In Sunlight or In Shadow Page 7

  She opened her two books side by side on a low table, along with the Euskera-English dictionary she kept at the house. Though she had studied Euskera, and spent two summers in Basque country, she read slowly, mouthing the words and translating haltingly, under her breath. There are two doors into this house . . . The smells from the kitchen, many rooms away, wafted to her. Shallots frying, tilefish filets sizzling on the grill, biscuits in the oven.

  2

  The cook had caught the fish that morning, casting his line from the door onto the sea, his legs dangling over the sill, the wavelets licking at the soles of his sandals. His name was Solomon Fabius. For many years, he worked for Carmen’s mother, Calleta. When she died and left the house to her daughter, Fabius remained. He promised Calleta he would give Carmen the copies of Rooms by the Sea. A Spaniard born in Senegal, he spoke French, Senegalese, and Euskera as well as Spanish. Though he had settled in America, he got by in rudimentary English. He claimed that he already spoke enough languages. With Calleta he mostly conversed in Euskera, which was one reason she had hired him. Other members of the household, including Carmen and her father, Klaus, rarely understood what they were saying. Klaus Ronson was a Danish doctor who had met Calleta in Venice and married her two months later. He died when Carmen was six, the year after Fabius arrived at the house. Each year on Klaus’s birthday Calleta drank the same champagne they had shared the night he proposed to her in Rome. She toasted him and said he was the only man she had ever loved and ever would love. After her husband’s death, she and Fabius spoke exclusively in Euskera.

  Fabius had gone to Spain as a young man and studied his craft at the finest culinary institutes in Barcelona and Madrid. He worked as a chef at two five-star hotels: the Sultana in Bilbao and the Atlantis in Sevilla. His specialty was Basque cuisine. It was at the Atlantis, after a six-course meal, that Juan Azarola, a powerful lawyer from an old Basque family, told Fabius how impressed he was with his cooking. Azarola practiced law in Cádiz, fifty miles to the south, and ate at many Basque restaurants; but even in the Pyrenees he had seldom enjoyed dishes as original and distinctive as Fabius’s. Azarola said he had a wealthy cousin in America who was looking for a chef. Whatever Fabius’s salary at the Atlantis, Azarola went on, she was willing to quadruple it. His work permit, visa, living quarters, and medical needs would all be taken care of, and he would receive a pension, in the currency of his choice, deposited in any bank in the world. Was he interested in such private employment? Taken aback, and only half-believing all this, Fabius said he had to think it over. Azarola replied that he would like an answer in twenty-four hours, before he left Sevilla. Fabius made his own inquiries, with his boss, the hotel manager, and the law firm that represented the hotel. Azarola’s credentials were impeccable. The offer was solid. Fabius accepted it, and never looked back. Over the past twenty-five years he had become a very rich man himself. He had not yet informed Carmen, but he intended to retire soon and return to Spain.

  Fabius was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man. Even at sixty-eight, his muscular arms, large flat hands, and long neck combined to make him look taller than he was. He wore the white smock and pants, but not the hat, of a chef; instead, a red fez with a gold tassel sat atop his thatch of curly white hair. His quarters, down countless corridors, were in a room so far from the room with the door onto the sea that no one else could find their way to them. It was just as well, because his one condition upon accepting the job was that his quarters be completely private, without exception, at all times.

  3

  The house had other unique—to Carmen, alarming—properties. For example, the fact that, each year, without human assistance, it acquired another room. This began the year of Fabius’s arrival, a few months before Klaus Ronson contracted lung cancer. Calleta Ronson dismissed the coincidence. And she never doubted that rooms could appear suddenly, as if they had risen from the sea. She said such things happened all the time, defying conventional laws of physics, but usually went unnoticed. Carmen, age six, asked her for examples that did get noticed.

  “There are salamanders with two heads and one heart,” Calleta replied, “and waterfalls in the Brazilian highlands that flow upward.”

  “You’ve seen these things?” Carmen asked.

  “Of course. How else would I know? Take such marvels as a sign of good luck—a divine blessing, even.”

