Butterflies in November

THIRTY-EIGHT

Hotel Sand stands in the middle of the desert, a brand-new blockhouse building with minibars, a satellite dish and loosely woven brown curtains in the rooms that don’t fully cover the windows. We’re surrounded by water, although the road men have started fixing the bridges on the eastern side of the desert.

“It’s wonderful to pass through here,” a foreigner confides to me in the lobby, “but I wouldn’t like to be stuck here. It’s different for you people who are used to sand deserts and darkness,” he adds, “because you were born and brought up in this. Of course, it would be different if the sand weren’t black but golden, and the temperature was about ten degrees higher, to be able to adapt I mean.”

We book ourselves into the hotel, having been preceded by the Estonian male choir, which we seem to bump into everywhere it goes on its tour around the country. They’ve already stayed here one night and have another two to go. This evening they will be giving a concert, followed by a surprise number, which is already attracting guests from the dam construction site. The hotel was built in record time, I’m told, in true Wild West style, and apparently is an exact replica of a hotel in west Texas, the only difference being that the original model is 300 rooms bigger.

“We expect to be enlarging the hotel over the coming years,” says the hotel manager in the lobby, “the growth potential is limitless.”

The restaurant on the ground floor has small carved wooden doors that swing in both directions, just like in old Westerns or those changing cubicles in fashion boutiques. At the top of the dining hall there is a varnished wooden stage, equipped with microphones, and a dance floor in front of it with mirrors.

We throw ourselves on the bed with the kitten between us and watch the evening TV news. Maps appear with circles around the areas where rivers have overflowed and reservoirs seem to be on the brink of bursting. The presenter briefly mentions the Estonian male choir and its accompanying troupe of young “artistic dancers” with a slightly smug air, before passing the ball to the sports reporters.

We zap through the foreign channels. Tumi is holding the remote and is therefore the master.

A naked snow-white woman crouches down on a golden beach to lean her head against a giant bottle of perfume, gently caressing its neck with the tip of her fingers and then rising towards the lid, stroking that as well, without, however, unscrewing it, before finally dropping her head and closing her eyes. The bottle is the size of a man, but the woman is small, fine and fragile. This bottle seems to be the only thing she has in the world to lean on.

We sit, stroking the cat and watching the woman in the commercial, mesmerized. It’s on a French channel. A woman is an island, a velvety male voice says in the distance. This is followed by a moment’s silence.

“Beautiful lady,” says the boy, clearly and distinctly.

“Yes, beautiful lady,” I say, laughing.

“Beautiful lady,” he repeats before placing the palm of his hand on my belly.

“We’re only allowed to serve alcohol with the food, if you buy more than chips,” says a teenage waitress in the dining room.

Quivering bottles of soda and beer are being carried into the room in crates and technicians are testing the microphones. There is a sense of anticipation in the air, but for now everything remains relatively quiet and the hotel manager gives himself time to chat to us in the hall.

“Things will be livening up later on; we’re expecting a group of foreigners from the dam construction this evening.”

Adopting a mysterious air, he then lowers his voice as he leans over the counter between two palm plants:

“We’re in an odd situation here. The cancellations due to the construction work on the dam have actually been far less than the number of bookings from the contractors above. We only get the odd ecological tourist who comes here to experience the desert. What’s more they like to keep to themselves, hardly buy a single souvenir and bring very little currency into the country.”

He has straightened up again now and raises his voice: “One has to look at the big picture.”

We both slip into silence, the hotel manager and I. I’m waiting for the restaurant to open. The boy wants boiled fish with potatoes and butter, just like at his grandad’s, if I’ve understood correctly. The kitten also wants fish. The hotel manager leans over the counter again.

“And then, of course, there’s the commercials. We get quite a few film crews around here shooting their ads. Mainly for mobile phones. They’re starting to bring in some currency. A foreigner recently said to me that he felt like he was living inside a mobile phone commercial here, nothing but sand and rocks, total freedom. Of course, some people are quite keen to track down these places with nothing around them. There isn’t a single blade of grass growing here at the moment, although we’re planning on planting a small oasis of pine trees in the sheltered area behind the building. We’ve been in touch with the Forestry Service and they’ve given us the green light. Unless we go for some mountain ash instead.”

The boy’s lips silently move, as he reads a sign on the wall in six languages. Once more the manager lowers his voice and turns on that mysterious air:

“And then, of course, there’s a fair bit of local traffic from people in the area if there’s something going on, people like to come here for a change of atmosphere and to give themselves a treat, gawk at the foreigners and have a drink.”

There’s a TV in the dining room so we watch a programme on some foreign channel while we’re waiting for our food to arrive. A man from a small Alpine village in Austria, who keeps goldfish the size of trout in his garden, is being interviewed. He’s taught them to play football, he claims, and to stick their heads out of the water to kiss him. His wife complains about how her husband spends all his free time kissing and fondling the fish and confesses that she is jealous. She invites the reporters in for dinner and chats to them, as she fries some brown trout. She is wearing a stained apron and seems to be quite chuffed by all the attention she is receiving from the cameras.

