Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer

happens to all of us.”
    “Don’t I know it,” said Trafalgar, and he let Marcos remove the empty cup and leave another, full one, “with all the places I’ve been to and everything I’ve done. Generally it isn’t true, you never before did what you think you’re remembering. A few, very few times it’s true, and if you don’t remember at the moment, you remember later. But this was much more intense, so much so that I thought I was going to lose my composure. I didn’t hear what people were talking about, I didn’t see the table, or the faces, or the windows that opened onto the lake. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my memory, it was my whole body that remembered the dish and the gesture and, looking at the wood, I recognized even the grain at the bottom,” he took out a pencil and drew the lines for me on the back of a card he fished out of his pocket. “See? And here they curved toward the bottom and then rising along the edge they became very, very fine and disappeared.”
    I stood the card against the water glass. “And then what happened?”
    “Nothing. I pulled myself together as best I could and kept talking. We drank liqueurs and coffee, yes, because there was coffee, and we smoked and listened to music and it was after midnight when dra Iratoni’s son-in-law drove me back to the hotel. When I was alone in the room, I remembered the thing with the wooden bowl and started to go over it like crazy because I was sure, I knew, sometime, somewhere I had eaten from that bowl. It was no use. I took off my clothes, I bathed, I lay down and I slept. No,” he said when I opened my mouth, “I did not dream about the bowl or about the daughters of dra Iratoni. I slept like a log until midday. I woke up hungry. But my hunger went away as soon as I sat up in bed. Speaking of which, don’t you want to eat a sandwich or something?”
    “No. Go on.”
    “My hunger and my sleepiness and everything went away, because I was not in the same room in which I had gone to bed. This one was smaller, comfortable but not as cheerful, it was not on the second floor but rather on the tenth or thereabouts, it didn’t overlook a park but rather another tall building, and the sunlight didn’t come in anywhere. Nor was the bathroom as luxurious as the one in the other hotel, which is to say, I thought I was in another hotel, but.”
    I wanted to ask him what that meant, but I know when Trafalgar can be interrupted and when he can’t.
    “It also had its comforts. I didn’t stop to bathe or shave. I washed, I went back to the room, and when I was going to the door the horrible idea occurred to me that I had been kidnapped and the door would be locked. It was locked, but the key was on the inside. I turned it with some apprehension and opened the door. It was a hotel, no question. There was a corridor and numbered doors on both sides. Mine was 1247. I looked for the elevator, found it, went down. Twelve floors. The lobby was smaller than the other, cheaper, as if they had wanted to take the fullest advantage of the space.”
    Here he paused and drank coffee and smoked and I didn’t know whether to say something that had occurred to me or not say it, so I kept quiet.
    “There was a hoity-toity concierge who asked me, ‘Sir?’ ‘Listen,’ I said to him, a little angry now, ‘I took a room yesterday in the Hotel Continental; can you tell me where the hell I am now?’ ‘In the Hotel Continental, sir,’ he answered. I was speechless. ‘It can’t be,’ I shouted. ‘The room is different and all this, too.’ The concierge was unruffled. ‘What day did the gentleman arrive?’ he asked. I told him the date, day, month, year, and added the hour. ‘Ah, that explains everything,’ he said. ‘How does it explain everything?’ I wanted to give him a good wallop while he looked over some papers. ‘Room 132 does not exist, sir, at least not at this moment, because the floor has been dedicated to the accounts department and