Cosmopol
Space-time winter hotel reverie
I imagine it was born in the 1970s, worn down yet fitted out by a former KGB man on the run from communism. The whole setting warns anyone who isn’t illiterate to the more or less explicit signs of a certain symbolism of influence—or who simply knows how to spot the emblems of espionage. The salmon-colored marble floor, the walls a yellow that seems alive yet exuding an indefinable anguish. The thirty-year-old carpets, the lamps suspended in the World War II espionage-vertigo charm of the Estoril Sol Hotel and Galeto, balconies without end. Then the NASA 1969 lettering, a relic adrift.
It’s the dead of winter, but the prices are peak season. Those who stroll around wear a quiet pride. Perhaps because they face the very sea where Charles V landed returning from his Flemish campaigns? And what a grand way to enter Spain. Behind the beach, the mountains look almost like the Azores. In the distance, snow plays against the vivid blue of the ocean, giving off an unreal, hazy, telluric atmosphere. The sand stretches for four kilometers. It takes little imagination to sketch a decent picture from the three-star hotel with its wide balconies: the glass-enclosed rooms, the air conditioning rationed for a few hours, like Ceaușescu did in Romania. Tiny, weak, futile, almost nonexistent.
In short, Laredo Beach—as if to enjoy time here one must also endure it. If you think it’s not all deliberate, just go down from your room to the cafeteria, where the soundtrack shuffles between Casablanca and bossa nova—volume set to level four, in tune with the rationed air-conditioning upstairs. Walls painted a rigorous sky blue, candlesticks discreet yet insistent—solemnity must be kept, in a hotel without guests, in a restaurant without diners.
I’ve seen no one yet in the cafeteria where I sit. Coat buttoned, scarf tight, someone will surely come to serve me a coffee—or perhaps what I ought to drink is a brandy.
Aki Kaurismäki doesn’t live all that far away. From Viana do Castelo it’s just an easy afternoon drive. From A Coruña to Tavira we’re all glad to hear he’s planning to shoot in Vigo. It might not be a bad idea for him to take a look at this hotel. I think he’d love it, above all this cold daylight. Of course, I’m in one of those places where, as soon as you walk in, you sense that if you leave, it’ll be for another universe. And the space program, naturally, must remain secret.
I don’t know if it’s quite David Lynch, but it’s hazy enough to carry us from Cantabria straight into Scandinavia.
