The Incompletes Read online

  She had noticed, earlier, the confusion that the oversized staircase produced in Felix. Then his breathing had quickened as they climbed the stairs—a sign of impatience or perplexity, she thought, but certainly not of exhaustion. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck and behind her ears, cold despite his proximity and most pronounced when they found themselves on the same step, him following close behind her. Masha thought of her nighttime attire: the layers of thick woolen clothing she slept in, one irregular garment over another, which were meant to protect a nucleus, namely her body, but which also had the predictable effect of relegating it to the depths by giving it another form. Many of these garments had lost all utility beyond providing nocturnal warmth; years of use and gradual misshaping had left them completely unintelligible and only able to cover a given body part when combined with other articles of clothing in the same condition.

  Though each individual garment was undefinable, this clothing was Masha’s most intimate possession, not as much for its nocturnal use as for the way it concealed and, let’s say, deformed her body. She knew Felix had thought something of the kind, and could not fathom how. The banal intuition that flourished in the hotel. Perhaps it was the ominous mood there, which was exasperatingly consistent and proliferated in infinite details, from the smallest and best hidden to the biggest and most obvious, and which came together in solidarity to produce a standard set of impressions among the guests. Based on her experience, Masha understood it was the power of the Hotel Salgado to induce shared ideas, outstripping the intelligence and, of course, the will of the individual, and that Felix’s recent thought was proof of this.

  As light and robust as a balloon made of wool, Masha understood that what she had gone to the new guest’s room to say was nonsense. But she had passed the point of no return, so between delivering her message and inventing an even flimsier pretext, she opted to stick to her plan, unaware that she would completely forget what she was going to say when Felix opened the door a moment later. To her, the room seemed like the hotel’s final frontier, where no one ever went and which no one ever noticed; if it did happen to pass through someone’s mind, it was to inspire feelings of suspicion and reticence, as if the place were a distant, hostile territory. Masha thought there was an insurmountable difference between that part of the building and the rest, despite the fact that these two spaces were the same in a sense that seemed obvious: one was included in the other. It was, however, only a half truth that the room was far removed and suspect, or any more so than the other areas in the hotel one might visit at that moment, since the endless stairs and awkward hallways, together with all the landings, turned the whole thing into a gallery of irresolvable spatial vagaries; it felt like arriving somewhere after a long and monotonous journey without ever having left the previous place. As soon as one stepped into a space, its shape and dimensions changed spontaneously, as sometimes happened when a corner that had previously gone unnoticed would take on the—almost invariably desolate—significance of an important room.

  Stairs, hallways, and unmarked doors. The Hotel Salgado had an accessible form that unfolded the deeper inside you went. A guest’s first impression would be that the place was too big, and that its size translated into an unusual complexity. As an object, however, it turned out to be both multifaceted and uniform, and as such could not stand up to lengthy cataloguing. A few repeated elements were always combined in different ways. One day, Felix looked out one of the windows and jumped back in surprise. According to Masha, the hotel was a space to be penetrated, not one to wander around; it could also be added that it was a place she almost never left. Many people made the mistake of treating it as if it were just another building. In this case, the habit was still to enact the idea of what was normal; it may have been a labyrinth, but each small act of adaptation led to a general acclimation. Spaces opened before the guest without foyers or transitions, and changes might also happen this way, as if hidden forces averse to coherence were swinging their perception between rupture and continuity. In fact, those who wandered through the hotel for the first time would occasionally pause, disoriented, feeling as if the past and immediate present had faded; immersed in a torrent of contradictory impressions, they suddenly felt they were somewhere else—not anywhere in particular, just some other, unfamiliar place.

