“If you need anything…” No, he doesn’t need anything. Thank you. The Beginner smiled politely—he would be capable even of killing politely—and withdrew to his room. Shall we wager that the first thing he will do as soon as the door has closed behind him will be to clean out the minibar and throw himself down on the big bed in the middle of this strange room, open his eyes wide and spin round with the ceiling while the world outside stops and waits for him? There, look. Wager won.
Over the course of the densely packed calendar of events, The Beginner has developed a harmless fetish for hotels. Deep-core sampling in his memory reveals that this weakness lies in one of the oldest layers of his consciousness, where there are fossil memories of distant, legendary journeys with his grandparents to tourist locations with a decadent reputation.
What he loves more than anything are provincial hotels, like the one he is in now, and of these provincial hotels, he prefers the down-at-heel ones, like the one he is in now, which still preserve traces of an old, corrupt luxury, like the one he is in now. It’s an old hotel in the main square of the town, just opposite the theatre. Once the haunt of actors, commercial travellers and clandestine lovers, today it is a place for lost tourists who, over breakfast in the morning, take another look at their guidebooks to see if this really is the hotel recommended, or for solitary travellers who exchange glances of mutual suspicion in the lift. In short, the feeling is that the hotel is kept open only out of a stubborn desire not to acknowledge its own downfall.
The Beginner wishes he never again has to get up from the mattress into which he has sunk, wishes he could spend the rest of his days in this room like a convalescent. He has two pillows behind his head. He is tired but not sleepy. With the remote
control
in his hand, he hops between shopping channels and erotic chatlines, the images and voices follow one another without his brain being able to put them together to make any kind of sense. He thinks again about his day. The whole of his day.
The afternoon arrival by train, the verdant countryside outside the window, then the ring of speculative building that besieges the historic centres of Italian towns. On the platform, the
embarrassment
of the person sent to pick up a stranger he had only seen in a photograph on the back cover of a novel, the exaggeratedly cordial welcome by the patroness of the local book club, and a certain tangible nervousness over the organization of the event.
A nervousness which in the evening was transformed into embarrassment. And then into melancholy, given that the event turned out so pitiful.
Nobody came, almost nobody. The frescoed hall placed at their disposal by the municipality, freezing cold and barely warmed by two stoves, was deserted.
When the appointed hour had long passed and it was obvious that the plastic chairs would remain empty, the patroness of the book club plucked up courage, abandoned her indefatigable smile for a moment and apologized. “I’m so sorry, there’s this flu going round… Half the town have come down with vomiting and diarrhoea…”
What about the other half, why hadn’t they come? he would have liked to ask. What he said, though, was: “I understand. I’ve had it too…”
Those are the words that come out of his mouth. But they aren’t true at all, The Beginner hasn’t had any kind of
gastrointestinal
problem, he’s fine, in fact he’s in perfect health. At most a burning in his stomach because of those miniature drinks he knocked back in his hotel room. Why did he say it, then? Partly to relieve the patroness of any remorse she might feel at having made the beginner travel so many kilometres for nothing (he had always been more embarrassed for other people than for himself), but because in the end he loves to make allowances for his fellow man. He may not be able to forgive the indifference of these townspeople towards his book, but he can understand it: when you came down to it, thinks The Beginner, he himself would never have gone to the presentation of
their
books.
But he knows perfectly well that basically he did it for himself, because to The Beginner the idea (just the idea) of being ill was not an unpleasant one at that moment, the warm dream of being able to stay in bed, in his pyjamas, with a cup of soup on the bedside table and a good book in his hands instead of
persevering
with that literary event, treating those two or three yawning customers with the same respect and the same enthusiasm he would show an adoring multitude.
It’s one of the riskiest of situations. An author offering himself as a sacrifice to a handful of torturers who have emerged from their houses, defying the tiredness and sadness of the evening with
a single intention: to see the writer, to hear the writer, to touch the writer. To have him in front of them, naked, bound to the stake of the event, a Saint Sebastian ready to be transfixed by the arrows of stupid questions and executed by the intelligent ones. Here he is, at last defenceless in front of his executioner, in plain clothes, stripped of his fragile armour of paper, demonstrating his fatal ignorance, his brazen mediocrity. A unique opportunity to give him the admiration, and the contempt, he deserves.
