The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  No one said a word. The Cuban daughter and her Dominican mother: Felix felt an urge to explore the subject, which meant he needed to devise a way to start the conversation. But the woman, wanting to avoid the question that her infallible instinct, the fruit of repeated experience, told her was imminent, abruptly lifted the phone to her ear and started talking as if she were picking up a conversation where she had left off. She was explaining what had happened to some money that had gone missing. Felix thought she seemed completely absorbed in her story: she had put the money in her pocket and then forgotten about it; a few days later, she got the pants back from the laundry and the money was gone. (Right then she turned back to the girl and whispered “Go, Laene,” or something like that, making a gesture in Felix’s general direction.) As a result, Felix missed the rest of the conversation but did learn the name of the girl, who showed him to his room without needing to say a word.

  They walked over to the elevator, a heavy machine proportional to the building on the outside but startlingly small on the inside; its capacity was severely reduced by the layers of wood and Formica patches that covered its walls. With more than one person inside, it was impossible to turn around to close the door. And so Laene and Felix ended up face to face, their bodies almost touching. The amused expression on the girl’s face embarrassed him, but he found a solution right away and stepped out of the elevator to enter again, backwards. These small movements, coupled with the proximity of their bodies, seemed to Felix like the steps of a delicate, unintentional dance. He tried to start a conversation that might lead to the topic that so interested him, but they reached the second floor before he could muster any small talk. Now they were standing in a different hallway, one with too many twists and turns, and walls that seemed fake at first glance. As he walked, Felix remembered the uniform, endearing world (ramshackle cantinas, dimly-lit rooms with walls caked in years of dirt, shoddy furniture, violent heat, and stifled laughter or, rather, whimpers of distress) at guesthouses overlooking the warm sea. He remembered all this and felt both a deep sadness at having recovered it when he least expected, and a rush of satisfaction at identifying his nostalgia. The feeling was so strong that he was suddenly inspired to announce his intention to take the room. Moments later, Laene opened the door and Felix, predictably, realized he’d made a mistake. Not that it really mattered. Each time he used the elevator over the next few days, he would wonder about the Formica panels and the space they occupied; whether there was anything behind them, if they were hiding something.

  Not forgetting would require a sketch, descriptions jotted on a loose sheet of paper. The room is long and narrow; its walls are painted an indeterminate shade of blue that sometimes, momentarily and depending on the daylight that doesn’t always find its way inside, turns an unexpected ultramarine. The furnishings consist of a twin bed, a small nightstand, a chair, and a wardrobe with six drawers, two shelves, and no door; this list should also include, because they are in the room, a small sink with an old mirror hanging on the wall above it and, in one corner, a bathroom squeezed in between two partitions or thin walls that don’t reach the ceiling. (At first glance, most people probably mistake it for, say, a dressing room.) The bathroom has no door; instead, there is a white arch (decorated, incidentally, as if it were the entrance to a sacred vault) and a plastic curtain hanging from large, heavy rings that make it difficult to open or close. There is another curtain in the room, this one an intensely orange sheet of rubber, which covers the window (small and sealed shut, with dirty, damaged panes) that faces, from beside the sink, the interior of the dilapidated building. Beyond its squalor and stagnant air and the chipping paint on the walls, however, the room produces a vague sense of melancholy, as if it were real and artificial at the same time; simple yet unnecessarily complicated, due to the enormous window set into the divider that marks off the bathroom. The window is made of thick, vertically striped glass and is too big to look like a porthole; its heavy frame, adorned with branches and buds that unintentionally evoke funeral wreaths and are painted white in a futile attempt to suggest transatlantic journeys, condemns the room to producing sensations of intentional inappropriateness or studied ugliness. Finally, as if it were a postscript to a report, the room’s third curtain should be mentioned: made of the thinnest turquoise plastic, it hangs perpendicular to the toilet, enclosing the solitary shower.