  A hotel in a foreign land. Felix could imagine himself living a borrowed life there as he could almost nowhere else; a life that was decidedly his, but whose details—in this case, his odyssey in the Hotel Salgado—could easily have been assigned to another; all it would have taken was the smallest difference, being just a few minutes too early or too late, to dispel the sequence of actions that had delivered him to where he was. In hotels, he felt like a person without a past, or, rather, he felt like a person with a vague and malleable past. This was not a problem for him at all, because all he needed to do was put some, let’s say, superficial piece of his life in order—the ceremonies of his morning routine, returning to his room, personal traces left on his space—to feel a new memory surge in some small part of himself. This state of transparency (being visible and also not, reducing his physical presence to the traces of his actions) was exacerbated in a hotel like the Salgado and had struck Felix right away, when he had needed to wait for Masha for an unspecified period of time and when, once registered, he’d watched her fade into the darkness behind the reception desk. Later, it was only with great effort that he had been able to see Masha signaling that he should follow her with a languid movement of her arm that Felix received somewhat dubiously. (Still, this is the most touching memory he has of Masha, her comical gesture of leaning backward with one hand extended, ready to guide him.)

  The sensations Felix experienced in the Hotel Salgado, particularly when at the mercy of the cold, the deathly silence, and the murmurings of the void, surely originated with those vast enclosures that stretched far into the darkness and out of sight. He often felt he was moving through endless expanses impossible to contain in thought, which only reinforced his conviction that he was living in an abstract space that the Hotel Salgado produced—starting with its name, given the part of the world where it stood. It occurred to Felix that the concrete experience of abstraction was something that all hotels lent out, that their walls gathered secret lives, expiration dates, detachment, and intimacy. This might have been his vision, but Masha’s was vastly different. For her, “hotel” practically meant “world,” and the name “Salgado” was the closest thing she knew to the idea of confinement.

  As if she were a chronic traveler, waking up each morning implies for Masha an effort to orient herself; she does not know where she is, or how and when she got there. This confusion lasts only a few moments, until she senses—with bitterness but also calm—that all is in order and she is right where she was when she fell asleep hours earlier. She recognizes the small square alarm clock on the nightstand and, next to it, the little polar bear, which she says is made of porcelain but is really just common clay, standing on its hind legs with its arms stretched forward as if it were moving toward an embrace. Both objects return her to a familiar world. Sometimes Masha wonders what this particular form of waking might mean; she understands that sleep and what happens during sleep cannot always be controlled, but she senses a practical inconsistency in her daily confusion, given that she has never slept anywhere but in the hotel. What other experience might her dreams be drawing on to suggest that she is sleeping somewhere else? At one point, this question made her think of previous lives (lives once lived that returned to her this way, like someone reaching out to grab another person’s arm to keep them close); obviously, she also thought of parallel, borrowed, glimpsed, and secret lives, as well as other possible forms of interpolation.

  Nights in the hotel were especially well suited, if not to these visits, which were unquestionably difficult to verify, then to this unfurling of thoughts. In reality, any type of mental exercise could encounter a repertoire of metaphors propitious for its
development in the intricate layout of the hotel, with all its evocative spaces and half-forgotten, often shadowy zones that revealed themselves as Masha moved through it. Her memory of the hotel’s proprietor is hazy: the man called Mr. Salgado giving instructions from the darkness he himself created by closing the heavy curtains that covered the windows and most of the walls in his room at dawn. She remembers her fear as a little girl when the man’s words, which she could not yet even understand, would seem to emanate from nowhere, or from someone hidden behind the thick folds of the curtains. But Salgado was flat on his back in bed, his face peeking out between his fists, which gripped the embroidered cover of his eiderdown quilt. His foreign accent lent an exotic, authoritative tone to his voice, such that his frequent errors of diction and the rushed way he concluded his sentences, which always ended abruptly and menacingly, seemed like the verbal manifestation of the baroque folds of the curtains that tumultuously accompanied, hid, or buried the indefinable body of the man who gave that voice life.

