Juan Benet*

Reichenau

Years ago, the man had said to him:

‘If you need anything, you only have to ring the bell. I’ll come at once.’

He hadn’t said this in the bored tones of someone accustomed to repeating the same formula over and over; he probably had very few guests, and wanted to suggest some meaning which, at the time, he himself didn’t quite understand, anxious as he was to get to bed and too troubled by the feeling of unease provoked by the arrival of that stranger.

It happened one night when the traveller took a wrong turning at a crossroads and ended up on a rough, potholed mountain track, and then didn’t get back onto a proper road for another couple of hours, only to find an ancient signpost on which the lettering was so eroded that he couldn’t decipher it in the light of his headlights. Unable to see where he was on the map, he set off blindly in one direction and, after quite a few kilometres, came upon a dark, deserted village consisting of a dozen or so ramshackle houses on either side of the road and a single lightbulb dangling from a cable, too dim even to illuminate the road, and, despite his tiredness and the lateness of the hour, he felt he had no option but to drive on in the direction indicated by a sign saying: ‘Región 23 km’. And so when, shortly afterwards, as he came round a sharp bend, he saw a big rambling house by the roadside with a gloomy sign bearing the one word: ‘Rooms’, he didn’t think twice.

When he knocked for the second time, a light came on in a window on the floor above, and a man – making it abundantly clear that he had been woken up and dragged from his bed – asked what he wanted, then, having agreed to take him in for the night, brusquely ordered him to park his car behind the house. He took some considerable time to actually open the front door and was still fastening his belt under his pyjama jacket when, without asking any further questions or demanding any documentation, he picked up a large key bearing the number 9 stamped on the metal tag attached to it by a ring.

The hotel was an antiquated, cheaply built edifice that smelled faintly of damp, and was furnished with such rigour and economy that every inch of it revealed an evident disdain for superfluous details: the bulbs hung bare and bereft, the walls were unadorned by any pictures from calendars and the only piece of furniture in the bedroom – apart from the metal bedstead, the bedside table and a tiny basin with no running water – was a flimsy wooden chair. As for the owner, which he clearly was, his only discernible quality seemed to be his apparent distaste for his chosen job, as if he had sought refuge in it more for reasons of security than anything else, in order to squirrel away a little money who knows where or how. Once he had shown the traveller the room and handed him the key, he pointed to the switch hanging above the bedhead and said:

‘If you need anything, you only have to press the switch to ring the bell. I’ll come at once.’

The traveller fell asleep immediately, determined to make that spartan night as brief as possible, but he soon woke up again, bathed in sweat and sweltering under the weight of the blankets. He began to toss and turn, incapable of shrugging off the intense smell of poverty; then he heard the sound of voices, of people whispering beyond the walls and the empty corridors, beyond the deserted kitchen and neat storeroom, the muffled words and suppressed laughter that seemed to correspond to the conversation of maids anxious not to be heard by the master and mistress of the house.

Anxious and unable to sleep, he turned on the light, and the voices stopped. He assumed that the light from his window shining onto the road had served as a warning to those imprudent chatterboxes, and, feeling calmer, he switched it off, although he feared he wouldn’t easily be able to convert that sense of calm into sleep. The voices soon returned, nearer now and more insistent, sibilant, long-drawn-out sounds and repeated consonants which, just as they seemed about to crystallize into an intelligible word, would vanish into thin air like a soap bubble, sounds that seduced him with their improbable proximity, with an intensity that belied their remoteness, with the suspicion that they were directed at him precisely because he would never be able to understand them. No, they weren’t coming from any precise place, they weren’t being spoken anywhere, but existed somewhere beyond the furniture and the walls of his room, in a soundscape defined by that concatenation of feminine whispers and laughter – older women exchanging evil, malign secrets, mingling and drawing apart in a whirlwind of gestures and movements that came to nothing and vanished at the very instant they appeared in the silvery glint of the shadows, not carried on the ether, but immersed in and inseparable from the all-enveloping darkness.

He again turned on the light, but not for long. The bulb fused with a fizzing sound that was the signal for the women to resume their hubbub, excited by their victory over the light and ready to make the most of the impunity that was now theirs.

