The Incompletes

by Sergio Chejfec

  He is finally given his key and the two set in motion. This is the ceremonious phase of the stay: registering and being shown the accommodations. The reception desk, which until then had occupied a place in the background, acquires the importance of a boundary in Felix’s mind. He knows that being inside the hotel means having crossed the border of reception, and that being outside means not having done that. Everything beyond, when seen from the other side, belongs to the past; in the same way, if you go out (or in, depending on the situation), everything behind you, that is, everything just recently left behind, also remains in the past. Felix is sometimes unsettled by thoughts like these, though he cannot seem to avoid them. In a way, he finds himself drawn to prologue situations, as he calls them, states in which nothing advances: transitions, waiting rooms, breaks, and wastes of time in general. Which is why he is so disturbed by those mundane circumstances that seem similar but are, in their fleeting nature, their own negation: crossing thresholds, doorways, vestibules, and also the border formed by the Hotel Salgado’s reception desk. (At first, this seemed merely a passing inclination, but it turned out to be a chronic aspect of his disposition: for Felix, nothing is unchanging except indeterminacy itself; everything is incidental and elastic, links in a chain. The world unfolds as one long wait; as such, transitions simply foreground our condition.)

  These states associated with entering and leaving hotels first took shape in a city in the provinces, where Felix had already been staying for a while. His itinerary that day had included the same things he did everywhere: a few planned strolls and others without any discernible aim, leaving plenty of time set aside for delays, extravagant detours provoked by unexpected curiosities or certain preferences, or for simply falling into an exhausted stupor. That morning he took inventory of the things he would bring with him before leaving the room; this was his way of organizing the journey’s vicissitudes, which he could not anticipate, but could sense in their possible variations. He walked down the stairs thinking the usual, and was momentarily embarrassed by his habitual thoughts, so crushingly predictable and as fleeting as sparks, but which somehow always left him in a state of surprise and suspense when they dissipated. He stepped into the street and had not made it more than a few paces before remembering that he had forgotten something.

  The hotel key rack, another object of worship for Felix. He removed his key from its corresponding hook and went back to his room; as soon as he entered, he got the sensation that he had been out too long. (It was the complete silence that had quickly taken over, erasing any trace of recent activity.) Without lingering on this impression, Felix grabbed the item he’d returned for and went back over the inventory of what he was carrying. As he walked down the stairs he recalled a recent memory: a moment earlier he had caught a glimpse of the morning and that had been enough for him to take in all the day’s scents mixed together, as if, after the night’s stillness, the renewed movement stirred the air and jumbled its component parts. Seconds later, as Felix passed the reception desk, he would remember that he’d forgotten something else. So he went back to his room again.

  In the stairwell, he wondered if there was a law (a rule, an essence, or at least some research or empirical knowledge) that governed forgetting, which sometimes dissipates quickly, or not, or even remains undiscovered for a long time. He entered his room, noticed the silence again (it rekindled, for a moment, the thought he’d just had), grabbed the item he needed, and left without delay. A sound was coming from the end of the hallway, on the other side of the wall, but Felix immediately dismissed it as an electric motor. He made it downstairs in four long strides, his mind blank despite his awareness that something unexpected was happening. As he walked by the reception desk again, he was sure an eternity was passing, as if leaving it behind him was an action that demanded to be completed in slow motion. That was when he realized something was terribly wrong; just as he was about to step into the street, he thought of something else he had forgotten.

  That made three trips. He felt that both the oversights and the way he became aware of them defied comprehension because the way they’d happened one by one, as if they were regularly timed revelations or ideas, seemed to suggest carefully measured doses rather than the pure chance that shapes people’s lives. The first instance of forgetting had occurred shortly after Felix passed the reception desk the first time; then, on his way out again, still in the hotel but certainly with different thoughts on his mind, the recent past was not forgotten but was instead a recovered memory—it was, let’s say, an indictment of forgetting. The same thing happened when he left and returned again; by the third time he left, the whole process had begun to feel ceremonial, like a private, modest ritual one observes without being entirely sure of its steps, which have been weakened by repetition.

  When he’d first taken the room, he’d seen a photo he found difficult to understand. He was generally of the opinion that pictures in hotel rooms hid something, and it seemed particularly true in this case, as the image was not a typical print of mountains or animals in one pose or another. It was a photo of two arms extended downward. Their veins stood out like twisted roots; above the hands and wrists was a lattice of strings wound back and forth, holding up two marionettes that did not appear in the image. It was noon, and the arms cast a dense vertical shadow; the strings, especially those in the left hand, were doubled by their shadows. By one of those strange effects of photography, the surface on which the puppeteer rested (maybe he was hiding or seeking shelter) was the same coarse gray as his skin, which made the presence of the strings seem to suggest someone immobilized, lying down, or facing away, in the process of being tied up. (One could imagine three bodies, or four: the marionettes, the puppeteer, and the victim who served as the backdrop.) But a pair of rolled-up white sleeves peeked out above the puppeteer’s elbows at the top of the photo, where one might say the image ended, so this first impression faded as it became clear that there was no one else on that side of the photo, that the surface was just a screen in front of the puppeteer.