  Much of her connection to Salgado was, for Masha, a secret she never managed to uncover; the burden of suspicions and falsehoods protected by the passage of time, like shameful or unspeakable facts that might begin as a bygone error, but end up replacing the past. She was the first exposed to this the morning when the hotel staff, women whose responsibilities included introducing Masha to the daily labors of the place, let slip in half-phrases and euphemisms, all still confusing for an innocent girl, that she was a byproduct of his, that he had engendered her. That “he” was Salgado, his name exotic and slippery, omnipresent in his palace like a dangerous god.

  The spirit that moved the maids to treat the docile young Masha this way was grounded in resentment. Glimpsing the future that awaited the girl, being Salgado’s daughter, what could they look forward to as mere employees other than greater travails and gradual abandonment in this most hostile of cities. Masha remembers one afternoon, at the time of day dedicated to rest; she is half asleep in one of those typical Russian children’s seats that look like modified country stools, but which is, in her memory, a miniature throne elevated to the height of the adults’ table. Several servants, with their yellow bonnets and aprons tied tight, spontaneously perform a dance of submission around the table, bowing as they pass her as if she were a small, silent deity, a fount of wisdom and wishes. Then they lift her onto their shoulders and carry her, tossing her in the air and showering her with kisses so forceful that the smacking of their lips frightens her. From an early age, Masha clearly saw Salgado’s wishes behind the education she received: those wishes contained a mandate of obedience and of appropriation—she was to become one with the building, to be its watchful soul, even though nothing, she realized as an adult, obliged her to do so; nothing even tied her to the hotel beyond the fact that she had spent her entire life among its indolent walls and silent rooms. Masha had no sense of loyalty, much less of belonging or ownership; just that early-morning feeling of surprise: her initial curiosity about where she was, followed immediately by her uneasiness about the possible causes of her confusion upon waking.

  The sheet of letterhead from the Hotel Salgado, which I received weeks later without much surprise, came from a piece of furniture that held, among other things that might prove useful to travelers, several comforters and thick blankets made of dark fabric. The armoire was in the far corner of his room, and a tall stack of letterhead seemed to have been waiting on its lone shelf since the hotel opened. As happened whenever he stumbled across any kind of paper, Felix was immediately curious. He lifted the first sheet and felt its texture, heavy and rough like the paper of days gone by (the embellishment of the logo and lettering, discolored to an undefinable dark shade, also revealed the passage of time), then he held it at a slight angle and discovered the trace of a pen stroke: someone had written on top of it. He felt a rush at being in the presence of a writing he knew nothing about. It wasn’t a question of inserting himself in someone else’s life (which he would have done without hesitation), but simply of reading a message not intended for him—or for anyone in particular, come to think of it. This was not a forgotten, lost, or misdirected letter: it was simply the topographical marks of someone’s writing. Wanting to decipher it, he held the page up to the lamp, but the light was too weak for him to see anything. Felix felt impotent and worried he would miss his chance to participate in something (he always hungered for experiences he refused to seek out himself, preferring instead to wait for them to materialize; as a result, they were so rare that each frustrated attempt plunged him into pessimism and bitterness), so he decided to wait and try in the daylight. Until then, he needed to ensure that the marks, after so long tucked away, would not be erased by these new conditions.

  In the middle of that big, unfamiliar room, Felix imagined a trivial message, that is, one that revealed nothing in particular; the world is full of jottings and letters of that sort—the exceptions are those that say something of consequence, reveal guilt, demand the truth, or confess a betrayal. Such were his thoughts when another possibility occurred to him: it would have been easy for the previous guest to spark his curiosity, and Felix realized that this scenario, as if it were an alternate ending or hidden part of the script, that is, some maneuver on the part of a playwright or director, held much of the mysterious letter’s meaning. Discovering its content was the only way to formulate an opinion about the lines that fate had placed in his hands (or, rather, that he had rescued from the void). In any event, he decided to wait until the morning and take advantage of Moscow’s daytime, which sometimes passes like a breath, to try reading it against the light. Felix imagined an endless network of scribes working in the shadows—“the scriveners of the Hotel Salgado,” he thought—leaning unhurried and calm over the stack of papers, unaware of the chain to which they belonged.

