The tapping noises woke me, the sound of a pick chipping at metal. I opened my eyes and tried to focus the vague rhomboid shadows on the ceiling, finally groping for my glasses. The shadows were like strangely tilted prison cells. Everything was deadly still except the chipping, which seemed to be happening in the street below the window.
The dark shapes of the room’s furniture gradually stood out from the walls. I knew exactly where I was in space and time, yet my body felt all at war with itself, its various parts taunting and mocking the ensemble, so to speak, with little twitches and spasms and pinpoints of pain. These miniature pains reminded me of the cockroach dragging its shattered belly across the ground, which of course recalled the odd worm of flesh above Valentina’s mouth, Jaybill’s pile of artificial arms and legs, Michael’s dark lips, the grille of the restaurant ashtray, and Irma’s mouth, all mixed up and tossed together, and I thought of my own scarred cheek and my face lying there in the darkness.
I imagined that someone below was chiseling the wrought iron bars off a basement window, and with some audacity, too, since it had to be three or four in the morning and every stroke of the instrument echoed down the cobbled avenue. As I sat up in bed, another sound commenced in the hallway, a squeaking noise, like a rubber wheel rubbing against linoleum, accompanied by a hoarse intermittent whisper. Fear began spreading up my legs, climbing my lower back, suddenly my organism was unified in a soft ball of fear. I expected at any moment the telltale creak of the twisting doorknob, the rattle of a passkey slipped into the lock.
The pencil line of light beneath the door was obliterated by a large object. The object wavered, the light slithered on either side of its moving shadow, and then the line returned to normal. I waited, holding my breath, thinking of the sinister brothers who ran the hotel, three of them, all in their twenties, built like soccer players, given to darting glances and furtive looks, as if the hotel business were a front for some darker, clandestine activity. Could one of them be the Cartagena Vampire? Or, better still, all of them?
The chipping outside suddenly ceased: now everything was frozen in a kind of electric silence. I forced shallow, inaudible breaths, as if someone outside the door had his ears pricked for any evidence of movement. Although I was terrified, I was also quite drowsy. I closed my eyes and lay back and started to drift off, when the whispering resumed, full of gluey-sounding breath, and this time I crept out of the bed, my weight causing the floor to creak, and crawled, with interminable caution, over to the door. I saw myself crawling and thought of the cockroach again, venturing out from under the hedge with its elaborate but useless defenses at high pitch. Finally I peered into the hall through the keyhole.
Now the rustling sound of rain commenced outside, drowning whatever faint ambient squeaks and creaks might have issued from my own little movements or those of anyone in the hall. The circle of lighted corridor visible through the keyhole included the lower half of Michael’s room door, the molding on either side of the door frame, and a small quadrant of the linoleum floor, a completely static composition that was also empty. Had someone been there? Did I imagine it? And what if they had simply moved to the small balcony overlooking the cathedral? There could, of course, be guests of the hotel drunkenly prowling the corridors, even this dead end, but the whole place had closed up so long ago that anyone doing that would have roused the night clerk.
I was wondering how long I could kneel in that position, probably wigged into paranoia by the epic quantities of speed and coke I’d been taking without even giving it a thought, when a figure entered the frame, a pair of legs, in black slacks, stood directly in front of Michael’s door, wearing soft black Chinese slippers, paced back and forth a bit, the slippers getting wet from the glassy skin of water on the lino, tapped at the door, paced, tapped again, louder, over the seething rattle of the rain, until it was really a loud knock. A ruminant, angry voice from inside, a call, a cry, something muffled, then the door opened onto a black space, a ghostly view of Michael’s bare legs in the blackness, the lower half of the other body entering the room, the door closing, and then, almost immediately, audible through the downpour, the chipping sounds resumed down in the street, followed by a horrendous thud from inside Michael’s room, like a heavy object falling from a great height.
And then everything fell silent, only the rain continued lashing the walls and pattering crazily against the windows. I remained kneeling and staring through the keyhole, quite stupidly I thought, unable to compose the slightest meaning for what I had just observed, though the meaning was obvious enough, it was either Maria or Irma sleeping with him, though how whoever it was had managed to get upstairs, with the front gate locked after midnight—unless of course she’d bribed the night clerk, or made some such arrangement . . . But I had hardly any time to think about it before another set of legs came squeaking along the hall, which was turning glassy from the water pouring in at either end . . . Ecru trousers, with creases, gray suede shoes, a bit of magenta shirt . . .
The new arrival loitered outside the door, with his ear no doubt pressed to the wood, his clothing beginning to merge with the cream-colored door frame and pale walls. The colors wavered and seemed to float free of the objects in physical space. Eyestrain reduced the visual field to a broad smudge. And then, quite suddenly, the person outside dropped to a crouch more or less identical with my own, and stared into Michael’s keyhole—it was Ray. This surprised me: he had manifested almost total indifference to Michael until now. Moreover, it was virtually impossible, at that hour, to move in and out of the villa and the hotel unobserved, since both places were policed by their staffs. So what was this strange nocturnal caravan up to?
Anyway, what could he possibly see? The room had been pitch dark when the door opened. Maybe they’d put a light on. Michael undoubtedly liked to watch himself making love. But that banging noise, what was that all about? It took me some minutes of further staring to realize that Ray’s hand was inside the front of his pants, that his arm was moving up and down. I, too, aroused by imagining Ray’s erection, had taken my own naked organ in hand and was pumping it in a desultory sort of excitement.