I found the hotel quite late, almost as a last resort. I was glad to have found a halfway acceptable place for the last night in Spain.

The building was located next to the main road leading to the next city. Next to it, an open field, almost as big as a soccer field, with parked scattered trucks. Looking at the seemingly lost vehicles in the huge open space I thought for a short moment about how many of these giants would fit in there.

In the cantina, the catering room, there was a counter where I got the keys for the room and paid immediately. This procedure went very smoothly and in daily routine. The older man across from me was apparently all roles wrapped up into one: receptionist, bartender, waiter, janitor and maybe even the owner of this hostel. He spoke to me only as much as absolutely necessary, without wasting a word.

The building had two floors, which looked exactly the same: a long corridor with doors to the rooms leading off left and right.

My room was on the upper floor. When I entered, I found two beds that almost filled the room, and no window. Instead I found an iron door to the roof terrace,a closet and a tiny bathroom.

To air the room, I opened the heavy door and entered the square in front of the room. In the meantime it had become dark. It was still warm. The air hardly got cooler.

I stood in front of the open door on a large, free, concrete surface, on which boxes with empty bottles were piled up in a corner. The area was apparently used to put things that were in the way elsewhere and, above all, to dry the laundry. Lines and wires were stretched all over the terrace, and on some of them hung white sheets that had been drying for a long time. They fell limply from the lines. There was no wind. I wondered if I could leave the door open overnight.

But then there were the sounds of the running engines. I was on the side of the building facing away from the parking lot and the street, but in the silence of the evening the noise came over to me: the standing ones with running engines from the opposite parking lot and the passing people from the main road. The evening traffic sounded like a never-ending, drawn band of varying degrees of engine noise, getting louder and quieter. They came intermittently from both directions, became louder and louder the closer they got. They roared past and got lost in the ever increasing distance to the ear. When they met directly and closely from both directions, there was a kind of crescendo, a short loud climax. Sometimes it became less. I hoped that maybe the traffic would abate and went back into the room. At first I left the door open. I was sure that during the night there would be less and less traffic. Then I turned off the light because of the insects and lay down on the bed just behind the open iron door and tried to sleep.

After a few short moments, my thoughts wandered away and the tiredness began to take effect, but I did not fall asleep because a loud disturbance brought me back. Someone was working on the other side of the terrace, handling glass bottles in the indirect light of an open door. Empty containers were put back. It made this typical noise when the bottle slipped into its position in the crate and then fell after being released. The person was nimble and accurate. In a short time, a large number of bottles were stored and the fast and almost rhythmic process broke off abruptly. From my bed I could see how the light disappeared again. A door clicked and it was as dark as before.

After this experience I was no longer sure whether the door should be open all night, especially since the room temperature hardly changed at all despite this measure. So I turned on the light and locked the steel door. But after a short time it became noticeably stuffy in the small room so I decided to switch on the air conditioner.

It was a big box that hung above my head under the ceiling. I chose the maximum setting and the box buzzed and rattled off. Then I turned off the light. The room was dark again like a closed box. I lay on the bed and listened to the humming generator, which actually blew out cool air. Involuntarily, I listened to all the nuances of this sound machine. There was no way to listen away and I observed the noises and commented every change for a while in my imagination until I fell asleep.

When I woke up again, I was cold. I had forgotten to cover myself. It was noticeably cooler in the room now. I groped for my cell phone. It wasn't late, but I felt the need to go back to sleep quickly, as I was leaving very early in the morning.

So I turned off the air conditioner. When I turned the knob in the dark, I noticed that the device had not been screwed to the wall properly or might have been shaken loosely during its surely long operating time. The thought haunted me as I lay in bed again, and I imagined the machine coming off the wall at some point during the night, falling directly onto my head. The longer I thought about it, the more probable this possibility seemed to me. Finally, I switched to the other bed and fell asleep again.

Some time later, I felt like I had slept for several hours, a loud bang outside my room woke me up. It was just before midnight. Other guests had entered the floor and slammed the front door. The draught in the hallway also made the door of my room vibrate so strongly that I first assumed that someone had rattled it. It wobbled violently in the door frame. Still drunk asleep, I heard people talking and passing my room, noisily walking down the hallway and unlocking some other room and entering it.

I was wide awake now, lying on my bed in the tiny room and listening into the darkness. What reached my ears were many simultaneous events. I didn't want to hear anything, and I wanted to block everything out, listen away and sleep on, but my attention was fixed and focused on every new detail. I felt trapped in this compulsion to perceive the many acoustic processes that were strange and unknown to me. The outside noises were now almost silent except for those from the street, but I could hear every movement of the other guests in the building. I felt like a listener and inmate in a permeable resonating body. Something seemed to be happening everywhere in the rooms. I could hear the flushing of toilets, the constant noise of the air-conditioning, children's screams, the TV programs and the folding of the doors and every opening and closing of the windows. Sometimes there were clear voices from somewhere.

The hotel was like a large transparent membrane that seemed to amplify all acoustic events. It was impossible to escape and not listen. Every announcement forced itself upon me and I listened, again and again my ears got lost in this surprising variety and in the different distances of its causes: Further away, somewhere at the end of the corridor, downstairs or outside and then, suddenly and completely unexpectedly very close, right behind my head. It was as if I was electrified. There was a quiet, scraping, scratching coming from the wall, and indeed, it could be heard again. I had no idea what might have caused it. I waited anxiously to see if it would happen again. I put my ear very close to the wall and listened. I remained in this position for some time, but nothing happened. Disappointed, I lay down on my bed again and tried to think of nothing more. As my tiredness slowly returned, I realized that it was quiet. I only noticed it now. I had not heard the sudden silence. Neither the sound that had just happened nor any other acute noise in the wall or anywhere else nearby, in the hallway or anywhere else in the building, could be heard.

It was eerie and I had an instant vision in the darkness of my room: I thought that all the sounds were staged for me, performed that night and for my ears only, here in this Spanish hotel.

To calm myself down, I turned on the air conditioning again. The sonorous and calculable sound seemed like a part of my known and so far experienced world. I felt relieved and looked at the clock of my cell phone. It was almost three o'clock in the morning and I still had an hour before I had to get up.

Norderheistedt, October 2011