  I, on the other hand, thought about the partially open door and its possible connotations. That mundane insignia, that exaggeratedly domestic emblem probably meant to offer some promise of simple hospitality—and which, for that very reason, as I mentioned earlier, could easily hide some trap or surprise—might have a secondary effect on travelers, leading them to submit to its invisible control and to write nervously on the yellowed pages, obeying a command that no one ever confirmed but was nonetheless assumed upon passing through the door. Crossing that threshold was a state still present in the minds of the travelers; the hotel’s entrance is like the door to their own homes, the limit or barricade beyond which they are safe and can do almost entirely as they please—but it was also, obviously, a state that was constantly renewed in the hotel’s printed matter. The door-symbol was there like a veiled invitation to write, because, among other things, it was meant to establish a continuity: to write was to insert oneself, to pass through the doorway and step into the dark, but also to find refuge. This continuity might represent a transposition or a transgression, and it might even be the innocent or insidious, yet consequential, way by which the hotel established a commitment of, let’s say, dubious intimacy with each guest. For the traveler, writing meant crossing that threshold again; as an action repeated allegorically, it revealed this commitment and a partial or complete surrender of free will. It occurred to me that Felix’s letter might also be that, his submitting to the Hotel Salgado with the first word he wrote, still unaware he had become one of its legion of scribes. Meanwhile, I imagined Masha repeating her aerial strolls through its rooms.

  When he woke hours later, wasting no time so he could take advantage of the daylight, Felix stationed himself below the upper window, which was so far above him it looked like an erratic flattened rectangle and offered only a glimpse of the city’s white sky; he could never tell whether it was cloudy or clear. Felix was struck by this faint light, and understood that its uniform, muted weariness contained within it the short life of the day. As such, he saw himself confronted by a permanent fact that appeared coincidental and unpredictable. The classic image of captivity: the prisoner standing below a high, narro
w window that projects a sliver of light onto his body, particularly his face, without error or excess. And so, as if under the halo of an infallible god, Felix grasped the paper he had set aside before going to bed and raised it so the light could hit it from behind. He could feel the glacial cold descending from the window and for a moment, forgetting the sheet of paper and the writing he wanted to reveal, he imagined his fingers frozen in their hesitant position; his hands, which had until moments earlier rested cozily under the blanket, and his blood, which had only just warmed, would soon begin to crystallize; he looked at the hardened, striated map of his skin, an opaque layer crackled like an old oil painting, a surface no longer connected to his numb, frozen flesh. In contrast to what was happening to his body, the hotel’s letterhead seemed outrageously immune, though between his anesthetized fingers it appeared to grow thin to the point of transparency and looked as if it might crumble to dust.

  He was immediately disappointed. It was just a few words written in oversized letters scattered across the page. He could forget the intimate or revelatory letter he’d hoped to find. The scale of the handwriting was not a minor point, because it made the page seem at first glance more like a poster, or maybe a note, but in any event not an especially personal object. Paradoxically, the handwriting’s size also presented the greatest challenge: each letter became a long, winding journey, an endless circular sketch. Then there were the irregular pen-strokes, whose traces thinned and then reappeared, and which turned the search for a continuous line into a guessing game. At the edges of the page, where the lack of space became a problem that could have been avoided by smaller lettering, words had been written over others, going in the opposite direction. The result was a network of open curves that looked like the marks a child might make, but were too eloquent to have been made by chance, as if what had been written were trying to hide behind the writing itself. Felix remembered several artworks that seemed to have been written rather than painted; the handwriting—unwound, flat, and inexpressive—perhaps revealed the prior life of those signs. Then there were the changes that took place in the paper’s texture from one moment to the next. Even in the dim light, a pale sheen passed across the surface of the paper as it contracted against the cold. As a result, one line would be more visible than another until a shift in the frozen current inverted this impression, revealing marks that had previously been invisible. Then there was the fatigue in Felix’s arm, which shook the page as if an electrical charge were running through it.