you in hospitals, diseases, perhaps, of hospitals.

To be in a hotel is to have a complaint, or to feel the tension of being about to complain, or to have the possibility of complaining, which is not possible at home. It is difficult to find a hotel for an angry woman but, at home, who would she complain to? If you have a complaint at home, you keep it to yourself, more shame you. You lie on your bed, and then you have to make it. Every day.

From what do I wish to be cured?

I must find something.

I want my temperature taken hourly, my pillow smoothed, my corners hospitalized. I want cool water and a straw, I want to be referred for treatment. I want to be referred to in the first person plural. I want to begin to refer to myself in the third person singular. I want my body parts to have personalities, as though I were in charge of an unruly playground. I want them to be disciplined. I want to be gently smothered by authority, all for the good of my health, to eat strange things at regular times, to be weighed and not to measure up. I want it to be time for something to be done about me; it’s too late for me to do anything for myself. I want to be told to do things, then told to do nothing. I want to be put into unfamiliar machines. I want the machines to do something for me. I want hydrotherapy, psychotherapy, physiotherapy. I want it all to hurt, just a little more than they say. I want to be nursed (oh yes!), I want to be gently, but firmly, physically humiliated. I want to be a hopeless case. I want them to say there’s hope; I want to be out of danger, I want to be brought back from the dead. I want life support. I want my body and my mind to be preserved by “hypocritic” oath. I want to be the stain on the bathroom tiles. If I am here to be ill, I will be. I am here to lack something, to uncomplete myself. I want to convalesce but never leave, because everything outside the hotel is sick.

The reality is, I get sick in hotels. But what I’m sick of isn’t hotels.

I used to call it hypochondria.

I didn’t want to call it anything else.

I blocked it with the name, perhaps. Words can do that. Some words are cul-de-sacs: they prevent anything enacting off the page. They’re just as good as aphonia.

II

A proper disease involves distance, and systems: trains, police, border controls, quarantine, passports, room numbers, bank-card numbers, and somewhere to locate it.

(You never go on holiday where you live.)

Dora’s dad was taken out of the family to be cured. His cure was physical: it was located in a spa. Dora’s cure was mental. It was presumed to be located in a psychologist’s office.

When Dora, or her father, are ill, they go away from home, where they recover. When they return they slowly become ill again. Diseases are not always caught in the street. Sometimes they’re familial. “He was sick before the marriage,” said Dora’s aunt. Perhaps she means syphilis, a family disease that Dora’s feared her dad had passed on to her, as well as to his wife. It was a disease that did not come from home, neither from his childhood home, nor from the one he made with Dora and her mother. It might have been caught in a hotel. In any case, it took up residence in Dora’s home, and made it necessary for Dora, her father — and, sometimes, her mother — to leave home, to search for a cure.

(Even Dora’s mother must be cured of home sometimes.)

So Dora leaves for a spa, but she travels there not with her mother, but her father. Dora’s mother already isn’t there. Throughout A Fragment , she is away (which is, in her case, at home). She is like Cinderella’s mother, like Snow White’s mother, like Bambi’s mother, like the mother of The Little Mermaid. These mothers are not needed in those stories, or it seems that their absence is needed. As “Dora” is not a story but a (case) history, Dora’s mother cannot, like them, be killed for the sake of the plot. But she is near absent from Freud’s analysis.

FREUD

The story of a mother’s love usually becomes a model for the daughter.

But Freud does not tell us the story of Dora’s mother’s love.

FREUD

I never met her mother.

Like Dora, like her father, and her mother, I sought the cure away from home, where the cause resided.

I do not know the story of my mother’s love. Perhaps I do not want to know it.

III

In 1909, Katherine Mansfield, a writer from New Zealand, arrived at a German hotel that adjoined a spa. Like its other inhabitants, she was there for a cure. From this visit came her first book of stories, In A German Pension .

The German Pension in the book is a “family hotel,” but it does not contain entire families. Every family is missing a member (usually the male member who, somehow, seldom needed to be cured). A family hotel can also refer to the family that runs it, not the family that stays there, the family that will provide a family atmosphere, which is so very unlike your own family, and who will adopt you, temporarily, into theirs, without any of your family’s inconveniences. Their son tends the bar; their daughter waits tables. The whole family is there to serve you.

To show the family away from home is to show it at its most powerful. That it exists outside its setting without splitting, crumbling, is to show something almost invincible. To become invincible it must harden. You see them sometimes, in hotel restaurants: parents and children with adjoining rooms; across the tables, faces that, over the years, have practiced love upon one another. A small family hotel was always the sort I could never afford. In a hotel the economics of family are laid bare. Only the rich stay in hotels as families, can afford to take members who cannot pay for themselves. Being rich enough to stay with each other, they find they have nowhere else to go.

I did not review family hotels.

It is a luxury not to think about family.

In the German Pension, all they can talk about is home.

“Germany,” the traveler boomed, “is the home of the family.”

“What is your husband’s favourite meat?” asked the widow. Katherine Mansfield’s narrator (avatar? — she is unnamed: let’s call her KM) cannot say. The widow says “You would not have kept house, as his wife, for a week without knowing that fact.”