  Carmen understood that, for her mother, the fact something was inexplicable made it all the more real and powerful. As Carmen got older, she grew accustomed to her mother’s circular logic and flights of fancy.

  But even Calleta was unsettled when it became clear that this process was not going to end, that there was no telling how many rooms the house would end up with. After seven years, she contacted the architects she and her husband had commissioned and explained the situation. They didn’t believe her. So when they came out to the house with the original blueprints and did a walk-through, they were stunned to find seven extra rooms, well constructed and freshly painted. At first, the architects were convinced she was playing a trick on them, that she had had the rooms built by real contractors in real time. But tricked them to what end? Especially when they were charging her four hundred dollars an hour. They returned unannounced two years later, thinking they would surprise her, and instead found two new rooms. One architect got lost roaming the house, tripped in a dark room, and broke his arm. The other, a right-wing Spaniard whose father had served under Franco, angrily told his partner that this was what they got for doing business with Basques. Then he burned the blueprints on the front lawn as a form of exorcism. His parting shot to Calleta was that she needed an exorcist, not an architect. The next day he suffered a massive heart attack.

  4

  A month ago, on a humid afternoon, Carmen had a boating accident. She had taken out the small sailboat that once belonged to her mother. She learned to navigate it as a child and had never suffered any mishaps. But on this occasion, a rogue wave rose up suddenly from a calm sea and swept over the deck. She wasn’t knocked down or injured, she didn’t lose consciousness, the boat didn’t capsize, but for a long moment, suspended within the wave as if she were suspended in time, she was terrified it would carry her overboard. Instead, the wave rolled on into the mist, the sea grew calm again, and she steered back to shore.

  Ever since that day, Carmen was certain the number of rooms in the house began multiplying at a faster pace, not annually but monthly. Whenever she tried to count them, she came up with a different number. Though externally the house appeared unchanged from the time of its construction thirty years earlier, internally it seemed to grow larger whenever she set out to explore it. Finally, she was convinced she could not find her way around her own house. It had become too enormous a construct in her mind. The rooms and corridors were no longer just multiplying, they were also expanding, contracting, and shifting position. The overall layout had become elastic. She could set off down the same corridor on successive days and find that it branched into four bedrooms one day and two bedrooms the next. Or that it stretched to a dead end, where there was a locked closet.

  The rooms were bedrooms and sitting rooms. Their walls were painted white, their ceilings blue. The bedrooms were furnished identically: a bed, a bureau, and a night table. The sitting rooms all had a desk with a green glass lamp and an easy chair. On each desk was a blue notebook and a fountain pen. The beds were neatly made and the notebooks were blank.

  Only Fabius, in his unseen quarters, and—until recently—Carmen slept in the house. Her bedroom and studio were the only rooms on the small second floor, a self-contained unit in a kind of watchtower. It was accessible by a spiral staircase and had a 360° view: three windows overlooked the sea, the fourth faced the forest.

  Carmen didn’t know why Fabius had a clearer knowledge of the house than anyone else. Not only could he walk to and from his quarters with ease, he could also travel between other rooms more quickly. When she asked him about this, he first pretended not t
o understand the question. When she reframed it in her imperfect French, he evaded it by replying that the house was a lucky house, “just as your mother always said.” Carmen realized he wasn’t going to tell her anything more.

  5

  Though Fabius had been around for most of her life, Carmen knew surprisingly little about him. His childhood, his schooling, his life in Senegal—it was all opaque. He never talked about his history in any of his several languages. Carmen was certain that her mother knew more, much more, but only once had Calleta shared some of this knowledge, an abbreviated story of Fabius’s origins.

