I pull up a chair in the lobby. It is home and the world, foreign and familiar, my ancestorless gallery! Here I will start to write about my friends, the hotel personnel. Such characters they are! Cosmopolites! Students of humanity! Expert readers of languages and souls! No Internationale like theirs! They are the true internationals! (Patriotism only begins with the owners of the hotel.)
I will begin by describing my friend, the receptionist.
Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 January 1929
* The hotel’s identity — if it has one, and is not a composite or a dream — is not known. Helmuth Nürnberger conjectures that the gently shelving port city may be Marseilles.
40. The Chief Receptionist
In the afternoon “between trains”, when the lobby is quiet and empty and an idyllic golden light floods the reception area, the chief receptionist reminds me of a kind of gold-braid and mobile saint in an iconostasis. To complete the likeness, he folds his hands over the little golden buttons that retain his belly, and commits himself to a profound contemplation of the air, the play of dust motes, and probably a few thoughts on his home life. Eventually he feels a pang at his inactivity in front of his boys, who are standing around in a small group, and in whom the unruliness of youth may at any moment stir, and so he contrives a few activities, in themselves highly superfluous but of a suggestively exemplary nature, to improve morale. He takes the heavy gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and compares its time with that shown on the electric wall clock, whose great, round, white face hangs there like a hotel moon on two coarsely woven chains, accenting the golden afternoon with its ghostly silver. It is so quiet that each time the big hand marks a minute one hears the tick, almost human in the silence. For a long time the receptionist looks at the two chronometers, as though to catch one out by a second or two. Then with a resolute expression that is the visual equivalent of a sigh, he returns his watch to its pocket. He lays two large books over each other in such a way that their edges are exactly aligned, slides the telephone half an inch closer to the inkwell, with the flat of his hand trundles the pen into its designated hollow, examines a loose button on his cuff, and twists at it, to satisfy himself that it is in no imminent danger of falling off. No one dares disturb him. In this almost meditative hour, his assistants, a couple of fellows in grey, standing silently at the entrance, dare not approach him with a question.
There are always two different fellows posted by him, and by my reckoning there are six in all. I can’t quite be sure, because I’ve never seen them all at the same time. When one lot arrives, the others are just setting off to consulates, chemists, florists, apartments, all about other people’s business as messengers, agents or servants. For years I have been unable to establish whether they are hotel employees or personal friends of the chief receptionist’s. By all appearances, it is he and not it that is their bread-giver and the dictator of their opportunities. They obey him as hunting dogs obey the master of hounds — and no matter how far away they are on their errands, it’s always as though he had them on invisible, elasticated strings, and could reach them at any moment. He treats them like a kind of decayed relation or hereditary disease. There is undeniably something perplexing about their existence — a life without uniform and without badge. Everyone else here wears the sign of their service and their function, only they have retained the anonymity of mufti, which puts one in mind of the borders of legality, and a sort of frenzy, a pursued pursuit, of police and of forbidden paths.
But enough of them! In this quiet hour they don’t exist for the chief receptionist, they are less than the air, which he at least deigns to contemplate. He avoids looking at them, even when talking to them. He has the gift of calling down an errand from the elevation of his box without looking at any particular individual. It is as though the lobby is full of minions only waiting for an assignment. Only when a guest steps up to his desk to make an order does he gently incline his head — not the better to hear it, but only to disguise his superiority which guests do not like to have their attention drawn to.
Because, make no bones about it, he is their superior. I find in his powerful head, the wide white brow, where the hair at the temples is already beginning to silver, the wide-set pale-grey eyes above which the heavy eyebrows form two complete arches, the deep-lying root of the powerful, beaky nose, the large and down-curving mouth, shaded as the eyes by their brows by the curve of the pendulous pepper-and-salt moustache, the massive chin at the heart of which is a lost little dimple that has survived from childhood: for me this face echoes the portraits of great noblemen, a fixed expression of proud aloofness, an aura that spreads over the whole visage like a transparent layer of bitter frost. The face is a reddish brown, as though it came from a life out of doors, a life among wheat, water, wood and wind, the skin is taut — and the handful of deep frown lines above the nose, and the more delicate pleats around the eyes seem not to have come from the daily round of cares, but willingly accepted signs, tattoos administered by life and experience, and performed by wind and weather…
He bends down before the gentlemen but it is not a bow, but a physical condescension. As he accepts an instruction it is as though he were hearing a petition. When he nods in agreement, he reminds one of the merciful judges in American films (which are the only places where one sees merciful judges). The visitor is unhappy about something now. But it looks as though the chief receptionist is thinking about whose responsibility it is. And with a small, utterly tangential question he is plucked from his conscientiousness into a kind of sympathy, and a remissness becomes partiality. As though the gentleman were come to him not to complain about him but to voice a complaint to him. “Oi!” the chief receptionist shouts down to the group of idle boys. “Which of you took 375’s suit to be ironed?”—Silence. It wasn’t any of the boys, but the porter whom the receptionist has just sent on a bus to the station. He very well remembered the porter’s protest, the suit, the particular urgency of the errand. But he doesn’t for a moment feel guilty. I’m not saying he has no conscience, but it is of a different quality. It is more spacious, like a general’s maybe, preoccupied with more important things, full of concern for the whole enterprise. “On your way, and pick up the suit!” he orders. Who would give anything for the boy who ventured to ask: Where is it? Something is aroused now in the eye of the receptionist, something like the crack of the whip in a circus, a drawn poniard, a storm darkening on the horizon… The boy doesn’t stop to ask, he runs off straightaway. A brooding silence settles on the remaining boys, a clouded summer sultriness. The master of the gold braid stands all alone in his elevation, and exhales a cloud of pure silent anger into the lobby.
Even so, he would straightaway break into a smile if a guest, for example myself, were to approach him now with a request. Nothing about him — and I certainly don’t understand him to the degree that I perhaps appear to — nothing about him is as remarkable as his gift of switching almost instantaneously between fury and graciousness, indifference and curiosity, cool aloofness and anxiety to be of service. It’s as though each of his feelings is lined with its obverse, and that all he needs to do is turn his mood around to transform himself. Now, ten minutes before the first guests are due off the Milan express, he moves into reception mode, which is to say, he gives a little tug at his waistcoat. “Ten minutes!” he calls out to the clerk. Then something remarkable happens: he leaves his receptionist’s eyrie. He climbs down and scatters the group of boys, each of whom now runs to his allotted place, one to the revolving doors, another to the luggage elevator, a third to the lift for persons, another to the staircase, a couple more to the cloakroom. Two more minutes, and the first automobile draws up. The chief receptionist purses his lips and issues a snake-like hiss. From a dark side entrance a baggage man in green apron sprints up. Already the humming engine of a motor-car is audible outside. Here come the first pieces of luggage. The receptionist gives them a glance, and since they are leather and there is a dark grey and green tartan rug with them, and a leather-lined pouch for walking sticks and umbrellas, he gives another tug at his waistcoat. With each new arrival he exchanges a look with the reception clerk, and each glance signifies a room number, a floor, a price, an exhortation, a warning, affability or dourness. Yes, there are some guests at whose appearance the chief receptionist gently closes one eye, with the result they are told the hotel has no vacancies. Sometimes — but this happens once a week at most — the chief receptionist makes a bow, and when he is upright again, one sees his face wreathed in smiles, smiles that, like yawns, are contagious. Then the visitor proceeds past beaming faces, as between two rows of lit lamps.