  Felix observes the translucent hairs on the man’s arms, the faint shadows on his skin, and wonders why these things draw his attention more than others, like the calloused tip of a thumb, the mark of manual labor turned into a sign of the past. Viewed from up close, the arms leave the world of scale behind and become rolling foothills. Imperfections in the skin and the light glinting unevenly off them translate into a subtly varied topography with fields, forests, and meadows at the mercy of a nearly uniform geography. Felix has an obvious thought and then a related, but less obvious one: the man with the marionettes as a puppeteer holding the strings of the world, who directs us as he pleases—without spite, but also without compassion—and then, by association, the man as a world, as an actual planet. (One is too small a thing to attract the behavior of others, Felix thinks; the most appropriate attitude is indifference, a future free of obstacles until the final scene of tragedy or dispersion, when the puppeteer grows tired, or forgets.)

  Back at the Hotel Salgado, Felix walks to his room, a few steps behind the woman. He notices that she is wearing heavy slippers made from fox fur or something like it, without soles, like baby booties, and that her calves are wrapped in thick woolen socks. A glacial silence, the echo of distant activity, is second nature to the hotel; right away, though, he realizes that it might just be the simple absence of sound, amplified by the walls. The sound reminds Felix of a void, of depth translated into a murmur, like cliffs sucking air down to their furthest reaches. He will soon learn that the woman’s name is Masha; fitting, given her lack of definition. Felix walks a bit further and glimpses a splotch of moonlight that rises at a gentle angle, then is lost in the darkness. This is when the woman pauses before climbing the stairs and waits, without turning, until she is sure that Felix—who is mildly intrigued but hasn’t yet said a word—is still behind her. The climb is laborious, not because the stairs are steep, but rather due to their depth: it takes two paces to get from one st
ep to the next. A staircase like this demands more patience than strength, Felix thinks as he observes Masha’s technique of sliding her feet as far as possible across the horizontal surfaces and lifting them whenever she runs into unavoidable obstacles. They climb several flights, follow a series of hallways, and stop in front of an unmarked door. “All the rooms in the Hotel Salgado have the same door,” he notes to himself and catches a trace of agreement in Masha’s expression, as if she were aware of his thought.

  At first glance, the room seems to be an arbitrary mix of prison cell and bedroom. There are two windows, one down by the floor and the other up high, almost like a skylight—looking out of either will require effort on Felix’s part. When he manages, after several contortions, to get close to the lower window, he will see the small hours of the night in a jumble of stillness, silence, and cold that will last until morning. From there, an artificial panorama of streets opens up, as if the hotel were a ship listing to one side. The parallel and somewhat juxtaposed profiles of houses can be seen, unsteady in the faint light and fuzzy behind a thin layer of fog that is either just forming or about to lift. Beyond these, a street, visible due to the light reflecting off the wet pavement, leads away from the Hotel Salgado in a straight line.

  After a while, Felix stands and sets out in search of a bathroom, which he finds hidden behind a door on a landing in the stairwell. He takes inventory of the objects inside and his first thought is that perhaps he is not the only guest in the hotel: he sees a used towel, a few battered toothbrushes, and a soap dish full of water. The light bulb, which he’d screwed into its socket to light moments earlier, was still warm, as if someone had just used it. Under these circumstances, it is easy to imagine the presence of other people. Still, something tells him it isn’t true; he has the feeling he is in the presence of a simple or a complex simulation, he can’t tell which, designed to convince him of a falsehood, a half-truth, or a complete fabrication. Felix imagines the routine of that other person, a man or a woman, staying in the hotel and who must have recently used the bathroom with the tranquility that characterizes solitary habits. The bottom of the tub is marked by splotches of soapy water and there are hairs distributed in an even ring around its sides.

  The light hangs close to the low ceiling from a single wire; one has to move with caution to avoid bumping into it. In a big city like Moscow, this hidden—and, in its way, anonymous—bathroom is insignificant. Yet despite being a new arrival to the city and, consequently, despite his desire to see its monuments, Felix finds this small and apparently forgotten thing to be a real nucleus of meaning. Perhaps all travelers experience something similar: when he arrives somewhere new, Felix absorbs his surroundings like a sponge; later, with the passage of time, he gets acclimated to the way things work and things become less opaque, though seeing them more often does not imply understanding them any better. Felix notes the bathtub, which stands there as if yoked to another time—the old predilection for extravagant roundness, designed to satisfy a ritualistic sensuality involving helpers or witnesses—which has become a hidden and functionally useless object, given the lack of space and likely differences in the sensual inclinations of the current residents. The signs of recent use look to Felix as if they had been staged: the walls splashed and covered in steam, objects distributed evenly around the bathroom as if by accident; all indications of incomplete and obvious actions. The scene is too emphatic, he thinks, and as such speaks volumes about the simulacrum meant to draw him in.