  Felix spends hours lying in bed, his eyes fixed on the big round window. Later, when he decides it is time to go out, he stands and gets ready to take a long, aimless walk. On the morning of the third day, his room loses power. He has always felt prepared to suffer adversity, is even predisposed to it, so blackouts never surprise him. Still, he goes down to the reception desk to inquire about it and discovers on the way that the elevator is working and the solitary hallway lights are lit. Laene is reading a women’s magazine. At her back, her mute audience of miniature animals continues its eternal exodus toward the wall. She doesn’t know anything about it, but says, weighing her words with what seems like newfound care, that she’ll call the gentleman who does maintenance on the building. Felix leaves; when he is out in the street he remembers those cities by the warm sea, and how everyone is a “Lady” or a “Gentleman” there. When he returns that night, he will find that the power is still out. Several days go by like this and Felix stops asking for it to be fixed; in a way, he takes it as the new terms that the Samich Guesthouse is able to offer for his stay, whether the women in charge like it or not. His room is almost as dark during the day as it is at night (another element, along with its vibrant colors and precarious narrowness that Felix associates with rooms on that other sea), and he can’t tell whether he can bear all this thanks to the nostalgia that the guesthouse and its many challenges awaken in him, or if it is his penchant for infinite tolerance, which is strongest in the face of adversity.

  Another time, I received a thick, rough sheet of paper stamped with the logo of a hotel in Moscow. The place was called “Salgado” and the whole thing seemed like another one of Felix’s typical quirks, the way he revels in any extravagant detail. I was surprised by the heading, which was also printed in Cyrillic, though it woud have been stranger had it not been. There was the name, the word “Hotel,” and what was almost certainly the address; I don’t know why it occurred to me to associate the duplication of text on that sheet of paper with conversion tables for magnitudes, distances, and temperatures, but I thought that if two forms of writing occupied the space of a single page, it was so one could expose the uselessness or redundancy of the other and, in so doing, reveal not only its limitations but also, in a sense, its arrogance. I imagined Felix in Moscow’s exaggerated cold, which was, I thought, just as measurable as any other, but was nonetheless different in substance. The hotel’s logo was stamped on the right side of the letterhead: instead of a coat of arms without, perhaps, much history behind it, they had chosen the figure of a door standing ajar. Years ago, in another of his brief missives, Felix had admitted that every time he arrived at a hotel he’d always think it was closed or had no vacancies, or that they would deny him lodging for some other reason. I gathered that, on this occasion, the image had seemed auspicious; because of it, the bastion that was the Hotel Salgado promised not to be entirely impenetrable.

  I remember that in the very first line, before summarizing his recent movements and tossing out an enigmatic quip, Felix announced, “The Hotel Salgado opened its doors to me.” I don’t know why, but I found it strange that the door opened to the left; this detail transformed a simple and forgettable logo into a mystery. I thought that any door left open so slightly, and in that direction, could only lead to a hidden place. I imagined the dark night and the city’s cold, empty streets, and in that innocent commercial drawing I saw the sign of an imminent yet unlikely danger, as if a previous unknown order had decided to reveal itself without any prior indications or beliefs that might have served as a warning.

  I should mention that I saw in the Hotel Salgado’s log
o evidence of the arbitrary danger to which the world subjects us. Sometimes we submit to this danger enthusiastically, other times we do so unconsciously, fearfully, or even with resigned consent. The Hotel Salgado invited you in; there was no sense of obligation to it, but in Russia, as in most countries, a foreigner probably doesn’t encounter too many open doors. It was one possibility: just as Felix had, at the sight of that open door, given in to its careless welcome, from another perspective, there was probably very little about that welcome, which probably concealed a deadly trap, that was careless. It seemed like a typical ploy awaiting its next hapless victim, a snare set of its own accord. Following some deep-seated animal, or even human, drive, the victim submits himself to whatever might come, understanding that this “arbitrary danger” is the risk one assumes by living. For its part, the Hotel Salgado—probably without any malicious intent—innocently offered the traveler protection and shelter, though with the implicit warning that under certain conditions their haven might become a living hell. As is clear by now, I should acknowledge that when I received his letter years ago, I believed Felix was exposed to more than one danger. This idea occupied my thoughts for several days without ever actually worrying me. There was little I could do, after all, and the way Felix chose to make his presence felt—always unexpectedly, and making it clear that he was subject both to his haste and to some formless directive imposed upon him, or that in any event, that something was pushing him to write a few hurried lines and to keep pressing forward—suggested to me that if Felix didn’t realize what had been going on for some time already, he was at least vaguely aware of what might come to pass, that his behavior anticipated an outcome that for the time being could only be known as intuition.