  She told Carmen that Fabius’s father was a Spanish missionary who married a Frenchwoman, the widow of an engineer, whom he talked down from committing suicide. She had walked into the square of a jungle village—mangy dogs sleeping in patches of shade, chickens pecking at the dust—and pressed a pistol to her heart. The barrel was cool against her chest. Sweat gathered in the small of her back. The cook’s father tossed aside the pamphlets he had been offering passersby. The pamphlets were titled Salvation Is Your Compass and Set Sail Across a Sea of Light. He clasped his hands and dropped to his knees before the widow. Startled, but without blinking or saying a word, she lowered the pistol. She stared at him as he rose up, took the pistol, and uncocked it. Then he led her out of the sun, to a moldy bench beneath an ironwood tree where she collapsed, bursting into tears. He sat beside her, neither of them saying a word for four hours until she told him that her daughter, her only child, had drowned in a flood during the rainy season. A week later, she married the missionary, and nine months after that gave birth to the infant who would grow up to be the cook in this house. She gave him the name Solomon, and cradling him, told his father that the child would live a hundred years or more.

  Carmen knew for herself that Fabius’s only close relatives were two sisters, seventy-year-old twins, one a retired science teacher in Marseilles, the other a nightclub owner in Dakar. He kept a photograph of the sisters, taken when they were twenty, on a shelf in the kitchen. They are wearing white dresses and sharing an umbrella in the hot sun. Caletta said Fabius had never been married, and he had no friends Carmen was aware of. Though a servant, he had also been a resident of the house for twenty-five years, with the run of the place. Except for the two weeks each year that he visited one of his sisters, he rarely left the property. He did go out on the water in his ocean kayak, rowing many miles from shore, and no matter the weather or the season, he took long swims twice daily. He received deliveries of groceries and supplies twice a week, by way of a private water service. He always had a chessboard on the kitchen counter. While he cooked, he played out famous games recorded in chess books. Alekhine, Capablanca, Morphy.

  Carmen’s relationship with Fabius was deceptively simple. Below the surface, it was a tangle of complications. They conversed in French, the language they had in common. They discussed the meals he was preparing, and because they both liked to sail, the science of currents and winds. That was as personal as he got. Carmen had always been curious about her mother’s relationship with Fabius. Caletta had been at ease with him from the first, when a water taxi deposited him at the door open to the sea and he greeted her in Euskera. For a time, Carmen suspected their relationship was sexual. However, after her father’s death, Carmen realized the intensity of Caletta’s faithfulness to her late husband. She never had an evening out with another man, much less a romantic entanglement. While maintaining her boundaries—he cooked and served every meal and never sat at the dinner table with the family—she treated him less as a servant than a kind of artist-in-residence. They played chess and worked together in the vegetable garden. For Carmen, the oddest aspect of all this was the very fact of Fabius’s presence. His predecessor was a housekeeper who was also an above-average cook. While Caletta liked a good meal, she often went whole days fueling herself with tea, cheese, and an apple. But while visiting Basque country with her husband on their extended honeymoon, she developed a passion, both cultural and culinary, for the cuisine and its hearty intricacies, the soups and stews in iron crocks that simmered for days in brick ovens. The same sort of oven she had built for Fabius, to his specifications.

  When Carmen asked her mother how they could know Fabius so little after so many years, Calleta replied without hesitation, “I know all I need to. I prefer people who remain within their own mysteries. Who don’t betray their true selves. The first months Fabius was here, I waited for him to open up and talk about himself. Then I saw he was never going to do that. And it struck me that that was all I needed to know about him. I respected it. If you pry with him, Carmen, he’ll step back. He’ll disappear.”

  6

  Carmen had only seen Fabius reveal strong emotions once: at her mother’s funeral. He had described her mother’s death to Carmen. Two days before, during Calleta’s morning swim, it was Fabius, at the kitchen window, who recognized how much trouble she was in, even before she did. A hundred yards from shore, she thought she was cramping up, but in fact she was experiencing a minor stroke. It nearly froze her right side. The pain was excruciating. On land, she might have survived long enough to receive medical attention, but not out there. She was trying to right herself with her left arm, to keep her head above the waves. Fabius said he ran through the house, into the room with the door open onto the sea, kicked off his shoes, and dived in. He was a strong swimmer, but he couldn’t cover that distance, against the current, before she went under. Swimming sidestroke, he pulled her in, lifting her to the threshold of the open door and climbing the short ladder there himself. He gave her mouth-to-mouth, pressing on her chest to get the water out of her lungs, to get her heart beating, but it was too late. He wept over her body, and he wept at the funeral, and he wept with Carmen, who had flown home in time to toss her mother’s ashes into the sea. He was solicitous of Carmen all that week. But then he stopped talking altogether. Already taciturn, he withdrew into an unbending silence. He asked Carmen if, for a while, she would put all her requests and instructions in writing, and he would reply in kind. She agreed without resentment, though she herself was in mourning. She guessed that the only reason he had remained at the house to cook for her was out of loyalty to her mother.