The Beginner had looked at them, inspected them
anthropologically
: a man in a jacket and tie, two ladies in furs, a young girl, a middle-aged man who had left in a great hurry before the end, as if he had suddenly remembered an engagement, or as if that infamous intestinal virus had finally struck him, too. The young girl might have been one of those precocious, sensitive adolescents who devour novels and poetry on the bus taking them to school while their companions share the earphones of their iPods and copy each other’s homework. From her, he had nothing to fear. She would ask him for his address and he would give her his publisher’s as a precaution, and she would send him a letter, in an envelope sprinkled with beads and scrawled over in coloured inks, in which she confessed she was in love with him. The gentleman in jacket and tie was a trickier proposition, a typical example of a provincial pedant, who would first put forward some criticisms of his book but then become unctuous and servile at the end of the event and present him with a small self-published book signed by himself in fine handwriting (a compendium of local history), begging him to pass it on to his publisher. And that was indeed what had happened.
Luckily, it was then time for dinner, and the patroness of the event and her ladies had transferred The Beginner to a small restaurant chosen by the book club, a place which, if it had not been for the booking, would have already been closed for a while at that hour. During the dinner he had drunk himself silly with
carafes of white wine, had ignored the advances of a retired female teacher who proposed grim toasts to nothingness and smiled every time their eyes met. Feeling immune because of his youth and his immature talent, he had pretended to have read a whole lot of books, and lavished scandalous and almost offensive judgements on most current books and authors (all of them very much respected by his dinner companions). Outside the
restaurant
, with the shutter already lowered, he had lit a cigarette and blandly thanked the patroness, and she had withdrawn together with the other dinner guests, who were by now overcome by sleep and the effort of being sociable. Pleased that he had eaten yet another meal without paying—there had been many of them since his book had been in contention for The Prize—The Beginner breathed in deep mouthfuls of smoke and contemplated the midweek desolation of that decorous little town. Now, between the restaurant and his hotel room, there remained only one final formidable enemy, an enemy he had been trying to avoid all day: the neglected provincial writer chosen to chair the debate.
A debate without disagreements, an argument without
arguments
, the only sticking point being that a successful young beginner and an unsuccessful and less young writer had been seated side by side at the same table.
As had been predictable from the start, after an initial
half-hearted
rejection of the patroness’s polite proposition, the
provincial
writer had accepted the invitation to dinner and had tagged along with the others. But The Beginner had managed, by changing places surreptitiously while his failed colleague had gone to wash his hands, to relegate him to the other end of the table, thus attracting hostile looks from him all through dinner—looks to which The Beginner could find nothing better to respond with than vague smiles.
Because he could well imagine ending up there himself, The Beginner had immediately recognized the type, universally known
as “provincial writer who hasn’t made it”. It was a very specific, widespread and in no way innocuous anthropological and
literary
category. Poisoned by the suspicion, if not the contempt, of their own fellow citizens, hurt by the smugness of literary society towards them, worn down by rejection and their own inadmissible lack of talent, such people spent their wretched days exiled to their desks, writing imaginary reviews, updating their blogs, working away at novels doomed to the eternal darkness of a drawer. With the passing of the years, they ended up suppressing their feelings of failure and converting them into a sense of martyrdom. They constructed vast conspiracy theories in which powerful
publishers
, ensconced in the centre of things, did all they could to crush anyone outside their own charmed circle—the only proof of this conspiracy, of course, being their own misfortune. They founded small and apparently crusading publishing houses in some cellar, or directly in their own homes, clandestine distilleries where they got drunk on the very spirits they sold under the counter. By so doing, they were finally able to realize their dream and see some of their own manuscripts in printed form, just for the fetishistic orgasm of touching the cover, leafing through the pages, arranging them on display on the mantelpiece in their best room. The more enterprising of them even managed to found schools of creative writing—on the pattern of the more famous ones—in premises placed at their disposal by co-operatives or local authorities, more as an opportunity to exchange a few words with some human beings on autistic winter evenings than as an assertion of their own debatable teaching skills.
