Journey to Portugal by José Saramago

If the traveller were to set himself a test, he would fail it. A test as a traveller, of course-any other kind, he might pass or fail. But to reach Guarda after one o'clock on a Saturday night in the month of March, which is high season for snow in these mountains, and to trust that the patron saint of travellers would provide him with a hotel room, is sheer incompetence. At the first place he was turned away, at the next they did not open up, further on he was told not even to bother ringing the bell. He went back to the first hotel-how could it be possible there was not so much as a single room free in such a huge building? But there was not. It was perishingly cold outside. The traveller could have begged them to let him settle down on a sofa in the lobby until morning when one of the rooms became free, but he has his pride and so decided that his lack of foresight deserved to be punished, and tried to get to sleep in his car. He did not succeed.

Wrapped in whatever he could press into service as protective clothing, nibbling at crackers to ease his nighttime hunger and to try at least to warm up his teeth, he considered himself the most wretched creature in the Universe through all the long hours of his personal Arctic winter. The first light of dawn was struggling into the sky, and the cold had become even more intense, when the traveller found himself faced with a terrible dilemma: either to suffer humiliation by finally asking for shelter in the warm hotel lobby, or to be humiliated by early risers pressing round his car windows to see if it was a man or a block of ice inside. He chose the softer option, and do not judge him too harshly for it. When at long last a noisy group of Spaniards who had won their own battle of Aljubarrota left the hotel early in the morning, freeing up a room, the traveller sank into the hottest water in the world, and then in between the sheets.