He sat up, dripping with sweat, but, since it was so cold in the room, immediately lay down again. He drew the blankets up over his head and it was as if the whispered conversation did actually grow more muffled, as if it were taking place in some corner beneath the sheets, simultaneously near and far. He emerged from under the blankets and felt for the switch above his head, but, when he found it, he couldn’t bring himself to press it and ring the bell. Or, rather, he was held back by his fear of having to ask the owner for help, by that and by the man’s smug expression, his papier-mâché head. He grabbed the switch with both hands and, in the grip of fever, even raised it to his lips and licked it, unable to control either his tears or his bladder in the face of the unbearable crescendo of voices that subsided only with the coming of a dawn that would find him drenched in sweat, panting and exhausted, his head pressed against the bars of the bedhead and a crazed look in his eyes, as he clung with both hands to the electric flex of the bell, feeling nevertheless proud to have survived the night without having to resort to that offer of help.

The following morning when he paid the bill – a risible amount – he said as little as possible to the owner; perhaps a feeling of confidence had taken hold of a mind oppressed at the time by all kinds of difficulties, but still capable of ignoring the landlord’s oblique gaze, which doubtless – with a little scorn added in for good measure – was telling him: that he could easily have saved himself all that trouble if only he had rung the bell; that this wasn’t intended as a reproach or a warning, merely a statement of fact; that he couldn’t claim to have been deceived because what he had been through was entirely due to his rejection of that offer of help; and that, should he ever find himself in a similar situation again, he should act very differently, because he could have avoided it altogether simply by ringing the bell. Exactly as he had told him to do the previous night.

This happened in the early days of his hard, difficult, solitary profession, trying to sell in hostile lands products for which, in those days, people had no need. However, by dint of sheer self-belief and perseverance he soon achieved professional independence, financial stability, became a representative for makers of foreign goods, and was transformed into a businessman and an inveterate smoker who, once a year, was obliged to take a rest cure. Those early days were long gone when, driving a little van laden with luxury goods, he had arrived one night at a roadside inn – in the heart of a nocturnal desert – which, had he not completely forgotten it, would constitute the lowest point in those difficult years, and which, if he ever had recalled it, would only have provided the obligatory preamble to his present prosperity.

The tickle in his throat and the tightness in his lungs woke him again late one night, but in very different circumstances. It was a silvery night, not far from Lake Constance, accompanied by a murmur that seemed to be hiding behind the serene, solemn murmur of the fir trees and the timid clapping of the lime trees and larches, as if they were applauding – out of politeness, not enthusiasm – the foolish, nonsensical remarks made by a hidden nocturnal animateur inaccessible to the man’s senses. Within these murmurings, though – among the dense woods flanking the path leading down to the lake – was hidden the sound of feminine laughter, louder, more audible, resonant and agitated when the wind dropped and the leaves ceased their clapping, intent on what might happen next.

He closed the window, and the room was instantly filled, apparently out of nowhere, with the tumultuous whispering of those elderly women, laughter that grew steadily in intensity and moved ever closer, about to take physical shape in hands and gestures directed at him, in winks and glances, which, blotting out the bogus shadows cast by the furniture, emerged into abject nakedness, stripped bare even of the darkness into which they would dissolve before – although only a moment before – he turned on the light and called for the chambermaid.

And then he understood that he was no longer as brave as he once had been, that he had succumbed. And, when he realized this, he understood that the other man had been waiting for and following him ever since their first encounter in remote, timeless Región many years before, until, as he had intimated with a look, this night in Reichenau, in Württemberg, not far from Lake Constance; that he had been watching him ever since they parted and had become convinced that, in these new circumstances, the traveller would prove incapable of clinging on to his self-belief, and would instead succumb to asking for the help promised by the bell. For, at that very moment, he recognized the man’s footsteps coming down the carpeted corridor and knew that he would have no difficulty in opening the door; that the man who had, quite rightly, warned him then not to hesitate to call him if he needed help was now taking his revenge with an arrogance accumulated over years of being disdainfully forgotten simply because the conditions on that other occasion had not been quite right. The traveller did not move from his bed. Sitting up, leaning on the pillow and pressing his back against the wall, he recognized the man’s hand, his papier-mâché head, by the slow way in which he turned the door handle.