  There are other postcards and letters from Felix, which I keep in a yellow folder. I wrote his name on the outside, and sometimes when I stumble upon it I’m filled with anxious resentment, in which my eagerness to receive another unexpected slim envelope mingles with the disappointment of knowing that the notes I’ve received so far are only the smallest part of a reality concealed from me; a part that was never intended as evidence or a scale model of any given reality, but rather as a fragment, which, instead of revealing, seeks to conceal or at least confuse—like the grain of sand whose smallness makes it impossible to see the quarry. This is how I receive and keep Felix’s messages, though I have no way of knowing in what spirit he sends them. As I said, I can imagine him carelessly selecting a free postcard, writing it slightly distracted, and mailing it with his mind elsewhere entirely. In any event, he must have some kind of standing reminder, some trace bit of mental energy that will tell him at some unknown future moment that it’s time to send another note to let me know that everything still seems to be in order—one of those generic postulates that prop up our forgotten existence. Felix is not a cautious person, but he acts cautiously. His infallible intuition reveals what lies beneath the surface of any situation, a gift that has often made him uncomfortable but has never led him astray, and which he has always known how to use to his advantage as if it were the perfect counterbalance to his impulses, typically no more than erratic whims.

  Removing himself from the cold night and the dark street, Felix steps into the Hotel Salgado; in order to do so, he carefully passes through the door, which has been left ajar. Above the reception desk in the far corner of the lobby, a lamp casts a faint light that seems on the verge of flickering out. The lampshade turns the already muted palette into a spectrum of brown, gray, and black. A servant’s bell hangs nearby. Felix looks at it: it is small and solid, exactly proportional to a standard one, as if some force had shrunk it down with absolute precision. The bell had lost its clapper at some point, so they replaced it with a bolt with edges rounded (Felix decides) by extensive use, which they set on a ceramic plate decorated with traditional figures. He rings and waits. He notices that the bolt is heavy and stands out against the delicate images. The lamp leaves many of the room’s corners in shadow. Felix thinks to himself that the feeble, murky light is probably meant to make the bell easier to hear, as if the darkness cleared a path for sound. He finds the lobby sad, and the weak light decidedly dreary. The light doesn’t reach; it can’t, Felix observes, but the thought develops into nothing and goes nowhere. When his eyes adjust, he sees one shadow glint against a darker one, the outline of some object graced by a stray beam of light, some fleeting and mysterious glimmer, perhaps from within or some unexpected illumination glancing off the surface.

  Exhausted by the day’s walk and stupefied by the cold that nearly froze him stiff, Felix loses track of time and surrenders to the wait. He spends an indeterminate period immersed in silence and darkness. He dreams that someone is approaching him soundlessly, like a ghost. When, a bit later, he comes to and is about to ring again, he senses movement all the way at the far end of the room. He can just barely make out the undulating motion of a white robe that dissipates and reappears as the glimmer, also hazy, of a pallid face. Something tells him that this movement is the translation of a woman’s form. This is when he notices that the light doesn’t reach the floor, either; it is as if the ghost ended prematurely or was floating forward with its feet behind it, in a simulation of walking. Felix feels more curiosity than suspicion or fear and hurries toward the illuminated space near the lamp to await the ghost’s arrival. His movements do not reflect his vacillation; only his constant blinking suggests a certain degree of discomfort.

