CHAPTER SEVEN

The Project

 

 

AFTER WE HAD worked our way through most of the rooms, I went up to our bedroom, intending to put away the rest of my clothes. The car journey had unsettled my stomach, and I had eaten too much just to prove to Senora Delgadillo that I was willing, so I lay down on the bed for a few minutes.

The mattress was immense and marshmallowy, the room thick-bricked and cool, with eggshell blue walls and a polished parquet floor. Everywhere were paintings of bombazine-clad women and stern-looking men with luxuriant moustaches, so overlaid with sepia tobacco residue that they were rendered almost invisible within their frames, like phantoms. Presumably they had been left behind because they belonged in the house, and would mean nothing to anyone else.

I sank down into the pillow but there was something lumpy beneath it. When I looked, I found a small wooden crucifix with a hook on the top. It had clearly been taken down from the wall, so I put it back up.

I had been expecting to feel at least a little disoriented and odd here, but the only sensation I felt was a soothing calm, a happy sense of homecoming, and I quickly fell asleep. I’m becoming Spanish already, I thought, taking an afternoon siesta.

At five he came to me. It felt as if I was still dreaming. From the corner of my eye I saw him unbutton his blue shirt and let it fall to the floor. I heard the rattle of his belt opening. The black trapezoid of his chest hair ended abruptly below his pectoral muscles, narrowing to a stripe of fur arrowing to his navel and below. If his body was toned by the natural forces of hard work, his hands were too smooth. They could only have known the touch of keypad, a phone, a steering wheel. He pressed them lightly against the side of my body to turn me, and lowered his lips to mine.

He was unlike anyone else I had made love with. My past sexual experience was a spontaneous, chaotic blur of late night fumbles and hungover mornings, after which I usually hated myself. Mateo was slow and deliberate, and if he was more intent on his own pleasure, it was because he knew it would please me. When he touched my breasts, my throat, the almost-flat of my stomach, it was with a sense of entitlement, but there was also discovery and wonder.

He took his time. I could hear birdsong, clocks ticking distantly, the rustle of bedclothes. When he finally entered me, it was as if he was starting a ritual of possession, a process in which I was complicit. The steady pressure of his body drove gently and steadily into me, filling me with a warm completion. I thought, let it always be like this, don’t let us ever become indifferent or lost to each other.

After, we lay in each other’s arms until I noticed the change.

At first it was so subtle that I couldn’t be sure that my eyes weren’t playing tricks. I sat up, moving so as not to wake him, and carefully disentangled myself from the white sheets. Stepping naked to the window and looking down, I could see that the sun was lower in the sky now, but was still before the windows. Outside, there was not a breath of air. The boles of the gnarled cork trees were partly in shadow, but the room was squarely flooded with light. It felt as if the sun was present inside me and without. Everything was warm to the touch. I thought then that the house liked us, that it wanted us to be here and to be happy.

I walked to the right-side pane, set further toward the ridge of the cliff, but found it also washed in sun-dust. The reason why became apparent. All of the foliage that might have blocked the path of the light had been removed in a great fan shape, so that no shadows could fall across the house. It must have been done years ago; the sawn boughs of the trees had long grown over.

Returning to the bed and gently stroking Mateo’s arm, I watched as his black lashes parted. ‘The house –’ I began, but didn’t know how to continue.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s just that the light – it comes all the way through to the central atrium,’ I said. ‘All of the time. Like a trail.’

‘I don’t understand.’ He sat up, fumbling for his clothes. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘No, but it’s unique. I mean, in a house of this age. It must have been done for a reason. Can we – ?’

‘Let me find my pants.’ He searched around, dressing with infuriating slowness while I waited impatiently.

‘The Hyperion Observatory must exist in some kind of catalogue,’ I said, holding open the door.

‘You want to start this right now?’ He was still half-asleep.

‘You said I needed to find myself a project, and I’ve found one.’ I led the way back down the stairs, past the unsmiling Senora Delgadillo, her arms palleted with folded sheets. I wondered if she’d heard us making love.

The rooms spread out beneath us from the central atrium, shafts gilding the polished floors. I slid open a tall panel of glass that admitted us to the great octagon at the heart of the house.

I wanted to understand. After the telescope was removed, why did they replace it with a glass roof? ‘The agent called it La Casa De La Luz, the House of Light,’ I said. ‘The house is self-fulfilling. Plants are phototropic. They always turn to face the light, so everything faces front. There are precedents. Several similar Venetian versions were constructed in the 18^th century to use the light from the Grand Canal, and there were some built in Paris, usually for the display of precious objects. The Italian ones were filled with collections of glassware. The sun passes across all of the windows, but it doesn’t look as if the house was intended to display anything. Who would they show off to? If that was the purpose, the Hyperion Observatory wouldn’t have been constructed in such an inaccessible place.’

As I passed between the plants, their foliage shining with a waxen lustre, I became aware that there was something missing. I tried to think it through. Astronomical observatories were built long before telescopes were invented. They’d been around since the third century in Alexandria, when the movement of the stars was studied with the naked eye. Then the Caliphs built them in Baghdad in the 9^th century. French and English telescopes were invented for the purpose of learning about navigation, but they didn’t arrive until the early 17^th.

‘Are you sure there was even a telescope? Do you think it could have been some other kind of apparatus? Those struts needed to come all the way down to the ground floor, but there are no sloat cuts.’

‘What does that mean?’ Mateo asked.

