Why deny it: the hotel itself is a trap. And this is something I think the other guests do realize, sufficiently well-traveled or sufficiently British as they are to be able to quickly sniff out any discrepancies between its pretensions to good taste, what it really offers, and the prices it charges. “No, not very good value,” my neighbors clucked at their breakfast table this morning. Their murmured conversation was peppered with this phrase — and different variations of it — which was repeated every five minutes like a mantra filled with endless caveats and nuances and scruples, and which served as a spell to lighten the mood. It always cheers us up when we can prove that the thing we so wished to see, what motivated our journey in the first place, was a rip-off.
Meanwhile, the clientele can’t be clamoring for the low-to-no-screen diet the hotel keeps us on quite as much as had been claimed at reception. From the very beginning of the day, there’s a line to use the single, prehistoric computer that sits in the small, windowless room they are calling a “business center”. Only on my third attempt did I manage to actually get a turn at it. It was in use during the siesta that this particular brand of foreign visitors is either unaware of or else feels itself to be above; and it was in use at teatime, when the whitewashed lounges are abuzz — if that’s not overstating it — with pre-prandial activity. It was nearly eleven o’clock at night before I could use it, and even then it was only after a lot of throat-clearing — not that my coughs made much of an impression on the deeply concentrated man in shorts, who looked like a retired Bengali cavalryman that had wandered out of an Agatha Christie novel, as he sat in endless contemplation of photos of the sights that awaited him in vain beyond the confines of the hotel.
This business center isn’t just squalid, it’s positively unhealthy. It takes a while to grow accustomed to the tiny room’s stale smell of tobacco (never mind the fact smoking is forbidden, even the garden); it permeates the air, seeming to seep out of the computer itself. It’s practically an archaeological specimen at this point; it sends out silky electromagnetic waves like spider webs, which I tried to bat away from my face out of pure reflex.
I visited thehotellife.com, fearing they might have a firewall installed against porn sites. The business center doesn’t have a door, and anyone passing by would be able to see the screen. Maybe that’s the real firewall. The computer finally connected after an agonizing minute of hesitation. As I had done so many times in these last three days, I typed in the address without looking. Our fingers learn fast.
I moved the cursor arrow to the small keyhole in the padlock that appeared under the page’s name. There’s an unimposing warning for underage users and those connecting from less permissive countries. The padlock, as always, lit up and widened out to fill the whole screen. The five-second wait becomes more intolerable to me each time, almost insulting.
I entered the password she had given me. I wonder if I’m leaving a trail in the system that she can follow when I do this. I can’t tell if I find it exciting or embarrassing that she might know how many times I’ve visited her page these last few days, and how long I was there each time. And I’m not sure if it’s a relief or a disappointment to think that she may never bother to find out, that perhaps this tenuous line of communication between us only exists in my imagination.
Some years ago, the head of an important hotel chain commissioned me to write a prologue for an anthology of hotel-themed stories. They wanted to do a large run and put a copy on all the bedside tables in all the hotels in the chain. The idea wasn’t at all bad, and it was certainly less sinister than the Americans with their Bibles; but the guests kept stealing them, and in the end a literal chain came to be used: to tie the spine of each book to a bed leg.
I’ve forgotten all the stories — and the prologue, of course — except one: a man and a woman, both incurable consumptives en route to their respective sanatoriums, happen to spend one night in a pair of neighboring rooms in a roadside hotel. They never see each other or speak. But they cough and cough all night, and in their feverish, delirious half sleep they find themselves believing they’re holding a conversation or singing a duet together through the wall. Their hackings and convulsions are transformed into strains of love and promises of comfort. The next day, the man continues on his way and forgets it all. In her final days in the hospital, the woman can still recall the imaginary duet from that night.
There they were, following my open-sesame: the photos and frozen videos. There are hundreds; I’ve barely scratched the surface yet. I don’t know who Candy, or Steven & Susana, or Dani & Leo are; nor am I familiar with the adventures of Carnival Day in Rio or what might have happened on the White Nights in Saint Petersburg or on Bullfight Day in Ronda. But I already recognize Linda’s face and Lewis’s body, I know that Jennifer looks younger than she really is and what Joey & Billy did to celebrate their Thanksgiving with the Twins. I can reconstruct from memory the decoration — glimpsed only in the background of the videos — of numerous hotel rooms, spectacular suites and tiny cubicles, beach huts, balconies with clinical-looking Jacuzzis, views over the rooftops of hundreds of cities. And the beds — wide beds, narrow beds, round beds, double beds, beds with canopies, water beds, beds surrounded by mirrors; and the wallpapers, stuccowork, trompe l’oeils of varying taste, modernist glass designs, and the alternately dull and sophisticated furniture of room after room scattered all over the globe.
What she said isn’t true. Our work isn’t similar; in fact, we occupy opposite poles of the profession. I visit hotels, while she’s managed to build one immense, labyrinthine hotel out of fragments of thousands of others, tailor made to be just right for her, and just right for anyone. A hotel whose doors are all open, whose rooms are all occupied, a hotel with impeccable service, run with her professional touch, a hotel where one is tempted to stay and live forever.
Sometimes I think I recognize a room in one of her videos or I even seem to remember having found myself between those exact four walls. And then I see a mention of some city I’ve never visited. So either she’s lying, or she’s mistaken, or my memory is deceiving me. At least there can be no doubt about the names of the actors: we all take for granted and accept from the start that no one is using their real name.
I moved the cursor down to the bottom of the page and saw what I’d been hoping to see for three days. As though in solidarity, the computer itself seemed to hold its breath: it gave a sort of hiccup and choked down its radioactive whirring. In a newly-appeared thumbnail, right above the name that went with it (Karinne & Leo), I could make out a miniature image of the face of the quick-tempered girl from the room next door, the one who had struggled to put on her shirt as she walked down the hallway at the Imperial and who had insulted me (or had she?) as she passed. I waited a little before clicking on her picture. So — Karinne at last. I had started to think that the woman hadn’t managed to “cut anything good from it” in the end (I have just reread and confirmed in my notes that those are the exact words she used that night in my room).