The Incompletes Read online

  That was the extent of Masha’s insight, though greater acuity might have been in order. The night had passed quickly and she needed to get back to her postponed tasks, so she stopped her thoughts right there. (It did not occur to her that the book and the money might both have belonged to Salgado.) After hurriedly distributing the bills between its pages, she ended up with a much thicker book than then one she had found. Masha felt a rare sensation of well-being: it was the first time that money had taken on a sensory dimension for her, in the form of an unrecognizable volume offering her material proof of its power to deform. Only then did she understand it was more than just a cautionary metaphor she had heard since childhood. If Masha knew an abundance, it was an abundance of scarcity or paltriness (for example, she had never seen more than three or four bills at once); for her, the money revealed a new kind of eloquence, the tangible effect of its accumulation. This effect might correspond, or not, to its actual exchange value, but in that form—and shrouded in that mystery—the money best expressed its perpetual abstract inspiration. Masha continued her twice-daily visits, but given how hard it was to remove the bills, count them, and hide them again, and given her assumption that they were safest inside the book, she ended up simply testing the volume’s weight in the dark, elatedly measuring its thickness, and then leaving the room and the fake floor behind with her typical floating gait. Every now and then she would count the money, but never all of it, overwhelmed as she was by both the sight of all those bills piled in messy stacks and the difficulty of extracting them from between the book’s pages.

  These visits went on for a long time, though Masha began to feel less and less comfortable not having the treasure at her complete and permanent disposal. Moreover, she was tired of repeating that mechanical procedure, which had gone from being helpful to being an irritating barrier between her and the money. So, early one morning, while the building still slept like a beast that trusted in the arrival of the day, she armed herself with resolve and went to bring the book back to her room. Decisions like this one offered her relief, they allowed her to rise above the place she lived: the hotel, and the country in general, with all its pathetic and annoying details. Strangely, though, things of this nature—the treasure and her unexpected boldness, anything that deviated in the least from the norm—brought those details to mind.

  The room where Masha slept was like all the others—dreary and cold—and shared their bizarre layout, with walls that were either too long or very short, creating the overall effect of a framing square; the few pieces of furniture inside never found a suitable location, much less a natural one. She had always slept there, so nothing about it seemed unusual to her. She remembered how scared she had been of the room’s longest wall, the only place the bed could go, which inexplicably cut through the space on the diagonal, essentially turning it into a triangle. The wall leaned inward, forming a slight but noticeable curve, which appeared to support the weight of the entire building with a strength on the verge of giving out; she would look up at the mass hovering above her before falling asleep, convinced she was going to be crushed to death. Because of this, every night was a farewell for which she’d whisper the semi-religious imprecations she had learned from the kitchen staff. Now, despite the years that had passed, she still lay in the same bed, against the same wall, probably in the same position she’d adopted as a child. It was an uncomfortable posture: given the angle of the wall, she needed to lean forward, tilting to one side. Whoever saw her for the first time would think of a staged pose, most likely one of penance, which was both gratuitously and quite modestly contorted—the position of a figurine whose most human trait is its improbability. The room had always reminded her of a cave, an impression that remained unchanged over the years, despite her being naturally accustomed to it.

  Masha settled onto the bed, fanned the book upside down, shaking it to loosen its more reluctant pages, and ecstatically surveyed the money, which lay jumbled and motionless on the blanket as if it had just fallen from the sky. She thought again of providence; she might not know how the story was going to end, or if anything unusual was happening at all, she felt herself to be in debt to something in particular, and also felt the gratuitous, and typically useless, sense of autonomy that comes with not knowing the value of what one has. So she began to count her cash, as she called it. She divided the bills and tallied endless quantities that communicated little to her simple mind. Only the night, she thought, the way it emanated silence, stillness, and mystery, could be the logical counterpoint to that accretion she couldn’t quite wrap her head around. She imagined herself counting the money long into the next morning and throughout the rest of day, not because there was so much of it, but because the same idea that drove her to count it in the first place would reassert itself in her mind whenever she was about to finish. She was mortified by this unsettling fact. She blamed herself for not having noticed the gradual thinning of the book, but above all for having kept her money there; she also regretted not counting it earlier, believing that it might have made a difference, the delay now sank her into frustration and impotence; in all these negative thoughts, she saw a veiled form of chastisement. At no point did she say to herself that it was found money, so it was impossible to know whether in the past the bundle had been thicker, perhaps unmanageably so, or if for some specific reason or through some mechanism, let’s say, she was in no position to imagine, the reduction had been going on for some time already. Like many people’s, Masha’s greed was variable: it might express itself instinctively under familiar conditions, or, as also happens, according to the limitations imposed by her environment. In that hotel, where there was practically no measure or median for anything, she experienced the loss of the money as a betrayal, something meant only to do her harm and for which the entire building was responsible. This thought and others like it would gradually fade as she grew tired. Besides, apart from counting, recounting, or reassuring herself that the book was still pretty thick, there was little she could do. So she decided to hide the money in her bed, in its traditional place under the mattress. The book would be closer at hand for her to weigh, as before, and she could start a new count whenever she wanted.