‘It’s an old theatrical scenery term, obsolete now. A wooden slot that you can slide something through. The wood on the ground floor is original; it’s never been planed and filled, so the only supporting arms were those two rods up there. Which means it probably wasn’t a telescope, because the old ones weighed a ton. It must have been something else. Look.’ I pointed to the small brass brackets that stood around the edges of the room. ‘Your lawyer’s great-grandfather thought he saw a telescope, but there was something else held here.’

Mateo had folded his arms and was watching me with interest. ‘I can’t believe your practice went under with you as an asset.’

‘The bank wouldn’t budge. We were doing everything right, we just got caught in the downturn. Hey, maybe the agent has a history of ownership or something. We have the address of the last owner, right?’

‘No, we have the address of his attorney.’ Mateo studied the replaced glass atrium, a neat copper-edged octagon cut into the roof. ‘The nights are very clear here. The warm dry air would have been perfect for stargazing. Surely that’s enough to explain the location.’

‘But there must be a record of the building somewhere, and a history of the architect. You think maybe in Gaucia?’

Mateo led the way out, stopping at a door constructed under the main staircase. He fished about for a switch but found nothing. ‘Rosita says they never got around to fitting electricity in the basement,’ he said. There were candles and matches on a side-table. Inside was an antechamber, the first room we had encountered without natural light.

A hatch in the floor had weighted handles attached to either side, and rose to the touch with hardly any application of strength. ‘If you think the telescope-thing is weird, you’re going to love this.’

A stone staircase led us down. The temperature dropped as we descended. We were now under the house. There was a chair and an ornate wooden desk, French-looking, and the central core was still here, an octagonal column of pale stone seemingly hewn and transplanted from the cliff itself. Around it, in a room that reminded me of a factory floor, stood a filigreed mechanical network of polished brass gears and cogs. I smelled earth and oil. In earlier times you would have heard more ticking and clicking and whirring down here than the noise made by the clocks above.

‘Oh my God,’ I said, ‘it’s a master clock. There’s a calibrated brass ring around the edge of the cupola. I think there would have been a rod going from here up to the roof. They only had to look up to read the time by the stars, and set the clocks.’ The gear system was in excellent condition, probably because the hatch to the room was airtight.

‘You know, I have a few contacts in New York who would probably consider publishing a book on this,’ said Mateo. ‘I’m there in a couple of weeks, I could have a word with them. What do you think?’

‘How soon can I start? Today? Now?’

He smiled again. ‘I love it when you get excited.’

‘You hardly know me yet.’

‘There’s plenty of time for that. We have our whole lives ahead of us.’ He embraced me with great tenderness. ‘I hate the idea of being away from you. These trips won’t last forever, maybe a year, just until the company is better established.’

‘I can live with that.’

We headed back upstairs. The burst of setting sunlight as I emerged blinded me for a moment. I stood in the hall waiting for my vision to return. It’s not about being able to see the stars, I realised, it’s about the light.

Mateo appeared at my side. ‘What?’

‘How do you know I’m thinking of anything?’

‘You’re always thinking. I can see it in your eyes. It’s funny,’ he said. ‘The first time I met you, I assumed you were just another uptight county girl. The second time, I saw a little bit of the wild child there. After that, intelligence.’

‘Yeah, I’m a complicated lady,’ I said.

‘You’re lucky. It means the world will always hold fresh hope for you.’

I walked toward the outer rooms, running my fingers lightly over the gilt frames of the paintings. ‘All the rooms are kept in sunshine, right until the moment the sun disappears.’

‘So?’

‘Why? The rear rooms must be in permanent darkness, which means they’re cold and uninhabitable. I want to see inside them. Will you talk to the housekeeper before you go?’

I walked across the great reception chamber to the entrance and pulled open the front door, shielding my eyes from the sunlight. ‘Come and see this,’ I called. Carved into the wooden lintel above my head was an inscription. ‘It’s in Latin. Felicitas in Solis Animabus.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Hang on.’ I had a translation app on my mobile, and tapped in the phrase. ‘Happiness only in their souls.’

‘Sol can also mean sun.’

‘Okay – Happiness lives within sunlight. Or Happiness only in sunlight. Think this was put there by the original architect?’

‘I imagine so.’

‘He wanted to live in everlasting sunshine,’ I explained. ‘A bit of a romantic notion, but quite common throughout history. Persian sultans were mortally afraid of shadows. They equated them with death. They constructed their courtyards so that no part was ever in darkness. They were inbred and isolated, and very sensitive. They hated noise of any kind. There’s a story that someone accidentally shattered a pane of glass in the Topkapi Palace and a Sultan dropped dead from fright.’

‘It’s good that the house always remains in sunlight,’ said Mateo. ‘Your mother told me that when you became a teenager you started to hate the dark. She said you used to have panic attacks –’

‘I told you to ignore anything she said.’

‘It’s okay, there’s no shame in that. Everyone’s afraid of something.’

‘I can’t imagine you being afraid of anything.’

‘As it happens, I’m scared of wasps. There – not so tough now, am I?’

‘At least you can see them and move out of the way. The dark – you don’t know what’s in it.’

‘Well, you could never be frightened here,’ said Mateo. ‘Don’t you see? From now on, you’ll live your life in sunshine. The house is built in the lee of the mountains. There are no shadows. I sensed it the moment I stepped inside the door, and I could see you did too. Rosita says that even the cut flowers she sets out in the dining room stay in bloom longer because of the light. So let this be my gift to you.’

‘Everlasting sunshine.’ I pressed my head into his chest and tried not to cry. In the last few years I had become lost. Now I felt as if I had been found and brought home.