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Not living had taken its toll. The bloom had lost its rose.

I couldn't remember life before the hotel. I had forgotten. Was it that I had seen so little of the world that I no longer remembered it, or had the world so completely deadened me that I could have forgotten?

I didn't know.



POUM, VIRUM, SNOT

Occasionally, roaming the hallways at night, tormented by insomnia, I’d catch a glimpse of a wisp of fabric disappearing around a corner. I’d hurry: it was only Luc, Luc M., the owner, he too was wandering with his monstrous gait through the narrow hallways, filthy and poorly lit, of his cursed establishment. Hey, Sixtus! How’s Sixtus? he would ask. Oh, just as you see, I’d say to him. And Luc, how’s he? Oh, same as always, pushing up daisies! he would respond, with a grimace drowning in a spatter of spittle, which was his way of signifying mirth.

I didn’t know how to respond. But in fact his joking seemed expressly designed to silence you, dominate you, mortify you, annihilate you. Left with your silence, he would press his advantage. He claimed, for example, to have been a war photographer (he photographed me a few times with an ancient camera, which in my opinion had no film in it, just for the pleasure of hearing the click, and what’s more I never saw any of his pictures), or to have run a convalescent home for the mortally ill, a clinic called . . . ah yes, the Daisy Pushers! (Again a grimace and a spatter of spittle.) He’d tirelessly tell me about his various lives. I always regretted listening to him. I thought myself weak. But in my defense it must be said that he was my only companion during the interminable duration of my stay at the hotel.

Fine. In the spirit of reconciliation, in order to avoid quarreling, to maintain some semblance of open and equal exchange, I pretended to believe him. I’d tell him that he was lucky to remember things, that I was constantly fighting my poor memory, such as whether or not my father had been a member of POUM, the Spanish anarchist party. But Luc didn’t take this well. He thought I was mimicking him, that I was fighting back, that I was playing with words to mock him. "POUM?" he would scornfully repeat, "POUM! Well, after the Daisy Pushers I opened a medical lab, the VIRUM, and then I started a pharmaceutical company that specialized in nasal deturgescents, called SNOT. Absolutely: I founded SNOT!" And then he’d run off, shedding tears of unhappy laughter (and desnotting his nose in the process), his torso shaken by a combination of cachinnation and despair, his hands over his ears so as to be sure he wouldn’t hear anything else, and would therefore have the last word.

A child who wanted to be interesting, a pathetic child, even though he was a hundred times older than I.

Or maybe, suddenly changing his tone as well as the subject, and alluding to my nocturnal presence in the hallways, he’d say, “Cheer up, Sixtus! There’s nothing like a nice long night of insomnia following an angst-ridden day to make you stare ever more despairingly at an ever-more-hopeless horizon! As for your morning coffee, I should warn you that we’re going to have to forgo it. There’s a problem with the supplier, etc.”

The monster!