I did not see Mr Corte again. (I did notice, however, a day later, a couple of visitors walk briskly through the hotel lobby, one carrying the same leather holdall that the physician’s companion had held.)
I spent the next few mornings walking around the local area: the habour, the docklands, a couple of boulevards lined with cafes and souvenir shops. (The proprietor had by then cleared up the issue with my reservation: the confusion had been over a note in his own illegible handwriting.) I avoided the heat of the afternoons by passing the time in the quiet of the hotel’s lobby-cum-library (through these hours, you could count only a handful of passersthrough—the proprietor, a young bartender setting up for the evening, the occasional guest returning to their room).
Some semblance of life would only return to the bar and lobby area by evening: guests would exit, dressed for dinner reservations elsewhere; businessmen would enter to take a spritz or beer, loosening their ties and placing their briefcases on the floor. The bartender seemed timid: she would never look directly at me, nor speak with the warmth she reserved for (who I assumed were) her more regular patrons.
I did make the acquaintance of one Isaac Rosenwasser one evening: he too was travelling alone (although would only stay one night), and took an interest in my line of work: he knew the institution well, he told me, but had never heard of the department where I would be working.
His attention, like mine, had been drawn to the ramshackle and disorganised collection of books that had accumulated in the hotel’s lobby. A library of the forgotten and leftover, I remarked: discarded holiday reading, copies which have fallen beneath bedside tables—books only noticed as missing when the owner has gone to retrieve them from their cabin luggage as their plane takes flight or, even, weeks later, upon seeing the gap left by the misplaced volume in their own bookcase, only to find there is nothing there where there once had been.
It was as if my comment on memory and forgetfulness had troubled Mr Rosenwasser; he turned the base of his glass on its coaster. ‘The gaps left in a bookcase are an inconvenience, no more than that; the true library of the forgotten and leftover, however, is not of these tomes, but it is what we will all come to be part of.’
He brought the glass to his lips, but didn’t drink. Returning the glass to the coaster, he continued: ‘There is an incredible sadness in the gaps and holes that form in our own minds, gaps we may never realise have appeared—the friends we will eventually forget, that last journey another’s name makes in our minds. That last journey an ion of sodium or potassium makes between two particular cells in the cerebral cortex, the last fragment of a relationship forever lost.’
Before he went upstairs to his room, Mr Rosenwasser made one final remark: ‘Have you noticed, my friend, that the majority of the books in this lobby contain short stories? It is both fitting for an establishment named L’hotel Delle Cento Storie, and apt for a space in which we pass those small pockets of our time waiting.’
Published in La Legge degli Spazi Bianchi, Marietti, 1989, and in English in The Law of White Spaces, Granta, 1992. Available to read online Granta here
A Personal Anthology 