When I was a child, I loved receiving wedding invitations at home. As an adult, a wedding is simply one of the worst pieces of news one can receive. That invitation should be replaced by a black dot like in Treasure Island where pirates received their death sentence. Something similar happens with hotel stays. At first glance: Who doesn’t want to go to a good hotel? From which day of the stay does the hotel start to harm you? What does a hotel room, as an emblematic non-place, do to your body night after night? You can never trust a hotel room because it is made not to be honest with anyone. It flatters you, welcomes you, makes you feel special when to it you are just another, the same as those before and after you.
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Each of us has a similar tolerance for living in hotels, just as we do for being in complete darkness or solitude. After a certain point, the mind starts to lose control, interpreting reality on its own and sending itself wrong signals. In this case, it shouldn’t be like that if we apply the right dose – two, three nights at most. A hotel is designed full of rooms where you feel the same no matter where you are in the world. But after a few days and their respective nights, the hotel, without you realizing it, starts destroying you from within like a sweet and lethal poison. A long-stay hotel user, upon returning home, is like an astronaut back from space, a double agent who has killed or saved his life in Bangkok without his family suspecting anything, a musician who destroys the domestic in exchange for the mythology of the tightrope walker from hotel to hotel.
You can never trust a hotel room, it is made not to be honest with anyone
One does not return unscathed from a hotel stay. At best, you come back wounded. Often fatally because the one who returns is never the one who left. Outlaws ended up getting caught because they got tired equally of robbing banks and of staying in hotels and consuming midday menus. Now that we are with Christopher Nolan’s Homeric adaptation, Odysseus was from hotel to hotel – from Calypso to Circe, from the oblivion brought by sensual love to feeling like a pig – before arriving in Ithaca and getting mad at the suitors of his estate and his wife, Penelope.
A long time ago, inside hotel nightstands, a Bible was kept. I know because my mother used to bring them all home on her trips with my father. The purpose of that custom was that if, in the middle of the night, you were seized by a doubt of faith or sudden fear of dying in sin, there you had the Word of God to get through the bad moment. The theological problems my mother must have caused, and she, an instrument of the Antichrist, unaware of all this.
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Nowadays those drawers are empty, but not the rest of the room, trinkets and furniture with little more purpose than perpetuating the idea that this is not a bedroom with a bathroom but a home you could call your own. Thus, apparently, in a hotel room you can write letters by hand with a goose quill and give them to the bellboy, bathe in foam, shave, read a Graham Greene novel in an armchair under a floor lamp, organize your wardrobe by colors or textures, make yourself a coffee, get drunk, raise your sugar with chocolates and juices, rub yourself on carpets and rugs, watch TV – all the channels in the world one after another, if you wish – try the wifi, have lunch or dinner in the room itself, frolic or have sex – alone or with company – or sleep badly – as Quim Monzó once wrote due to how beds are made by protocol in hotels.
There is a characteristic anxiety in being in a hotel room without being able to do almost any of the opportunities it offers you. Apparently, for lack of time, but perhaps the reason is deeper. It looks like a house, it has everything houses should have, but you know it’s not, that all this is designed to deceive you, to make you forget that it is a non-place, a model of a home. That is the demonic perversity hidden in hotel rooms. That is why rock bands in the 70s broke the furniture in rooms, threw TVs into pools – and even Charly García himself.
Drugs, alcohol, yes, but also the evil presence of the room itself. They will say I exaggerate. But think about it carefully. It’s like being introduced to a guy who looks like yourself, but too tidy, too clean and sensible, and no, that’s not you and, terrified, you open the nightstand drawer and there is nothing and you vow to leave early tomorrow, without fail, before it’s too late.
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