In the end he jammed a slipper under the door, though he fretted the whole time he was going down in the elevator and as he rode back up whether he would find the door shut, which would have meant, since Daniel Atijas was sleeping, that he would not have been able to get into the room, but everything worked out fine after all, or rather seemed fine until he brought me to my room, where I thanked him for his efforts in the most ordinary voice, as if sober that instant, entered the room, and shut the door, but when he turned to go back to the elevator, he heard a crash and, assuming I’d fallen, came back to my door, where, after knocking softly and calling to no purpose (he had to keep in mind, after all, the rules of good behavior, which meant that he couldn’t kick the door with all his might or holler my name, though even that wouldn’t have helped much, he believed; indeed, it wouldn’t have made a whit of difference), he, after the soft knocking and calling, finally went back to the elevator, glancing over his shoulder as he went, and rode up to the third floor, where his concern for my welfare, he said, gradually gave way to anxiety about the stability of the slipper under the door to Daniel Atijas’s room, and luckily — for had the door slammed shut, he said, he really would not have known what to do — luckily the slipper was where he’d left it, just as Daniel Atijas was where he had left him, having moved only a little. Daniel Atijas raised his head and asked where I was, but before Ivan Matulić’s grandson was able to tell him anything, his head dropped back onto the pillow, and back to sleep he went. In short, I could breathe a sigh of relief, but I was still wondering, though I didn’t dare ask, what happened later while he and Daniel Atijas were alone, between the time when Ivan Matulić’s grandson returned to the room and the time he left for Canmore.
Knowing of our memory lapses, I could readily assume that everything proceeded in that blurred state between waking and sleeping, though I still quaked, in part because nothing is less sure than human nature. Rare is the person who can keep his pledge to the end, whatever the pledge may be, and I saw no reason why Daniel Atijas would be any different, nor, after all, was I. In the end, Daniel Atijas had no obligation to me, and if there ever was someone who did have an obligation, then that was I, except that the obligation was not so much to him as to myself, which comes down, in extreme cases, to the same thing. As to the question of lunch that one of us had raised, Ivan Matulić’s grandson said he would not be able to even think of food for days, and as far as he was concerned, a bowl of soup would do just fine, though now that he was thinking about it, tea would suit him best. Daniel Atijas chimed in, adding that it would be nice to have the tea elsewhere because he was getting sick of the dining hall at the Banff Centre — not the facility, he added, but the atmosphere, the smell of food that seeped into everything, and the excited voices of the hungry people, resonant at first and then, as the lunch proceeded, duller and duller, less and less vibrant, until finally there was nothing left but a swallowed yawn and a yen for a nap. He knew, of course, that the atmosphere wasn’t a question of choice, it was a physical inevitability, but ever since he had become acquainted with the habits of northern Europeans and their preference for a main meal in the evening, closer to the time one retires yet not so close as to disturb their sleep, which, as he had seen earlier, was how Canadians and Americans ate as well, he had become so partial to that dining schedule that he had given serious thought as to whether it might have shaped relations between the north and the south, thinking, of course, of the south of Europe, the Mediterranean, where people are known to take every opportunity to nap and sometimes spend more time asleep during the day than at night.
There could be no question but that the north was more advanced than the south, and not only where Europe was concerned. Elsewhere the north was advanced, while the south was mainly in disrepair, and this encouraged him in his conviction that there ought to be in-depth research done into the nutritional habits of southerners and northerners across all the continents, including Africa and Australia. Such a detailed study, he said, might entirely uproot the assumptions we have about the purpose of meals and sleep, meaning, in other words, that the final outcome might completely change the way people think about themselves, and change the world. One never knows where the turning points are, where the lever of change rests, he said, and we seldom, if ever, recognize turning points when they appear but only later, once the change has irreversibly begun and we are surprised by how we failed to spot it, or, conversely, we pretend we did notice it, but this is usually an out-and-out lie. Now, he said, in his country everyone is saying that from the start they knew what would happen and where things were headed, but the truth of the matter is that ten years earlier no one had had any clue as to the degree of horror, devastation, and human degradation that would one day be deemed history.
Most of us, he said, lag behind life and never really catch up. One might say, he said, that we trail after it, forever late for what life is all about — in which case, he said, we should snap to it and get that tea before someone else drinks it. Ivan Matulić’s grandson chuckled. Daniel Atijas only shook his head. There is no better place in Banff for tea, I said, than the restaurant at the old Banff Springs Hotel, and so we sat in the grandson’s car, drove into town, crossed the bridge, and drove along the other bank of the Bow River. I remarked how odd it was that no one had taken Daniel Atijas there yet, for going there was usually the first thing visitors did in Banff, so I regaled them until we got there with tales from its history. The hotel was begun, I said, in 1886, as one of a series of castle-like hotels which the Canadian Railway began to build after laying its railway tracks through the Rocky Mountains. Since Banff was already known as a spa with hot mineral springs, the administration of the railway wanted to build something fancier than they had been planning to build elsewhere and asked Bruce Price, a noted architect, to draft the design. One of the most beautiful sites in Banff was chosen for the hoteclass="underline" where the Spray flows into the Bow, on a bluff overlooking the two rivers. When William Cornelius Van Horne, president of the Canadian Pacific Railway, visited the construction site, he almost fainted in horror. Someone had been following the blueprints incorrectly and had turned the plans around 180 degrees, so the finest rooms looked out on featureless slopes while the hotel kitchen had a sweeping view of the river valley and mountains.
The plans were quickly adjusted, I said, and the hotel opened, in its first iteration, that is, on June 1, 1888, advertised as the largest hotel in the world. With the surge in the number of visitors from Europe and the United States, the hotel grew, so now, I said, there are almost six hundred rooms, though it certainly is not the world’s largest. At the turn of the century it had grown in height, I said, so a guest had been quoted as saying that, yes, the new building was, indeed, towering; the only thing that towered higher was the price of drinks at the bar. As I had reckoned, after last night’s binge of drinking no one was amused. The hotel acquired its current appearance, what we see today, I said, in the late 1930s, and someone once described it nicely, saying it had “hallways for invalids, towers for stargazers and balconies for lovers.” Considering the state we were in, said Daniel Atijas, there was nothing left for us to do but stick to the hallways. Again no one laughed. Its appearance as a castle, which might more readily be described as a paraphrase of castle features, was unconvincing today, and once a French painter who had also been staying at the Banff Centre announced that it was a Hollywood version of a European castle. He said this with disdain, and I had never forgiven him. I could have gone on entertaining them with any number of hotel ghost stories, tales of the celebrities who had stayed there, a story of how the first runway for planes was laid in about 1930, when Benny Goodman decided to visit Banff by plane, but Daniel Atijas was impressed enough with what I had already related, and this was apparent, so I hurried us through the labyrinthine hotel corridors and down countless stairs, at some points aptly gloomy, until we got to the restaurant, from which stretched a view of the Fairholme Range with its snow-covered peaks.