  There is something in the woman’s expression that Felix can’t identify: he is unsure whether it is embarrassment or numbness, a grimace or exhaustion distilled over the course of what he imagines was a long day. She has a round face, pale skin, and hair of an indeterminate color. He finds her face agreeable, if not terribly expressive, and is unsure whether to assign this any particular value. He observes the exaggerated whiteness of her skin and remembers the translucent porcelain of antique dolls. And then there are her almond-shaped eyes, almost colorless, which stare straight ahead (perhaps still drowsily) and do not turn toward Felix—if they do, it’s too furtively for him to notice. The woman finally reaches the reception desk, places a heavy notebook on it, and begins to leaf mechanically through its pages, looking for the most recent entry. Meanwhile, Felix dives into vague memories of gothic dramas and tragedies dictated by chance. The pages flip past, revealing their uniformity; each is written in the same hand, with the same docility. She has lowered her eyes—Felix watches her eyelashes flutter when each page fans them as it passes—and he notices that they pause momentarily, registering a doubt. These movements lead Felix to two conclusions: that this woman’s beauty is the ageless beauty of the automaton, and that the expression of embarrassment, numbness, or exhaustion on her face is its hallmark (that is, the evidence and cost of its existence). Still, there is something unrecognizable there, some estranging element that, he thinks, would keep him from remembering or recognizing her face in a different context.

  The words she pens with pale blue ink and regular movements in the old notebook do not change in appearance or orientation when she switches into or out of Cyrillic, probably to jot down something untranslatable. The paperwork drags on; not a sound reaches them from the street and the silence of the night is so thick the two of them can hear the pen move across the page in an unevenly matched battle that seems on the verge of grinding to a halt. A question stirs in Felix: he wonders if the woman might not embody some spectral existence, the ghost of someone long trapped in those confines, a rural transplant to a city where, from what he had seen, every corner looked like a village.

  The woman’s shadow plunges the reception desk into even greater darkness; on its surface, blurred under protective glass, Felix sees the hotel’s strange symbol for the first time. He thinks about the drawing, and about himself, and imagines himself on the other side (in the image, that is, on the outside), where he had been until a few moments earlier, and then passing through. The figure could be understood as a line dividing the page into two distinct
surfaces. Felix senses he is in the presence of a simple yet decisive sign, a symbol of himself, an unexpected keyword, yet another commentary on time’s dividing things into a before and an after. And he remembers having read somewhere that crossing a threshold is the most common and most fleeting way to experience eternity. Even in the darkness, there is clearly nothing on the other side of the drawing’s partially open door, just a deep black interior that invades one’s attention the same way that the night absorbs this hotel scene, situating it in the realm of the permanent: this will remain unchanged, we want to linger on the threshold. Meanwhile, the woman is putting all her weight behind forming her letters evenly. Felix hears the pen scrape across the paper like a knife and observes the woman in profile, her soft, downy face lit from behind. He doesn’t want to be indiscreet, so he lowers his eyes to the hotel’s logo; in that moment, his most recent memories blur. He moves his head slowly, so as not to be obvious about it: he wants to know if the front door matches the one in the drawing, if they have similar proportions and the same design, if they open the same way (to the same side), if their handles are identical, and so on, like in a game of spot the difference. But he can’t see because of the darkness and, as often happens with events that only barely occur, each time he turns his head the most recent image, vague but certainly recoverable, dissolves. Less than a moment goes by, only as long as it takes Felix to turn forward again, but he finds the woman staring at him with her deep yet inexpressive eyes, waiting for his return. Felix senses he’s done something wrong; he doesn’t know how long he was looking away and guesses that she must be too tired to express her annoyance. In the midst of his silence and despair, it occurs to him that he might be the only guest in the hotel and he wonders whether this might not be a fabricated, or rather, a staged scene—orchestrated to fulfill a more or less preconceived function.