And she thought that at least some, if not all of her subscribers appreciated her careful choice of the right hotels. She had had emails applauding her taste in selecting a particular room, or a view just visible through a window in the background. So porn, too — porn especially, perhaps — had its connoisseurs.
And it’s for them that she really does her work. She doesn’t give the names of the establishments, she told me, nor does she shoot anything outside the rooms (although they had, on occasion, ventured briefly out into a hallway to film a preamble at the door into a room). And she’s never had a complaint addressed to her from a single hotel — either no one working there has seen the site; or if they have seen it, they don’t recognize the hotel; or else they recognize it but prefer not to let on.
She likes to imagine they’ve decided that it can’t be bad publicity for the place, in the end. She’ll never know, though, because she never goes back to a city or a hotel.
“If you go to the site, you’ll see that when I visit a city where you’ve reviewed a hotel, I tend to stay in that one. Our work isn’t all that different, really.”
I smiled. It had just occurred to me that, like me, she must make reservations under a fake name. They were similar in that way, too.
“You think so?”
“Yes. Although I can see from your face that you don’t agree. And that’s not all. Sometimes after reading your articles, I’ve wanted to take up a few things with you. I remember a horrible write-up you gave to a hotel in the Azores that I had liked a lot. You spent half a page attacking the ‘cosmetic freebies’ in the bathroom. I could have killed you.”
I laughed. I remembered that review. And she was right: the hotel was excellent. It had a garden that was practically a park, and a steaming, sulphurous hot spring filled with yellow water, inside a bathhouse covered in faded mosaics. But I arrived there off the back of a long, chaotic trip I had made for a special edition paid for by the Portuguese board of tourism. A half-hearted fling across a string of islands, a fling forged from silly coincidences and scant enthusiasm, had finally fallen apart there, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth. Throughout that stay, I had felt at my back the same threat of ferocious sadness that had raised its head in the reading room that night and that I could almost hear pacing around the door to the room now, waiting for her to leave.
I told her she was right, that I’d been very tired when I wrote it. She was prodding a little cube of ice down into her whisky. It was very small by now, almost entirely melted. She would submerge it gently, let it surface, and push it down again.
“We’re all tired, aren’t we?”
Then she got up, smiling. It was the same smile as I’d seen at the beginning of the evening — as though we had scarcely talked at all, or as if nothing had been said that deserved any other sort of smile.
“And we’re right to be. It must be after three o’clock. And I don’t know about you, but I have to get up early tomorrow. Or today, rather.”
At the time, I assumed her indifference was feigned. Now I’m not so sure. She was right, it was very late. And actually, she was right about everything else. You could see how confident she was in that. She was irritatingly self-assured, which of course only made her more attractive.
We looked at each other without speaking. In fact, it was that second of silence that made me doubtful, and that still makes me doubtful now. A hotel expert like herself couldn’t have failed to imagine what I was imagining — and, finally, very definitely desiring — at that moment. I felt an anxiety that I only became aware of when I realized I had pictured being relieved of it: whatever happened, sooner or later she would close the door behind her and I would be left alone and would sit here and write it all down in this notebook.
It was a cowardly sort of relief. Writing is for cowards, in my opinion. I stood up too.
“Well, we’ll read each other soon.”
She quickly finished her drink as she said this and set the glass down on the bedside table. I couldn’t tell if her farewell was genuine. I held her gaze, and couldn’t help thinking to myself (in these exact words, absurd as that was): “This isn’t going to last.” And it didn’t last. It stopped lasting when I had the thought, or because I had it. I hesitated another second longer, and it proved to be the fateful second — it may have been the exact one that decided it for her.
“Pedro must have finished tidying up by now. I’d better leave you. It’s very late.”
I said nothing, paralyzed as though in a bad dream. Eventually she held out her hand, and I managed to offer her mine.
It wasn’t a cold handshake, or a warm one, or full of double meanings. It meant nothing more than it was supposed to mean: that we had met, that we had talked, that we were now shaking hands to say goodbye.
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
She left the room, closing the door carefully. It now no longer seemed an acceptable revenge to sit and write this down and make more sense of it all.
~ ~ ~
There’s no internet in the rooms at the Reina Amalia — another sign of its being resigned to its own future. Or of its lack of faith in the future, period — this hotel lives on bottling the past. When I asked about it, checking in at reception, they presented the drawback as a gift, even as a response to the demands of their clientele.
“People come here to get away from all those screens.”
To journey into the past, they added, waxing lyrical. I don’t know whether they were referring to the supposedly glorious past of the hotel itself or to the more recent but almost more remote period — ten years ago, or twelve now — before “all those screens” arrived.
Cellphones are forbidden, or at least not welcome, in the common areas. And it’s true that the guests don’t seem the type who would miss them. It’s mostly elderly, cultured, badly-dressed English couples that sit on the floral-print sofas in the lounge and on the peeling iron benches in the garden, bestowing their dispirited smiles on everything and everyone around them. They have breakfast early, give a quick nod to the sights surrounding the hotel, and then put their critical gazes out to pasture for hours among the closely shorn privet hedges in the park. They strew shelves and bedside tables with books with unknown authors on their covers, and loud spines. But you know how it is with books like that, especially if they’re foreign. Just as with the books’ owners, with their incongruous sneakers, they shouldn’t be judged by their covers. Sometimes they conceal more than is apparent at first glance.
But we shouldn’t overestimate them, either — what both books and owners really bring to mind are wholesome weekly book clubs and pages fastidiously annotated in preparation for the coming debate.
Many of these volumes have been stranded forever on the shelves of the hotel’s reading room, unbeatably melancholic. A small library of assorted little tomes is gathering dust there, with all the requisite names in attendance: Maurois; Malraux; Lajos Zilahy; Daphne du Maurier; some mismatched Lawrence Durrells; a few later Hemingways; and of course, level with the floor, scraping the bottom of the barrel down on the lowest shelf, Pearl S. Buck and a Papini that’s coming loose from its binding.
And, naturally, there are translations into various languages of the letters and the travelogue of the region that were written by the Scottish poet and illustrious guest from whose stay the hotel squeezes so much value, or at least tries to.
They have his books in a little display case at reception, where they sell them to those guests who haven’t brought them from home. I think this must be the poet’s busiest sales point in all of Europe; we’ve all heard of him, but none of us has read him. And with good reason, perhaps: I thought I’d give his little travel journal a go while I was here, and I just couldn’t stand it. What little talent he had for badmouthing and insulting the locals. What a misguided series of rhapsodies and clumsy romps with the region’s gallants and damsels, almost all of them born of mistakes or deceptions. He was the first tourist to fall into the region’s tourist traps, which were set with remarkable speed and intuition as he passed through it. In essentials, they’re no better now than they were, to tell the truth.