Skip to main content
kfitz

Nothing to Be Done

We’re at the airport, on our way back to the US. Earlier this morning, as we were checking out of the hotel, I took one last look around the reception area, which was much emptier than it had been at any previous point during our stay. Past one sitting area, I spotted these two paintings:

Hotel lobby painting

Wow, I thought. Amazingly dramatic faces! Real personality. And such… hopelessness. Odd choice for a hotel lobby.

So I turn the opposite direction, toward the reception desk, and see a matching pair of paintings behind the desk.

Hotel lobby painting

I was trying to be subtle here, and so the bottom quarter of the paintings is lost. But you get the idea: the same bleakness, the same deep character. While the first set of paintings are of equal width, though, the second set are quite different; the painting on the left, of an older man weighed down by suitcases, is much narrower than the one on the right, of a man sitting on a bench. And yet they’re tied together, I slowly realized, by the scarf the man on the left is wearing, which is blowing into the frame of the painting on the right.

But wait. It’s not a scarf. It’s a rope.

It’s… Lucky. And Pozzo. And Didi and Gogo.

How utterly astonishing, to stay in a hotel whose lobby walls are waiting for Godot.

Webmentions

No replies yet.