He must have slept, because he became aware that the sunlight, filtered by the gauzy inner curtain of the shade, was warming the side of his face. The heavy velvet curtains had been drawn aside. She wasn’t beside him and she wasn’t in the room.
He climbed to his feet, sliding off the edge of the bed with a delighted grin. He wasn’t a man who bought things; his life was pretty ascetic, but silk sheets, now… those he could get used to. He went into the enormous bathroom, which had a marble soaking tub as big as his whole apartment back in Chicago. There was a glassed-in shower with four arching, fluted showerheads that made him wildly jealous. He turned on the water and a cascade like a waterfall collided in the center of the shower and steam began to rise.
A pile of clothing awaited him on the long low table on the other side of the room, and a stack of enormous, fluffy towels sat next to the shower. He opened the door and stepped into the water. Despite the heat of the previous day, it felt good to be scoured and cleansed. He scrubbed, preened, and enjoyed the hell out of the best shower he’d ever taken.
When he had toweled off and dressed, he went in search of his hostess. The clock on the wall in the enormous hall that led to the main house told him it was just after seven A.M.
He found Carolyn Delgado on the wide wooden deck that ran the length of the back of the house. She wore a diaphanous wrap of cloudy gray silk and held a mug of steaming coffee. His mouth watered. He helped himself to a second mug and slid the glass door aside. He stood next to her.
“May I join you?”
“But of course.” Her voice held a distracted note, and he eyed her.
“Did you sleep well?”
“I did.” She gave him a sideways glance. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, of course. Anything I can do.”
She gave a wan smile, and stared over the trees down into the valley of São Paulo. The city sprawled lazily in the bowl of the valley, green mist blurring and obscuring the far edges. The jungle around them was alive with birdsong, and the sun had just peeked over the ridge to the east.
They enjoyed the view in silence, and the coffee was thick and good, powerful enough to scrape the sleep from the edges of his brain. When they had finished, he followed her back inside.
“Are you hungry? I could fix something.”
“Not at the moment. I’d rather see the house again. In the light of day.”
She smiled. “Good choice. The lights can do much, but the sunlight brings the paintings to life. Let me change, and I’ll take you around again.”
“You don’t have to change on my account,” he said with what he hoped was an endearing smile, “and I can find my way.”
“I want to be with you. Reading a painting is one thing. But reading someone’s face as they encounter beauty, that’s quite different. I wish to see you see them, if that is all right.”
“Of course.”
She left him in the kitchen, and he had more coffee while she changed into a skirt, blouse, and a pair of heels. Her face was serene and he was almost positive she’d used makeup, but he couldn’t tell precisely what she might have done. Her eyes were no longer red around the outside, but were instead clear and steady and white.
“This coffee is amazing.”
“It was picked a mile from here. Not more than a week ago. That is what coffee should be. Everything else is a pale reflection. Except for Turkish coffee, that is.”
“Turkish coffee is as good as fresh coffee?”
“No, but they use enough grounds that the flavor is stronger than most. Come, my boy. Let us view the history of the painting world.”
She tucked her hand into the crook of his arm and led him again to that wide-open arena of color and texture. Again he marveled at the flawless woodwork. “Who did this? It’s obviously hand-carved, and by artisans.”
“Senhor de la Luna hired the best local woodcarvers he could find, after Ossirian painted a picture of what he wanted. Together they created this extraordinary room,” she said. She ran a fingertip along the silky-smooth lacquered finish.
“You lived here with the de la Lunas?”
She nodded. “We shared their home and their lives for five years, before… before Senhora de la Luna took ill. She died in 1961. Cancer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. She was happy right until the end. And Senhora de la Luna was a woman of enthusiasm and appetite. She had no regrets when she passed. We should all be lucky enough to claim so.”
“Appetites,” Brent mused. He gave her a sly sideways glance. “I gathered that from your stories.”
Carolyn looked at him, her eyes deep and serious. “She taught me everything I know about how to be myself,” she said. “I owe her and Senhor de la Luna an unpayable debt.”
“Why do you not use their names?”
“It is out of reverence and respect that I do not use their names casually,” she said, “but I assure you… in private we were most familiar.”
“We.”
“You have questions, Mr. Metierra?” she asked, somewhat archly.
“Thousands. But they’re not appropriate. At least, not outside the bedroom.”
She laughed merrily. “You are more clever than you look, my dear boy.”
“Better than looking more clever than you are, I suppose,” he said with a smile.
She led him back to the start, back to the first room, and flung open the door. Again the masterpieces crowed at him from the walls, demanding to be seen, demanding to be heard, but the bright sunlight streaming through the window caused the images to explode in vivid, living color so deep and immediate he blinked as though it caused him pain.
“You were right, as you can see,” she all but whispered, her voice that of a penitent in a church. “About the sunlight.”
He nodded, mute, trying to see and understand everything at once. His voice, hushed and awed, almost couldn’t be heard over the cacophony of color and imagery, so immediate and bright was it.
“Who did all this? How did this happen?”
She smiled behind him, and he could hear it in her voice. “Come now, dear boy. You told me you were a good student of art. You tell me who painted them?”
Brent studied the artwork with the eyes of a scholar. He saw past the colors and into the brushwork, into the purpose behind the brushwork, into the DNA of the paintings. What he saw troubled him. It couldn’t be possible.
He turned to her, eyes wide. “It’s not just impossible,” he said, “but flatly contradictory. There’s no way the hands that made this made this. No way that any of these artists ever came here. They-”
She put a finger to his lips. The touch was electric. “Shhh. Look. Not with your eyes. Look with your heart.”
He frowned at her, but obediently turned to study the room again. And as he focused on the willful use of stroke and pigment, the purposeful carelessness of the backhanded brush-marks, he though he saw what she was implying. He looked closer, until she nudged him over the threshold.
“Touch. Feel. Understand.”
He went to his knees, reverently, hands finding the ridges and sworls of marks like fingerprints. He read them like braille, and his hands began to trace the movements, follow them like signposts into an unknow but familiar land, the way a familiar copse of wood looks in the winter, when the trees are dead, the leaves are gone, and the fresh white snow smothers everything in a blanket of forgetfulness.
“…my God…” he whispered, hoarse. “I… I can’t believe this. It’s too… too big.”
He turned to her.
She smiled at him. “And now you see.”
“I see. But what am I seeing?”
“The path. The one it took him forever to find.”
He stared at the floor under him, at the walls, at the ceiling. Every inch a work of unparalleled craftsmanship and even genius. “A path?”
“The path,” she corrected. “The way through the dark of aimlessness and wandering into the light of righteousness and purpose. A path whose way came from the direction of an enemy.”
He looked up at her again over his shoulder. “Tell me. Tell me how.”
She collapsed gracefully into a cross-legged seat and put her hands on her knees, as though she were meditating.
“What you need to understand is that Toefler, with an off-handed comment, stabbed Ossirian through the heart. He was bleeding; hemorrhaging purpose. He had no direction, no passion. He was inconsolable. He was never a man to turn away from an experience and he embraced his dissolution with the same energy with which he had embraced all the rest of his life.”