“We’re out of fish,” says the waitress, “it’s mainly Italian dishes we have. Pizzas are the most popular. That includes soup of the day, mushroom.”

I order milk for the boy and water for me.

“Is skimmed milk OK?” the girl asks. “People never order milk with their food here.”

Tumi can only handle two morsels before the cheese seems to get stuck in his throat and he can’t breathe and coughs into his glass of milk. Finally, he spits out the food into a green napkin I hold up to his mouth.

When I come back to the table, after washing his face, our plates have been taken away and clean sets of cutlery have been wrapped in green napkins on the table. The girl tells me that the kitchen staff agree that the Margarita and calzone weren’t quite up to scratch and they would like to offer us hamburgers and chips on the house instead.

“All hotel guests are entitled to one free drink and a discount on two further drinks at the concert tonight.”

Once the boy and cat have fallen asleep under the same duvet, I take a shower and finish reading Gli Indifferenti by Moravia. Feeling a slight chill after all my travels, I slip on a thick white sweater and return to sit in the dining hall. The place is steadily filling up with guests, who group into tables, according to their level of acquaintanceship and family ties. Many of them bear a striking resemblance to each other, with their red faces and freckles.

Two foreigners in anoraks by the entrance cast their dark eyes on me over their pints of beer. One of them has a rolled-up cigarette poised between his fingers. Scanning the room with my eyes, I notice a teenager, sitting slightly apart, about seventeen years old I would guess, with a bottle of coke and a glass full of ice cubes in front of him. He sips on the bottle, but doesn’t touch the glass. There’s something oddly familiar about him. He has a sensitive air and pale complexion, and I imagine he has started to harmonize the proportions of the various parts of his body and that he is no longer as lethargic as he was. He has dark, undulating hair, which he has clearly tried to wet and comb down.

I sidle up to his table and ask him if I can take a seat. When he looks up I see that he has beautiful green eyes and that he probably suffered from bad skin that has now started to heal. I order the same thing he’s having and, before I know it, have leant over slightly towards him to ask him when his birthday is. His gaze shiftily darts in all directions, like the deserter of an enemy army who is on the point of disclosing information that could put him in peril of his life.

“At the end of May,” he says, but without any hostility, pulling the hood off his head. A dark lock of hair dangles over his forehead.

“Are you from here?” I ask him bluntly, sipping on my soda. The youngster whitens and glances nervously over his shoulder, as if he were expecting someone.

“I see that you two have already introduced yourselves,” says a man taking a seat at the table beside the youngster.

He slips a hand around the boy’s shoulder, as if to tell him he’s got nothing to fear, and smiles at me. It’s the man from the bridge.

“Hi, and thanks for your help earlier.”

“Same to you.”

“We came to listen to the singing, but he’ll have to wait a few years before we can watch the act that follows the choir,” he says.

After chatting with them for a while, I tell him I have to go and check on Tumi. As I get up, he asks if I could do him a favour. He has to take the boy home before the show begins and he wants to know if I can watch the sick falcon for him while he’s away, it’s in a box.

“He’s already been fed, so you won’t have any worries. It’ll just be for a few hours or until tomorrow morning at the latest. There’s one place I have to stop off at on the way, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be back at the hotel tonight.”

Far be it from my mind to weigh the prospect of the company of a feathered predator against that of a naked man, I can clearly see that I will be given no choice about which of the two I would like to sleep or wake up with.

He follows me to room ten, walking behind me up the stairs with the box in his arms, and places it on the bedside table. The bird gives us a hostile glare through the two little holes in the box. The kitten immediately arches its back and hisses at the feathered guest, fluffing its hair up in all directions. Before we know it, he’s leapt out into the corridor and vanished around the corner on two paws, as if he had been swallowed up by the earth. The man from the bridge promises to help me find the kitten when he gets back, and tells me he is extremely grateful for the favour.

I notice how he rapidly glances around the room as he’s leaving, and picks up the duvet, which the boy has kicked off onto the floor, and spreads it back over him again, showing the same care to all creatures great and small, just like those ptarmigan chicks.

“I’m a vet,” he says. “I have to pop over to a farm to perform a caesarean on a calving cow.”

I pull out a book, the posthumous publication of an early work by a French author, and read a story about a father and son who perished as the father was trying to save his ten-year-old son from drowning. The boy was then buried in his father’s arms in the churchyard on the island, which they had planned to visit before returning on the ferry that evening. I’m having problems concentrating on my reading under the menacing stare of our overnight guest; not even the death of the hero manages to hold my attention. I decide not to sleep, but to wait for the return of the falcon’s owner. The choir resounds from the floor below. They are being applauded now and will no doubt give an encore. I seem to have dozed off for a moment, because when I come to, I remember fragments of a dream: I’m lying on the grass under an apple tree and, as I’m looking up at these succulent red apples, I hear myself saying: “Opportunities will soon fall on you.”