  This solution put her at ease. The strong, icy wind that, during those moments of nocturnal quiet made itself felt through the walls, seemed to soften as well; something slipped back into its groove, the book returned to its channel, the money returned to its rightful guardianship, according to Masha, and the early morning promised a day full of minutes. She had never let a book rest in her hands for so long. Sometimes when she finished counting, as the bills waited in uneven stacks to be put away, she felt the temptation to see what this one was about. She was so used to her routine at work, distinguishing the travelers’ spaces and belongings from those of the hotel, and so accustomed to safeguarding the money, which was the only thing she really saw as her own (so much so that she looked back on her life before the discovery with melancholy incomprehension as an empty, joyless time spent without purpose in hallways and rooms), that by some strange mental operation reading the book seemed like entering a forbidden space that did not naturally belong to her, but which beckoned nonetheless.

  The book was where the money slept, where Masha had seen it tucked in, and where, she thought, investing it with a behavior she imagined to be automatic, it might even reproduce. To be interesting or real, Masha thought, the book should be about her; being written into a story was the fairest or most fitting thing that could happen to her, given her recent and ongoing hardships. She wanted to be the hero: not some docile Cinderella whose fortune is changed by a stroke of good luck, but rather a character who faces challenges, takes risks, and goes after what she wants. The book’s cover featured an image suited to what she imagined for herself as a protagonist, that is, universal recognition, a victory of resolve, an ending triumphant enough to merit hoisting a flag. I want to be the hero, she thought, no matter if it’s in the city or the country. She wasn’t imagining
a character who overcomes obstacles, she knew there were many novels like that already, but rather one who conquers her own indecision. Masha did not want her book to be about lessons learned in a traditional sense, or for it to center on one or several intrigues that are ultimately resolved. It should be the story of sentimental misadventures that were above all difficult to pin down; also of practical ones, though not to the point of overshadowing the others. Come to think of it, the novel needed to be like a tale of the high seas, but without a traveler or a journey, and should unfold in single frames of situations, or moments, displaying supposedly important aspects of her life.

  Masha tried to think of an example and one came immediately to mind. She returns to her room after getting off work, exhausted from going up and down the stairs all day. She knows the hotel’s few guests have all retired for the night—at most, some restless soul might make a hushed, hurried trip to the toilet—but she double locks her door, anyway. As always, from the monumental semi-concave wall behind her comes a murmur that seems to emanate from somewhere deep inside the building, and which sounds like an enormous ventilation system or an army of pigeons cooing in the eaves as they wait for morning. Masha digs around under the mattress; she is alarmed at first not to find anything, but, sliding her arm further in, she reaches the book and withdraws it with a pleased expression. This description would be incomplete if it didn’t linger on Masha’s hand as her small fingers grasp at the book, stretching to wrap themselves around its bulk. Their final attempt results in a victory that produces an immediate sense of elation in Masha and moves her to observe the book from different angles, savoring her success. She cannot believe she has so much money in her possession, or that it could take a form both so commanding and so well concealed.

  There is a scene that Masha repeats because its outcome is consistent, because there is no risk of surprises or unexpected consequences. Repetition, she thinks, never gets the credit it deserves. Masha finds in this the security of knowing exactly what she is looking for and what she is going to find. The results of her actions are always similar, differing only slightly from one time to the next and, she can attest, from all the results the same actions might produce in the future: if she had to stop and reflect on them, the variations would range from slightly better to marginally worse, like endless byproducts of the selfsame. Thanks to this operation, things become permanent and experience evolves as a continually updated sequence: prior behaviors align with new ones, which in turn anticipate those to come. The scene: Masha half reclines on the bed, in as relaxed a position as the wall behind her allows. She opens the book with the spine facing up and watches the bills flutter down. Another pleasure, this time deferred: she hurries to free the money still trapped between the pages, wagging the book, now slim and at her disposition, back and forth. It sometimes happens that she is tempted to read it, in which case she will open to a random page and start with the first paragraph she sees. She has no idea what came before and will therefore obviously understand very little, but that’s not a problem because she knows she can invent whatever she wants. It also happens sometimes that she replaces a character’s name with her own, regardless of gender or any other minor detail, and assigns to the “Masha” she imagines in writing similar traits, her own vacillations, or mistakes that resonate with her. She believes the book—like all books, in general—conveys useless knowledge, though their insights are no more useless than the reality behind them. The real book, Masha knows, the one that holds her story isn’t useless: the one, say, in which the yellow book associated with money appears, and in which not learning a lesson could imply a serious risk.

