Without Reservation: Samuel Beckett Reviews His Airbnb
I am in a room. It is I who live here now. I have no idea how I got here. Maybe in a wagon of some kind, thrown in the back like so many rags. A man comes every day and asks me to write a review. It’s good for business, he says. It’s none of mine, I tell him, but the words come unbidden. If I get them all on paper, I can go back to dying.
The room is bare apart from a bed, a table and a toilet. It is there I piss and shit. Not every time, you understand, but I like to be in a position to choose.
On the bed, I remember a chambermaid who once bent over for me. I rustled her skirts for a few minutes, I can’t be sure how many. Could a spermatozoon of mine have persisted, as I persist? Could it have found its way past the cervix and up the Fallopian tubes, with my sense of direction, or more pertinently, my lack of it? It’s inconceivable, though I conceive of it. It’s enough to put me off my stroke.
This room has double doors from which, eyesight allowing, I look out at the sea. The amount of water displaced is equal to the volume of the man drowning. I sit here in the morning and shave, my razor orange with the rust of many days, too many to list now, every one of which will appear on the inventory when my time comes, the Full Monty, or Montgomery, of ignominies and private shame, every last wank.
I can behave myself, within the exasperated limits of my anxiety. When the man comes again to ask about my review, I will offer him coffee and invite him to look at the waves. I won’t bring up my dead mother this time. I won’t talk about pissing and shitting in the toilet, though he must have guessed. I’ll hold in the farts to the best of my ability, which lies rather in the opposite direction. I will talk about running around and kicking a ball, though in the attempt I would collapse like an epileptic anticipating the fit. Also, I have no ball.
It must be Wednesday. A woman has come to clean. Assuredly I feign indifference and observe her from my chair. But I have the weakness to return in spirit to the chambermaid, the rustled skirts. I’m all astir, a drooping tumescence takes hold of me, of my unwashed regions to be specific, I can tell by the stench.
She cleans as women are wont to do in the countryside, on her knees. She sweeps up my filth, the pellets and the flakes. She changes the sheets I have fouled. I yearn to raise her skirts but it’s been so long, I can’t be sure of the holes. Safer just to watch. My testicles dangle from my sinless groin like a Saint Bernard’s saliva.
Before she leaves, she reminds me to finish my review. So she is in on it, too.
I choose between the things not worth mentioning and those even less so. If I mention everything, the stench and the termites and the dogs and the neighboring cunts and the lack of curtains and the constant interruptions, I will never be done and the trick, in the final analysis with the seven trumpets and the four horsemen, is to be done, to have done. I am done, and let there be an end to it.
