Portrait of an Unknown Lady by Maria Gainza

Author:Maria Gainza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2022-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

On the wall of my hotel room there is a mirror with beveled edges, and a number of traditional pampas prints depicting gauchos on horseback, bola lassos high in the air as they chase down ostriches, which dodge and feint their way across the land. There is also the Louis XVI desk, at which I never sit, and a blackout curtain I keep lowered. Halfway through the week, the concierge mentioned there was going to be a band playing. How interesting, I said, a band. Perhaps I’ll come down for a listen. I said this with enthusiasm, almost as though I were a different person, as though trying different personalities on for size.

A few hours later, I put my fur coat on and, steeling myself, went down to the concert hall—which turned out to be a cold, badly lit room with lino flooring, a few small tables, and five or six gentlemen gathered around their blackish drinks. The waitress who brought my Bloody Mary agreed that it was a bad night for that time of year. The band turned out to be all women. Most of them wore blusher on their more-or-less wizened cheeks and most did not seem to take the performance tremendously seriously. I got back to my room with the strains of a possibly Hungarian ballad clanking around inside my brain.

And in that state I remained. During the night, unable to sleep, what could I not do? No evil act would have been beyond me, though at the same time—why not?—I felt equally capable of taking the Bible out of a drawer and dipping into the New Testament. There are moments when I think this hotel a kind of brushwood for larvae like me. The cleaners hardly ever come to my room and I have seen women with babies in their arms in the hallways but never heard any crying.

My insomniac nights are sometimes spent looking at my smile in the mirror. I try to correct it, to make it symmetrical, so that the two edges go up at the same time and to the same height as well; for my face to be harmonious. In any case, a smile is nothing but a mask. I know by now that the most sincere part of the face is the eyes. The bartender in the hotel lounge, a man by the name of Joe Navarro, told me that the eyes are the clearest barometer of our feelings. See something we like, and our pupils dilate; see something we don’t, they contract. There’s no way of controlling this. I suppose it is why those French seminarians from the nineteenth century, so partial to their divinely inspired intrigues, went around always with heads lowered.

But I don’t wish to give the wrong idea. These conversations with the hotel employees are the exception to the rule. I have systematically avoided talking to anyone since I got here. I spend the majority of the time in bed—it’s my own personal raft. I drift along on a sea of papers, a long way out from shore.

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