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. My thoughts seem to come slowly, solemnly and monotonously, and my imaginings seem as interminable as the architecture. My fantasies seem hypnotised, but these surroundings stir something seemingly timeless, something abyssal 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.

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 can still imagine 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 long dead age, this enormous, florid, fustian, flamboyant hotel, where passages succeed endless passages, dead, empty passages overloaded with a darkened, overelaborated workmanship of carvings, plasterwork, tracery, polished surfaces, faded mirrors, darkened oils, columns, heavy curtains, stucco door surrounds, series of door arches, corridors, intersecting galleries that open in turn on dusty salons, floridly decorated atriums, deserted palm courts. 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.

Are they awake or dreaming, thinking or mindless? 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… There is a way. The rules are clear and prescribed before hand. If the world is orderly, there is a way. There is a strategy. I cannot seem to determine it. And between games, sometimes I speak to you. 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. They moved as if from tableaux to tableaux.

But… Can I explain? … the labyrinthine palace, a luxury hotel for the timelessly wealthy, a country paradise for its elegant clientele. Its baroque seventeenth century design was geometric, made up of repeating flat surfaces and intersections, 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. 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?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.