Its characters dress as though they are from the early thirties, and comport themselves with the demure etiquette of an epoch long gone. The weather was cool that year. The rooms seemed icy cold. A drama was being performed at the hotel as entertainment. Its plot was a love triangle presented in a stilted and melodramatic style. The stage actors were posturing rather than acting like ordinary people. I was a hotel devoid of memory, but I am beginning to remember. They were all dressed in formal attire, and engaged in polite murmured conversations while standing about decorously, in the unobtrusive manner of well bred people.

When did it begin? Yes, it must have been last year in Marienbad. The hotel was just like this one. You just turn away. Sometimes, you seem to be distant or indifferent. But, of course, you do remember. You must remember. One bright but icily cold Saturday I went up to your bedroom. It was a plush bedroom of oriental silks, finely carved wardrobes and four poster beds. It seems as if you were waiting, silently, seductively, lying in your velvet robe on the bed invitingly drawing me to you. The details seem indistinct to me, now, but you accepted that you did remember, eventually. Walls, corridors, doors. Always walls, always corridors, always doors. And, on the other side, still more doors. I was walking desolate corridors between these walls covered with woodwork, stucco, mouldings, pictures, framed prints. 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. There were always walls, everywhere, around me, dark grey, polished granite, beautiful but forbidding, there were always walls. These walls, and corridors and passages seem to be the very recesses of the soul.

Inner experience. like emerging and disappearing memories, is subjective. We experience what is in our minds. Can we truly remember anything? I can never properly remember the bedroom, or what you were wearing. The scent. Was it rose geranium? The flowers. Were they Madonna lilies? The details do not matter. It is what happened. What I wanted to happen. 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. Is it a charade, a masque, a play, a tableaux or series of tableaux? Are the guests merely the baroque statues come to life? The guests seem strangely unemotional as if not fully human, or in a trance like state of acquiescence.

Odd… It seems so long ago… the labyrinthine palace, a luxury hotel for those apparently rich beyond care, a country paradise for its elegant clientele. Its baroque palatial design was geometric, perpendicular and right angular, though punctuated with classical looking pictures and statues, and decorated with elaborate ornamentation. I should have known… this trompe l’oeil style… A world where memory has begun to disappear. It seems so long ago, but you did it. You wanted to think things over for a year. You said you would leave with me, if we met again. Then it was that you gave me the gold wristlet. 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! I am not ready. Please let me alone. Are they flesh or stone, living or dead? Can they remember? I cannot remember events perfectly, in a perfect sequence. Time seems jagged like a broken mirror. They leave and reappear. As if in a dream, they are in different places at the same time. I leave him by the grand staircase and enter the conservatory, and here he is again, smiling, challenging me…