I was thinking of her when I chose it. Or thinking like her, actually. I don’t know if she’ll like the hotel, but it certainly makes a good backdrop. This place looks like something off her website. It would be a beginner’s error to mistake for cruelty the staff’s impeccable bearing, the flawless foresight with which they anticipate one’s wishes, and the distance — measured with extreme precision — that they establish before granting them. Really, it’s the guests who demand this distance or who take it for granted. They pay good money for it, and they would be taken aback if it suddenly disappeared.
And I was lucky to find a room here. Someone had just canceled a reservation, and apparently all the beds in the city are taken. The winter season is already in full swing at the ski resorts in the area. There’s gray frost on the windshields and ice in the tree beds lining the sidewalk. There’s snow on the vast mountains that rise up over the city and that the train must have been crossing during the night while I looked through the windows into the darkness outside, a darkness so impenetrable that I couldn’t be sure we weren’t traveling through one long tunnel all night long.
After breakfast, I went out for a walk. At the door, hoards of guests were climbing into minibuses and cars. They were stuffed into fluorescent clothes that must have cost the same as several weeks’ worth of anti — jet lag treatments. I soon came back to the hotel. It’s the only feasible refuge in this ultimate paradise of winter sports. The city is everywhere advertising itself as such: there are specialist magazines on the newsstands, signs reading “Forfait”, “Snowboard”, and “The Black Diamond Run” over bars and clubs, offers on winter vacation packages at the travel agencies. There are cars with skis on the roof racks, shop windows showing off the latest in snowready fashions, and sunglasses that look like the LCD ones I was given at reception. They leave a mask of defiant white skin around the eyes of people’s tanned faces. Everyone looks either recently arrived from or about to set out for the ski areas in the mountains. It’s cold, and I keep finding myself one coat behind on this trip. A provisionary, chill breeze eddies along the streets as though we were standing offstage and none of this mattered much, as though the real action were taking place far off, up there, where the adults are having their fun.
At least the other cities seemed to be aware of my search effort. They played a part in it, even if it was only to make it more difficult. But I get the feeling that this one is refusing to even take the hint. Considering the results of my hunches thus far, that could be a good sign.
The hotel restaurant was deserted, and I sat in the lobby instead. I passed the time by watching the woman who was acting as hostess. She was efficiency incarnate. She maneuvered expertly, very seriously, and never inelegantly among the tables, offering tea and coffee. Her comings and goings, all her gestures, were impeccable, worthy of study; they were a reminder that there is an art to everything, a way of executing things properly. She wore a tailored suit whose only elements of uniform were the little brushstrokes of corporate colors on her belt and her shoes.
I noticed that after listening to the guests’ orders it was she herself who disappeared and reappeared with a heavy tray that she would deposit on the low tables. I was surprised. Really, her role ought to have been heading up an army of waiters and waitresses to whom she could pass the orders.
I barely had to signal (not even a signal — I simply raised my eyes and met hers) to get her over to my armchair. The black coffee and newspapers I asked her for were only an excuse to see her from up close and to hear her voice. She smiled — just a little, but just right — and went off to the little bar in the corner of the room. I was surprised again to see that it was she who operated the espresso machine. And then she vanished, the task half done. The diligence of her wordless promise didn’t seem to match the fifteen minutes it took her to reappear with a newspaper in her hand. No tray, no sash with the hotel’s logo; she was clearly much more mortified than I was by this lack of formalities in an establishment that would appear to guarantee them to the guest as he arrives, and that doubtless charges dearly for them as he departs. And I think that the liking, or at least the fellow feeling, she inspired in me was mutual. That she noticed that I noticed the absence of these details, in the same way that one lost in an uncivilized country finally finds a person who speaks his language.
She apologized as she handed it to me — they could only get local papers today. As for the coffee, the machine had run out of cartridges and it would be a while before they could get more. I didn’t have to ask why; my gesture of very slight surprise was enough to make her tell me that from midday onwards there would be some disruptions in the normal functioning of the hotel. It seems the parent company and the recently appointed director have failed to comply with what’s been laid out in the industry agreements. Apparently, the unions have been nursing wounds and planning formal complaints for weeks. And today was the very day they had agreed on for a series of strikes and protests.
After a pause, she asked me with a pained, conspiratorial movement if I could hear anything. I remembered the man with the slippers in the poet’s hotel, his inaudible radio stuck in a loop of repeated songs. Once again, I couldn’t hear anything, and I told her as much.
“Exactly.”
Her answer was quick, triumphant, and bitter. We ought to have been able to hear the ambient music programed to play twenty-four hours a day in the hotel’s common areas.
She pointed to a used coffee cup on one of the little, low tables.
“You see this? Well, you shouldn’t have to. It shouldn’t be there.”
But she can’t cover the other staff members’ absences on her own. In fact, she explained, she shouldn’t be there, either. It isn’t part of her purview as a middle manager. But today, apparently, a lot of managers like herself, and even some directors (she pronounced the italics), have had to get up out of their offices and get to work at reception or in the rooms. This didn’t exactly mean she feared to get her hands dirty — though she must have taken her rings off for a bit, because I could see the marks on her magnificent fingers. The ones who drew the short straws had to make up the rooms or dry glasses in the kitchen. The head events organizer was serving the breakfast this morning. If they don’t make progress on the negotiations, she told me solemnly, the hotel will find itself hurtling down the slippery slope from a discreet strike to an all-out war on strikebreakers.
She stopped herself just at that moment to look at the camouflaged door at one corner of the lobby. Two men in street clothes were sticking a flyer written in large, capital lettering onto it. We could read it from where we were. It was an ordinary piece of paper, printed in one of the standard fonts that come with any word processor. It had an almost handmade look to it, which was shocking in a place like this, where everything presented to the public is first submitted to a process of denaturalization and homogenization. As in haunted castles, the law here is that nothing of what hosts can see or touch must resemble what they can touch or have or consume daily, when at home.
The flyer announced strikes on behalf of the protesting hotel staff. It also warned that the contracting of temporary replacement staff contravened current labor statutes and would be immediately reported to the Ministry of Labor.