Now, dual-occupancy rooms in towns where lovers or, on occasion, married couples stay are a necessity. But in the town of P. and in the “Hotel Kopriva” in particular where almost exclusively single, rivalrous, anxious travellers put up, dual-occupancy rooms give rise to awkward scenes. The conviction that one does not snore depends on the physiological impossibility of listening to oneself in sleep; the belief that others do follows an old tradition. But an even stronger objection to dual occupancy is the prejudice that a man of distinction should and must sleep alone. So there are repeated productions of the following scene:
“I always sleep alone. On principle!”
“Whose are those things? You told me you had a room! You don’t have a room at all!”
“But there is the room!”
“I’m not paying for a room with two beds!”
“Nor am I!”
“You will pay for it both together!”
“No!” said simultaneously by both visitors.
But the porter, who understands the pliancy of human nature, says: “All right then, room seventy-six.”
“Unbelievable!” say both travellers. One would think they really didn’t like each other. But the imagination of the porter in seeing them as sleeping companions has made them into such. Their hostility to the idea welds them together.
“Er — do you snore?” asks the first.
“I beg your pardon!” replies the other.
“I hasten to say, I don’t…!”
“You know — I don’t mean this in any way personally — but I can’t stand snoring!”
“That’s exactly what I say! Once, I was on my way to…” And there follows the obligatory anecdote that ushers in friendships and firms up alliances.
More noxious meanwhile than any snoring is the blaring gramophone. Downstairs, somewhere in the dining room it scratches out marches, waltzes and two-steps with the inert implacability of a machine. Its insidiousness lies in the fact that its sound becomes clearer and more penetrating the further you stand from its funnel. This well-established characteristic of physics leaves the sleepless guest convinced that intervention is impossible, an illusion. Its range is limitless. The acoustic persecution is more traumatically effective in the remotest room on the second floor than anywhere on the first. It would be easier to find sleep in the sonorous throat of the funnel itself than in the illusory, delusory distance.
Sometimes there are fairs in P. It is never possible to anticipate them. They occur like natural catastrophes. They break out like storms. And then the rooms cost more. In fact, they cost twice as much. Also the fairs are surreptitious. There is no sign of them on the evening of one’s arrival. You get tangled up in a fair as in a waiting net.
Thousands of sample cases wander through the “Hotel Kopriva”. Its beds house commercial travellers of every kind. They sit at the single long table in the dining room. The traveller in children’s toys with the doleful face. He looks like someone who should be travelling in sacred relics. But no, he carries with him the gaudy joys of life: red wooden horsemen; yellow silk clowns; bouncy monkeys on thin elastics; colourful spinning tops; chimneysweeps no bigger than Tanagra figurines, with eyes that open and close; little black devils with tongues of flame; abacuses strung with wooden beads that convert mathematics to a game. But beside him the traveller in soaps at least is cheerful. He smells of musk, patchouli, powder. The paper seller plays solitaire. The man with the fountain pens is a little old-fashioned, he reminds you of goose quills. Tobacco smoke hangs under the ceiling. And no one has any time. Everyone is between arrival and departure. The “Hotel Kopriva” is always between trains. Its eighty rooms and hundred and twenty beds whirl round and round. The “Hotel Kopriva” doesn’t exist. It merely seems to exist. The gramophone tumbles upstairs and down. The sample cases fly through the air. The manager rushes from room to room. The room-service waiter runs to the train. The porter is knocked for six. The manager is the room-service waiter. The porter is the manager. The room-service waiter is the porter. The room numbers are departure times. The clock is a timetable. The visitors are tied to the station on invisible elastics. They bounce back and forth. The gramophone sings train sounds. Eighty makes a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty rooms trundle through eighty beds.
Prager Tagblatt, 4 December 1923
24. The All-Powerful Police
At the end of two days I have taken against the porter of my Roman hotel. His professional friendliness is vitiated with that ill-concealed curiosity that betrays the mediocre spy. He simply wasn’t born to serve the police. He has been in the hotel business for twenty years — if I can believe anything he says — and he was a hotel porter when visitors in Italy were merely guests, and not yet objects of official scrutiny. A change in regime is something a traveller sees first in a hotel porter. His first move after welcoming the guest is to ask for his passport. I will admit, I have a deep suspicion of states that demand the surrender of your passport in a hotel. (Some travellers are less particular in this regard.) All the traditional hospitality of a country that has been getting by on tourism for many years, and seems likely not to be able to get by without it for many more, becomes suspicious to me when hotel personnel start to behave in a semi-official capacity and take away my passport, and thereby my freedom of movement, even if it’s only for half a day. But the hotel porter does more. When I go to him for stamps, he takes the trouble to read the names of my addressees. So concerned is he for my comfort that he will not let me walk a few steps to the letter box. He insists on posting my letters himself. The outcome is that they arrive a day or two later than they should have done.
He has some curious friends, my hotel porter. Several times a day one sees him in the company of two or three gentlemen who are certainly not guests at the hotel. Curious fellows, who, as I hand in my key, straightaway fall into a deep silence. As I walk away, I feel their glances boring into my neck. Sometimes I run into one or other of them in a café, whom just half an hour ago I heard sharing a silence with my hotel porter. Haven’t we met somewhere before? Aha!
I know there are travellers who have eyes only for the ruins, and who are prepared to let spies be spies. But my sensitivity, nurtured and developed by stays in police states — which is to say, states with an anxious police — is such that no amount of tourist attractions is enough to distract me from the lively espionage culture.
When I call on the gentleman my friend in Milan recommended me to, the janitor looks me up and down. This gentleman, a businessman and devout Catholic, was under police suspicion for a time. As we leave the building together he greets the porter, to whom he sometimes gives tips, with a smile and a tad too politely. “The man is dangerous,” says my host. “He could report me any moment.” “What for?” “Who knows?”
Indeed, one may not know why one incurs the suspicions of the janitor and the intimate of the police. The bourgeois lives in permanent dread of incurring suspicion. The law surrenders him entirely into the hands of the police. Here, perhaps a little excursus on the helplessness of the citizen in present-day Italy.
According to Mussolini himself (as of 26 May 1927), Fascist Italy has: 60,000 gendarmes, 15,000 policemen, and a 10,000-strong rail, post and communications militia. In addition to these there are the frontier militia and a 300,000-strong volunteer Fascist militia for “national security”.
The mere existence of these units would be sufficient to trim the f reedoms of the Italian citizen. But then there are Fascist laws, which are such as to completely destroy them.