Another thing that can happen to one in the course of a lifetime is to spend a night in the Hotel Zuari. At the time it may not seem a particularly happy adventure; but in the memory, as always with memories, refined of immediate physical sensations, of smells, colour, and the sight of a certain little beasty beneath the washbasin, the experience takes on a vagueness which improves the overall image. Past reality never seems quite as bad as it really was: the memory is a formidable falsifier. Distortions creep in, even when you don’t want them to. Hotels like this already populate our fantasy: we have already come across them in the books of Conrad or Somerset Maugham, in the occasional American film based on the novels of Kipling or Bromfield: they seem almost familiar.
I arrived at the Hotel Zuari late in the evening and I had no choice but to stay there, as is often the way in India. Vasco da Gama is a small town in the State of Goa, an exceptionally ugly, dark town with cows wandering about the streets and poor people wearing Western clothes, an inheritance of the Portuguese period; it thus has all the misery without the mystery. Beggars abound, but there are no temples or sacred places here, and the beggars don’t beg in the name of Vishnù, nor lavish benedictions and religious formulas on you: they are taciturn and dazed, as if dead.
In the lobby of the Hotel Zuari there is a semi-circular reception desk behind which stands a fat male receptionist who is forever talking on the telephone. He books you in, talking on the telephone; still talking on the telephone he gives you the keys; and at dawn, when the first light tells you you can finally dispense with the hospitality of your room, you will find him talking on the telephone in a monotonous, low, indecipherable voice. Who is the receptionist of the Hotel Zuari talking to?
There is also a vast dining room on the first floor of the Hotel Zuari, so as not to contradict the sign on the door; but that evening it was dark and there were no tables and I ate on the patio, a little courtyard with bougainvillaea and heavily scented flowers and low little tables with small wooden benches, all dimly lit. I ate scampi as big as lobsters and a mango dessert, I drank tea and a kind of wine that tasted of cinnamon; all for a price equivalent to three thousand lira, which cheered me up. Along one side of the patio ran the veranda onto which the rooms looked out; a white rabbit was hopping over the stones of the courtyard. An Indian family was eating at a table at the far end. At the table next to mine was a blonde woman of indefinable age and faded beauty. She ate with three fingers, the way the Indians do, making perfect little balls of rice and dipping them in the sauce. She looked English to me, and so, as it turned out, she was. She had a mad glint in her eyes, but only every now and then. Later she told me a story that I don’t really think I should put down here. It may well have been an anxiety dream. But then the Hotel Zuari is not a place for happy dreams.