  I will put it as Felix did once, writing of other latitudes: in that “part” of the year, the cold seeps into every corner. It leaves a layer of moisture on the surface of things that vacillates between icing over and melting without ever fully reaching either state. As it settles deeper in, it freezes these objects incrementally until they are entirely at its disposal, having become, over time, potent repositories of cold. Consequently, the moisture in a peripheral—and, as mentioned earlier, small, relative to the building’s proportions—bathroom like this one could not, according to Felix, indicate anything beyond the state of the enclosure itself and the periodic condensation of the air, which, under those conditions, might well have preserved day after day a scene abandoned years before. Felix was struck by this permanent renewal, insofar as it was, above all, grounded in appearances (no matter what was really going on, the cycle of cold and water would repeat in an endless sequence).

  For Felix, appearances had an additional value, and when they turned back on their object—whatever they were supposed to emulate or “give the appearance” of, in this case the bathroom—to replace its purported original attributes, they seemed truer and almost tangible, even while maintaining their ephemeral and deceptive nature. Appearances were like beliefs, they belonged to the realm of opinion; shifting focus to his origins in Argentina, they were also like nationalities, which might persist but never remain the same and, over time, become a matter of choice. Later, when he is back in his room, trying to look out one of his windows, he will hear a knock at the door. He will remain motionless, silent and intrigued, afraid at being surprised in the middle of an ambiguous thought, until more knocking leaves him no choice but to ask who it is. “Masha,” the woman will answer.

  As he walked over to open the door, Felix realized it was the first time he’d heard her speak, that he hadn’t known what her voice was like, but some special sense—over time he would come to understand it as a local logic, an extreme sensitivity backed up by a simultaneously infallible and selective intuition—told him it could only be the same person. Felix opened the door and was transformed. No human face could have provoked his expression of disillusionment, which was instead the product of his current view of the hallway; he had managed not to notice it at all moments earlier—first, when he had been led to his room, and later, on his way back from the bathroom. It was as if he were discovering, all at once, the dreariness that had been amassing in the building for decades and had suddenly been concentrated in that hallway, a labyrinth stretching endlessly in both directions without any markings on the walls, floors, or ceiling that might help someone get their bearings. A belated shudder ran through him: he wondered how he’d managed to find his room after his trip to the bathroom, and, moreover, how he was going to get back each time he went out.

  The light in the hallway was barely any brighter than the faint glow in his room. Even so, Felix was momentarily blinded when he opened the door, definitive proof of his quick adaptation to this unbelievable world of shadows. He would come up with a definition, albeit a slightly forced one, for those glimmers of half-light in the Hotel Salgado that never really illuminated anything: they were the condescending gestures of the darkness, which lazily opened up trivial fissures like alms tossed out by a millionaire so people could intermittently have a bit of mostly useless light. Darkness was the rule, and light, the exception. This explains why it wasn’t until a moment after opening the door that Felix saw Masha’s face shining pale against the gray, looking as distracted or distant as a Russian icon.

  And so, there was a moment of confusion at that indeterminate hour. On one hand, Felix did not know if the figure emerging from the darkness, bloated with layers of clothing in response to the temperature in the hallway, was simply more of what was visible, that is, unkempt and without any discernable charm, or if, on the contrary, those layers concealed a more sensual and immediate physical beauty. For her part, Masha could not be sure if Felix’s curtness upon opening the door suggested an unwelcome interruption or if it was one of those sudden changes of mood that hotel patrons often have. Felix, however, does not remember this. The name Masha seemed so typical, and so well suited to this silent being, that he believed he’d already known it, as if it were information recovered from a dream, or as if a more or less familiar past had destined him to hear it. Now he realized that the moment had come, and his expression of consternation when he opened the door was the result of his just having experienced this inexplicable trance. Meanwhile, Masha wanted t
o say something, but did not know how. During her slow ascent, she had quietly practiced a few different ways, then settled on a fitting and melodious phrase—thoughtful, not formulaic—which had sounded perfect in the stairwell and reflected the hotel’s spirit of hospitality. But Felix’s curtness had made her forget it completely. Of all the different kinds of traveler, the solitary ones were the worst. Couples or groups complemented one another and tried to resolve their issues before turning to the hotel staff. Those traveling alone, however, turned every whim into a demand and treated their preferences as necessities.

  Masha did not know how much longer she would go on wasting her life in the gloomy Hotel Salgado. Nothing tormented her more than those long, shallow steps that were impossible to take two at a time. With its palatial dimensions, the staircase set the stage for excessively deliberate movements: coming and going seemed to be a single confused, extravagant, gratuitously delayed action that was never fully realized; as such, going up and down the stairs was a dramatization devoid of any value beyond its own performance. This was due to the subtle inclination of the stairs, which produced a feeling of slowed movement and even of levitation. Thanks to her frequent trips between floors, Masha had gotten so used to the feeling that, even when walking on regular surfaces, she felt as if she were floating a few centimeters above the ground.