  The one time Carmen’s curiosity got the best of her, she broke the one absolute rule of the house, laid down to her by her mother, and after dinner tried to follow Fabius to his quarters from the kitchen. After walking quietly down two short corridors, she could no longer hear his footfalls, and she found herself in a large pitch-black room with cold stone walls. It was only by feeling her way along three of the walls that she found a door which opened onto a corridor she had never seen before, just wide enough for her to pass through. With several twists and turns, it led to a storeroom off the kitchen.

  She would never try to follow him again.

  7

  After Carmen’s accident, weariness, then fear, began eating away at her. She couldn’t sleep. She visited two doctors, both of whom said she was in perfect health. They gave her sleeping pills and told her to quit smoking. She thought of going abroad. She had studied drawing and painting in Austria and Italy, and been happy there. Until her mother died, Carmen had never thought of returning to live in her childhood home. But now it was her house, and in the short time she lived there she painted the so-called “ocean canvases” that would make her famous. She was also trying to sketch a large house that she saw clearly in her mind’s eye, but could never capture with her pencil. She felt it was central to her next painting. She kept drawing and erasing—altering the slope of the roof, the number of windows, the size of the porches and doors—determined to fix the dimensions and fill in the details.

  The sleeping pills didn’t work, and she couldn’t bear another night of staring into the darkness, so she rented an apartment in the city. A brownstone on a quiet street with shade trees. She slept well there every night since, only returning to her house to paint by day. She ate lunch in the room that opened onto the sea, but
had Fabius pack her supper in a basket that she took back to her apartment at dusk. She didn’t say why she had adopted this regimen and was not surprised that he made no comment.

  She continued reading Claudine Rementeria’s Rooms by the Sea. She had nearly finished the English version, but was finding the Euskera edition harder to get through now. She couldn’t afford to put that much energy into it. Claudine wrote a great deal about her marriage, the books and music shared with her husband, and the births of their son, the future father of Calleta Rementeria. She also wrote in passing about the sprawling Victorian house she lived in. Carmen realized that its foundation would have included the site of the current house, but was five times as large. The four-story house was constructed of pale gray limestone transported from Indiana. The trim was oak, the roof slate. Mostly she mentioned the details of the interior in passing, a backdrop to the life of the family. People were born, died, fell ill, fell in love, ate and drank, gazed at the stars from the solarium and at night, from their beds, listened to the soft rhythms of the surf. Members of the family—men, women, and children—spent a great deal of time swimming and fishing and taking long hikes along the shore. It was a fairly new house, well built, airy and light. And constantly expanding, Carmen noted with a chill. It seemed the Rementerias were inveterate renovators, adding new wings, knocking down walls, redesigning rooms, upgrading fixtures.

  Calleta had once told Carmen that, incredibly enough, no photograph, painting, sketch, or other visual rendering of the house existed. A fire in the library had destroyed the family photograph albums, financial records, and a filing cabinet that contained the house’s blueprints and construction drawings. Calleta had searched in vain for duplicates of the blueprints in the county clerk’s archives.

  One afternoon Carmen found a murky photograph tucked between pages 178 and 179 of the Euskera edition. It was the house. The entire Rementeria family was lined up before it on a snowy Christmas morning. Between the falling snow and the fading of the photograph, she could barely make out their faces. The most distinctive features of the house were a pair of turrets with 360-degree windows, a broad widow’s walk, and a pair of right whales carved into the limestone, flanking the front door.