  Masha imagines herself discovering, by accident, a secret numerical connection between the bills and the pages that shelter them. A quotient derived from lengthy calculations involving chapter and page numbers, sequences, character and word counts, as well as other values. It is a complicated science, hard to put into practice, but it endows Masha with almost limitless attributes because, perhaps somewhat predictably, it suggests the ability to multiply the money in question. No one asks how this is possible; just as happens in dreams, everyone simply accepts this outcome as inevitable. In the book, Masha remembers the privations and impoverishment of the Hotel Salgado, its cold and its chipped coins; she feels an era about to come to its ideal end, without resentment, shame, or regret. But the real Masha knows this kind of thing can only happen in novels; even if she’s never read one, she understands it is possible. And so she decides to stop dreaming, to stop getting lost in the hypothetical book in her hands, and to start counting the bills she has left.

  This return to herself is calming; she’d been in the grip of a primal fear, the way someone might fear the dark or the sea, grounded solely in the impossible idea of turning into a fictional character. For the first time in her life, faced with the possibility of changing her nature, at least in fiction, she is also seized by a kind of anticipatory nostalgia for the Hotel Salgado. She imagines its hallways, empty and unchanged, the building stripped of her presence, and is saddened by the loneliness that will take it over. As happens in the novel she’d like to be part of, this is a good guess: the grand building on the verge of falling apart without its guardian angel. And so, without realizing it, she has re-entered the realm of the book: having been lucky enough to find or invent the highly efficient currency press hidden between its pages—pages, moreover, on which she is a protagonist—Masha leaves the hotel behind and her memory of Salgado is profoundly changed.

  Disoriented in the limbo between book and reality, she evokes the mornings of her childhood, when it was time to get out of bed. Silence reigns in her room, underscored by the occasional shout from the street or a door slamming, distant but sudden, in the hall. Masha knows that those moments were her happiest, marked by a finite and intense pleasure: emerging from sleep and glimpsing the leisurely incoherence and ineptitude of all kinds of human activity; the world a world set in motion to produce anything and everything like a machine that, once ignited, begins its mad, unstoppable operations; a world set in motion but capable of waiting for someone as insignificant as Masha. This is her memory of how she perceived those thuds, shouts from passers-by, and slamming doors. On one hand, the array of movement and activity frightened her; on the other, the fact that she was clearly removed from it all was proof of the protection the world had set aside for her. The outside world could generate any kind of facsimile, but Salgado and his legion of helpers would be sure to keep her safe.

  Like the echo of those doors slamming, Masha remembers something about which she has only approximate ideas. There is a chronic guest who has been living for years in one of the most remote rooms in the hotel; to reach it requires memorizing a long and complicated route. Only a few people have managed to catch sight of him, but those who did have had a hard time erasing the image of this furtive being hidden under loose-fitting clothes, walking with hurried, jerking movements as if he were trying to get away from himself and failing. The longer he stays in the hotel, the harder it becomes to verify what is known about him: the legend spun around him confuses the marks he must have left at some point, and his unpredictable appearances, though sporadic, paradoxically produce an effect of gradual withdrawal, as if this mysterious being were returning to the indeterminacy from which he came, making use of occasional goodbyes through which he is both manifested and dissolves. A moment arrives when the hotel employees have nearly given up hope of regaining any clear indication of his presence; nonetheless, the memory refuses to fade completely—though it is not enough to fully remember him, a tiny fraction remains as a threat of forgetting—when the guest suddenly appears, multiplying his furtive, ghostly habits. In his room, in the bathroom he would use, and nearly everywhere he would appear (or, rather, disappear), defining a peripheral circuit noticed only much later, people start finding money. The amount varies, but it is always organized in impeccable bundles.

  For Masha, this is where the story begins; everything posited or p
roven before these appearances is nothing more than a preamble, a backstory useful only for suggesting a few tenuous links to the past. Her memory tells her that it is these discoveries, as they are described in urgent detail by the maids, that began her symbiotic relationship with the world of the hotel, which, she thinks, she will always carry with her. As if the money were an essential motor, theories about the stranger materialize every morning in the kitchen just as spontaneously as the discoveries themselves, establishing and dismantling interpretations, searching for causes, proposing motivations and inventing separations. Masha listens enthralled to each version, but is surprised by what she considers to be an overly hasty sequence of explanations and arguments, which dizzies and confuses her even more. The hotel’s employees are delighted with their discoveries, and Salgado wants to find a way to keep them for himself. That’s the key, thinks Masha in a moment of clarity as she waits in the solitude of her room for someone to arrive with the latest update: the stories about the guest (his identity, his presence there, his words and gestures), whether real or invented, are there to establish the rightful holder of that money. This endless waiting and the desire for new—though usually boring and useless, outrageously abridged, scattered, and decidedly incomprehensible—details or stories nonetheless made it clear to Masha early on that she, too, would become one of the hotel’s enslaved spirits.