I have a recurring memory of moving slowly through the hallways, galleries, and salons of the hotel’s endless passages. I am walking on, again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this sun-king splendour of a past epoch, this enormous, voluptuous, elaborate, elysian hotel, where corridors succeed endless corridors, silent deserted corridors overloaded with an ageing, frigid opulence of woodwork, plasterwork, tracery, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy fabrics, ornamented architravings, series of arches, walkways, intersecting passages, that open in turn on dusty salons, floridly decorated atriums, deserted palm courts. Walls, corridors, doors. Always walls, always corridors, always doors. And, having passed through, still more of the same. I was walking desolate corridors between these walls covered with silk drapes, lithographs of the gardens, bas reliefs. On the walls were framed prints of the immense formal park outside with its exceedingly regular late seventeenth century French formal layout. All the paintings in the hotel were of the resort itself and its gardens.

Walking, waiting! Alone, I was waiting for you, very far away from this dark place where I feel you, beside me, still waiting for the love or enchantment, that no longer threatens to come to separate us again, to inject you with his deadly charm. Are you coming? The curtain falls to polite applause. Now, I seem to remember—a play, a production put on for the guests, it was so cold. In an opulent hotel with vast gardens, guests gossip languidly about a scandal. Last year in Marienbad the weather was impossibly cold, icy. They had an affair. Was it then? She cannot remember. He wants to convince her that last year, perhaps in Marienbad, they had met, become lovers, and even planned to leave together. Nothing ever changes at the resort. No one seems to arrive or depart. The park’s clipped bushes and criss-crossing pathways are like an inescapable labyrinth. We tread them as if in an eternal ceremony, an eternal drama, real but unreal. It is as if we are meticulously following prescribed mechanical rites. As we walked with hurried steps, the house seemed to loom even larger to us.

My thoughts seem to come slowly, solemnly and monotonously, and my imaginings seem as interminable as the architecture. My retrospections seem drugged, but the ambience revives something seemingly timeless, something nearly lost in my subconscious from long ago. Is memory so fallible? It is hard to be sure quite what happened that year at the hotel. Was it there, or somewhere else? It does not matter where. Memory is a private world. A world that seems like a dream. It all seems now so holographic in time, as if everything happened simultaneously with no beginning or end. All of your thoughts are in your head together. Sometimes it is hard to keep them in the right sequence. Is there a right sequence? I think it was her. We had met before. I am sure it was her… … Why couldn’t you let me forget this… this catastrophe?! Why couldn’t you just let me sleep…forever?! …why?The guests drifted like somnabulists from the court where the stage was, and mingled with the histrionic statues that lined the room. I imagine them as if they were captured on a still photograph, people, statues, palmate trees, silent, still. They stand statuesque, motionless with a vacant gaze among the emptily chatting guests and the theatrical decorations. Then in a moment the scene is different.

Eurydice forever falls back into the underworld. She did not just fall once. Orpheus did not look back only once in all eternity. He does it continuously. Perpetually. It seems so long ago, but you did it. You wanted time to put your life in order. You said you would leave with me, if we met again. Then it was that you gave me the little bracelet. You asked for a year. Maybe, you wanted to be sure. To test me. To wear me out. Perhaps to forget me. It was a question of time. Time. But time does not matter. I can wait. I have waited. Now I have come. Now, I am here, to take you away. Yet even now you deny it. Over and over you say, No, no. It cannot be. You are mistaken. This year you promised to elope with me, to leave him. Slowly I convinced you. The past is a stifling, lifeless place. It all seemed to me strange, even indeterminate. Did things happen quite like that? It sometimes seemed not to make sense. It seemed ambiguous and uncertain.