Zenith Hotel Read Free Page A

greasy hair who smell of the second-hand bookstalls on the banks of the Seine. I don’t like the hairy students who take the métro to go to the library. I can’t stomach their accent. They turn me off much more that those evil Le Pen supporters in the north who admire that smarmy newsreader Jean-Pierre Pernaut.
     
    They think clever thoughts. They talk of Zola and Montesquieu. I spew my ignorant guts in their faces.
    I tend to let my hate run away with me when I write. I should stop it. I don’t really mean it. I don’t loathe people as much as I make out. It’s easier to hate, to write that you puke over all those arseholes, that you cheerfully shit on them. You feel alive, you feel above all that. To be honest, I’m no better than they are. I can’t bring myself to hate them.

    I could write about my squeaking window, about my aching feet. Not now. Writing makes me anxious. I don’t know how to go about it. I’m afraid to talk about myself. I smoke a cigarette, feeling wistful. Maybe that’s enough. A chair, a cigarette and a vacant look. I don’t know. I can’t think of anything special enough to write about. I feel hollow – as commonplace as a chamber pot that you plonk down beside a bed. An old pot full of spunk who hangs around the Gare Saint-Lazare and comes home to the Zenith Hotel in the middle of the night to try and think about nothing and sleep. I wish I was able to not give a fuck, to live as I please, in a cave, drinking cool water. I’m not brave enough.
    I’ve got no nerve. Maybe one day I’ll developsome. And I’ll follow it outside my body, wherever it leads me. What else can I do but wait? I harbour my little woes, caress my little scorchmarks. I don’t try and heal them. I wait for them to leave my flesh. You live with your burns. What else can you do?
    We can recall what we were two months or a year ago. No need to go very far back to be a stranger to oneself.

    Good old Nanou who sucks and fucks. And who suffers, like everyone else, in silence, without really knowing why.
    I’ve seen some things in my time, believe you me.
    I find it all so absurd that I just try and get by as best I can.
    I don’t like my life, but I wouldn’t want to live anyone else’s life. I find other lives even more sickening than my own, which isn’t much fun. We live as we do, we’d never cope with life otherwise. I’m a prostitute for all eternity.

Emmanuel
    Emmanuel has blue eyes. Right now, they’re wide open. It’s very late, but Emmanuel hasn’t closed them. His wife’s asleep next to him. She’s fat. Emmanuel loves her anyway, he doesn’t mind that she’s fat. And besides, he can play with her breasts – pretend to lose himself in them. Her name is Estelle and she snores gently. Not loudly, just a deep breath in that can’t find its way out of her stomach, obstructed by fat. At first, it used to irritate him, but he’s gradually grown used to it.
    You get used to the things life throws at you – Emmanuel grasped that a long time ago. There’s Estelle sleeping next to him; she snores a bit, she’s fat. You get used to it. This is my life now. She’s the one who irons my shirts and cooks. Sometimes she nags a bit, but it never lasts long. And anyway, I must be sympathetic – her job makes her anxious. Emmanuel does the same job. He’s a high-school supervisor. He supervises all day long. He has responsibilities. At all hours, you have to go to the upper floors and lock the classrooms. Before turning the key, you make sure there’s no one leftin the room. You have an early lunch, and while the kids are having theirs, you patrol the playground. You pick up the yellow sponge balls, you go sniffing round the toilets to see if there’s a smell of cigarette smoke. You stand there bolt upright by the door, your hands behind your back dangling a big bunch of keys. And then you have to collect all the pink and blue forms and log all the absentees and latecomers on the office computer. You