Grenoble

Housekeeping knocked and woke me up. The night before I realized that the adapter I took from the hotel in Lausanne would not work here. There were three prongs, and I needed two. So my phone died, my computer died, and my camera remained dead. I didn't know what time it was, and I assumed it was later, in the afternoon, and I had slept in too long, because that's when housekeeping usually comes. I told the women I didn't need housekeeping. I didn't really tell her that, but the tone of my voice and my bad French did. I put on the grey zip-up hoodie that L gave me and the black Helmut Lang jeans M traded me and the foamposites that now can't be properly called white as they are so dirty. I put on the dirty foamposites and I asked the lobby where I could get an adapter. He didn't know. He didn't know what I was asking and I facetimed with his daughter. And she didn't know what to tell me so I left to go find one.

I realized that it was not that late, it was still the morning, the city was coated in a layer of fog. It comes with the geography. When I was walking to the hotel in the sunset of previous evening, certain sidestreets would open up into the most beautiful mountain views, enclosed by apartment buildings, some austere, some ornate. This morning, I couldn't see the landscape, only the fog. I began to walk, keeping mental note of my turns so that I could make it back to the hotel. First I went to a Carrefour but they did not sell adapters. Then I found a cell phone shop and there they sold adapters. Only the man did not understand what I was asking for at first, and said that they did not sell adapters. But I saw what I needed hanging on the wall behind him and I asked him for it. He wrote down the price and I paid with my card. Then I asked him the time. He wrote that down as well.

I went back to the hotel and went back to bed. I slept until the afternoon. It has been so long since I've been alone and I had forgotten this tendency to collapse into myself, into nothingness, that without any relation to the outside world, I too cease to exist and cease to take actions towards being. I got up an hour before the sun would begin to set and took a shower. I washed out my braids and forgot how long my hair had gotten until the unraveling reminded me. This hotel is cheap, tiny, it was a shock at first as I was spoiled by the hotel in Lausanne. A shock to be reminded of the limits of what one can afford. But still, there is this affordance of silence. In the early morning I was texting J, complaining, specifically about the desk and the window. That the desk was too small, and that the window did not have good light. It was not what I had idealized, as far as the room that I would write in in Grenoble. But I found that the desk was too small for my computer, but the perfect size to sit at with my paper, to write and draw with pens and markers and paints and brushes.

The hotel did not have stationary, only a tri-fold card with information about the hotel, its services, the wi-fi, transit in Grenoble, and the hotel breakfast. I traced the cover and rewrote what I had previously written about going to Grenoble, after reading and re-writing the A. L. Snijders story about Baalbek. Or rather Lydia Davis's translation of it. And I thought of this hotel I was in and I thought of the Palmyra Hotel in Baalbek. Naturally, I thought of Balbec as well, and of my conversation with S the previous night, where we touched on Proust and language-in-translation, and I had mentioned the Snijders book and its translation, we must have been talking about Amsterdam before. Until yesterday, I had not been to the Hotel Gloria or the Palmyra Hotel or Balbec. The first two I had encountered through TripAdvisor, the reviews of the Hotel Gloria mentioned that it was old and there was art. But it wasn't the type of old I imagined, my room's floor and walls are covered by this vinyl wood, recently applied, I am sure underneath there is some decaying wood, the floor creaks constantly. This veneer was registered as another complaint to J.

But yesterday I made it to the Hotel Gloria in Grenoble. Today I left it twice. The second time to eat. I went to a restaurant, Charlotte, that was still open, even though it was that period in between lunch and dinner when many of the restaurants here are closed. The women spoke good English. I ordered a croque monsieur and a red wine and finished the book of Alain Robbe-Grillet short stories while I ate. After I finished, she asked me if I wanted dessert and I ate a poundcake with chocolate chips. There was Genepi for sale, and other local products, and I asked how much the bottle was. She came back and told me that it was 45 euros but that I could also try a sample. I told her that I would decide later. I did not check a bag and checking a bag would be an additional 80 dollars or so. And I also have no extra room in my current bags to carry the Genepi or anything else. So the decision is not whether to spend 45 euros but to spend 45 euros and 80 dollars and the cost of another bag in order to bring back a bottle of Genepi and whatever else I decide fill that bag with. As for the sample, having wine with my first meal of the day felt like it was enough.

It was not foggy this morning. It may not be foggy again before I leave. While I wandered the streets looking for an adapter to charge my devices, I thought about how it was impossible for me to take a picture of the fog. By the time I left the hotel again, the fog had lifted. This was when I went to Charlotte. After Charlotte, I walked around and then went to a restaurant close to the hotel, La Belle Idée, for dinner. Or a sort of dinner, for everyone else in the restaurant it was dinner. I brought the Javier Marías novel with me, A Heart So White, which I bought because H had recommended Marías, not a book, but a name, by way of her brother, and when I was in the bookstore when I bought the Robbe-Grillet and the Snijders I saw it and I bought it, it had a somewhat seductive cover, a portrait of a Latin woman in a white dress, taken from a profile angle in black-and-white, sending attention to the shadow that contoured her shoulder and her dark lipstick. I got a red wine and a beef tartare, later a green chartreuse, local to the region. I did not like it as much as genepy, which I would drink later that night at a bar. Too sweet. At La Belle Idée I thought of La Belle Noiseuse and read Marías. The first scene was of a suicide, of a family finding the suicide, gruesome to read in a restaurant, but then the time and placed changed, the narrator was speaking of recording and memory:

And I was impatient because I was aware that what I didn't hear now I never would hear; there would be no instant replay as there can be when you listen to a tape or watch a video and can press the rewind button, rather, any whisper not apprehended or understood there and then would be lost for ever. That's the unfortunate thing about what happens to us and remains unrecorded, or worse still, unknown or unseen or unheard, for later, there's no way it can be recovered... what in fact happens are our notes or our recordings or our films and nothing more, even in that infinite perfecting of repetition we will have lost the time in which those events actually took place (even if it were only the time it took to note them down) and while we try to relive it or reproduce it or make it come back and prevent it becoming the past, another different time will be happening, and in that other time we will doubtless not be together, we will pick up no phones, we will not dare to do anything, unable to prevent any crime or death (on the other hand, we won't commit any or cause any) because, in our morbid attempt to prevent time from ending, to cause what is over to return, we will be letting that other time slip past us as if it were not ours... we cannot stop focusing our lives on hearing and seeing and witnessing and knowing, in the belief that these lives of ours depend on our spending a day together or answering a phone call or daring to do something or committing a crime or causing a death and knowing that that was how it was... Or perhaps there was never anything.