By the bye, on this occasion I see that the chief receptionist has on a pair of grey worsted trousers, evidently the lower half of a well-cut suit, under his uniform tunic, as though to hint that only his upper half, the half with which he so rarely bows, is in livery. He tells me a little about his personal life, which I thought I knew something about. One more revelation, I imagine to myself. Certainly he has a relationship with a seamstress, and one may even assume that tailors are interested in his custom, and supply him with cut-price clothes. In the evening at six our friend disappears into the wardrobe, to emerge five minutes later in transformed dignity. For the first time one may see him responding to greetings. Taking his black silver-tipped cane in his grey-gloved left hand, with his right he touches the half top hat which he continues to affect, doffs it politely but quickly to his boys, who all bow very low to him. He has a little comradely chat with the night porter. Visitors who are sitting in the lobby or who happen to cross his path he doesn’t even look at. Once more his eyes sweep the room, spot me, and send me a little spurt of friendliness. Then he enters the revolving door. And from the slow majesty with which it spins one may tell who has just left the hotel.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 24 January 1929
41. The Old Waiter
This waiter is so old that he is known all over the hotel as “the old man”, and employees and guests alike refer to him as “the old man”, and he himself probably only intermittently recollects his name, which has fallen into disuse over many years. It’s as though he had none any more, because like a mythological demi-god he has joined the ranks of those whose names no longer matter, because they represent a function. The waiter represents age in this hotel — and, as a distant second, waiterdom. He was a waiter for over forty years, now he has been “old” for another ten. And the set of tails he pulls on every afternoon has changed from professional to emblematic clothing — if you see the waiter in them, you think that that is the fitting uniform for old age.
I should say that this old man bears none of the familiar badges of old age. He is clean shaven, his skull is completely hairless, and even his eyebrows have remained pale, by some freak of nature. He seems to have refused the respectable silver of old age. Either that, or he is so old that he has passed through the epoch of white hair and is well on the way to petrifaction, a species of human mineral, perhaps regressing to the world’s original condition, the inertness of the so-called inorganic. If you watch him leaning against one of the stout pillars in the hotel lobby for an hour, a stubby clay pipe (extinguished) in the corner of his mouth, lower lip pouting, his slightly pendulous cheeks the gleaming waxy red of some Tyrolean apples, his little expressionless eyes of shiny cobalt fixing some distant world, his crisp shirtfront of a pure, almost otherworldly white, the deep black of the impeccably fitting tails without a crease or speck of dust, in his gleaming shoes the steady reflections of lamps and candles — then you might suppose the waiter was his own monument, a deity of the hotel and the tourist trade, and you would feel unable to pass him without a small bow. But then all at once — and just when you least expect it, he starts to move — and the sight is so improbable that you start to wonder about the pillar as well, and suspect that it too will shortly change location. Where is the old man going? — To the restaurant. He walks from the knees down, his feet take tiny shuffling steps, if someone is in his way, he will stop, a mechanism stalls, and you think you hear somewhere under the tails that a little cog has suddenly ground to a halt. Then he starts to move again. A quarter of an hour later, the old man reaches the restaurant.
He never moves — though this is not always immediately apparent — without some end in view. Guests have arrived whom he waited on twenty or thirty years before and whose approach he saw while he was leaning against the pillar, his eyes apparently fixed on some other world. His alertness is unchanged, only his movements have slowed down. This was how he watched people arriving forty years before. Only then he got there quicker, he materialized in front of them, he ran to the kitchen, he was back. Imperceptibly but steadily over the years and the decades his feet have grown feebler, his hands more shaky, his movements slower; imperceptible as the movement of an hour hand on a clock, but just as unstoppable, age and feebleness have overtaken the body of the old waiter. Every day his walk has grown a little slower — till finally at the end of forty years it has become a glacial shuffle.
Now he is standing before his familiar guests, a bow is something he can still manage. A second waiter, a young and nimble one, is at the side of the old man, pad in hand, ready to take the order. It’s as though the old guests spoke in a language that the young waiter doesn’t understand, the language of a vanished generation, perhaps a vanished world. For the old man repeats everything the guests have said verbatim to his young colleague — but it looks as though he were interpreting it. It is as though the orders were only turned into edible dishes, to courses, to delicacies, by grace of the old waiter’s intervention. If the young fellow were to take them down directly, they might prove to be inedible. Although the guests speak softly (the table they are seated at an oasis of silence in the room full of noise and talk and clattering plates and clinking glasses), the old man hears every word of what they have to say — the young one presumably wouldn’t be capable of it. For the former has the gift of intuition; he guesses what the guests want — and further, he is capable of changing their order should he choose to do so. For it is possible that they might order a dish whose quality on a given day the old man is unwilling to vouch for. Then he will pretend they have ordered something else. And that is why the guests are willing to wait for him while he slowly approaches their table. There is an ancient relationship between them and him, they are all coevals; just as one might share a certain provenance, they and he are, so to speak, patriots of an epoch, which is a dearer and more important thing than a fatherland anyway, because times are quick to disappear, while fatherlands remain what they were; one can cast aside or mislay the former, while the latter keep us in their grasp. The guests and the old waiter: they share the language of a gone epoch. That’s why they understand one another, that’s why they wait on and for one another.