This was what had happened to our provincial writer, who had actually had leaflets printed advertising his school of writing, leaflets of which he had given whole bunches to The Beginner, asking him to circulate them once he was back in Rome. “If it’s no bother…” “Oh, no bother…” The Beginner had replied, thinking as he said this, not “Would it be right of me to throw
them away?”—he was already beyond that—but only “Where can I throw them?”
“Would you like a drink? I have some friends waiting for me in a bar…”
The provincial writer was looking at him with a treacherous smile. But the question had not caught him unawares. Prepared by the psychological analysis he had made, The Beginner had in his pocket the one answer which his colleague the writer could not counter without disavowing his nature and his character.
“Thanks. I’d like to come but… I’m going to take advantage of the time to do a bit of work. I have a piece to hand in tomorrow…”
The provincial writer nodded bitterly. He knew perfectly well what that meant. Mutual solidarity between colleagues.
Now The Beginner is cold, he shrinks inside his jacket, which is too casual for the way the temperature has dropped since the sun went down. If only he had been more sensible, and less trusting in tomorrow, he would have brought with him at least a sweatshirt to offer to the wind which has suddenly risen in the square, stirring the leaves on the branches in the park.
He has preferred to take a detour through side streets which, sooner or later, must any way lead him back to his hotel. And in fact there it is: at the end of the alley, he glimpses the dim sign on the other side of the square. An inevitable doubt accompanies him during the last metres that separate him from the revolving door. Will there be a night porter? If there isn’t one, all it takes to get any porter to transform himself into a night porter is to have the courage to ring and put aside every scruple and sense of guilt at dragging a sleeping man from his bed. Here he comes, looking sleepy, his uniform creased. The Beginner just has to pretend that everything is normal, that he feels no embarrassment, no scruples, he just has to dismiss the porter with a hygienic “good night”. It’s his job anyway, just as it’s the job of writers to stay out late. So the night porter who comes and opens the door to a
night-loving writer and the writer himself are two professionals of the night, made for each other. There’s no lift, but never mind, at The Beginner’s age two flights of stairs are nothing. Here is the room. We’re almost at the end of this long day.
It’s time to sleep. The Beginner undresses, cleans his teeth, turns on the tap and thirstily gulps down two glasses full of water… Oh God, is it drinkable? But why does he always have these doubts after, instead of before, drinking? It’s ridiculous anyway, with what he’s drunk lately it certainly won’t be water that kills him. He slips under the blankets. He hears a noise, a dull thudding. The Beginner gets up and walks barefoot—the carpet filthy beneath his feet—to the window and moves aside the shutter that’s banging. There’s nobody outside. Who are those streetlamps lit for? The main square of the town looks like a bathtub without water. A cat crosses it quickly and mysteriously, dedicated to God knows what nocturnal mission. The sky above the dark roofs is starless. It will rain tomorrow, there is a smell like damp sand in the air. Back under the blankets.
The Beginner’s final—or rather, penultimate—thought before turning out the light is for The Girlfriend: how is she getting on with the parrot?
It wasn’t easy to get her to accept the presence—which is a little unsettling, she isn’t completely wrong about that—of that black bird in her colourful little loft. To persuade her, The Beginner had to exhume the old, but still valid, argument about moving: they’ll look for somewhere new to live, somewhere more spacious, the old promise of a love nest works every time. If only he knew that The Girlfriend is pregnant, he wouldn’t be so flippant about it. The Beginner turns out the light and falls asleep thinking—and this really is his last thought—about the hotel room in London. A bright room with lacquered furniture, clean wallpaper with bright colours, soft beds, shiny tiles in the scented bathroom, the capacious bathtub edged in marble and the sanitized toilet sealed
with a paper band around it, so similar to the one they put on his book with a quotation from a rave review.