1

There were two doors into this house. The first, in a small unfurnished room, opened directly onto the sea. It could only be entered from the water. When it was left wide open on a sunny day, the light slanting into the room illuminated half of the near wall on a diagonal. As the sun descended to the horizon, the wall could be read like a sundial: its illuminated half shrinking until the entire wall had darkened.

The second door, in a foyer on the other side of the house, opened onto a rough path that wound through a forest and ended in an obscure park at the city limits. The fountain in that park, centered by stone mermaids that spout water, had been dry for months. The buildings that lined the city streets were red and brown. The sun ate into their brick, sending up puffs of dust. At dusk their blue windows turned amber. On the fire escapes women were smoking and reading, gazing up occasionally at the river of bruised clouds that flowed to sea. One of them, a redhead, was reading a slim memoir entitled Rooms by the Sea, written a century ago. The author, Claudine Rementeria, was married to a Basque shipping magnate who had immigrated to America. She herself was Basque, and shortly before her untimely death at thirty, she wrote the book in their native language, Euskera, in order to please her husband. Aside from a small private printing at the time—of which only a few copies have survived—her book hadn’t been translated and published in English until recently. The redhead, Carmen Ronson, the thirty-year-old great-granddaughter of Claudine Rementeria, owned both the English translation and one of the extant Euskera copies.

Carmen arrived at the house today at nine o’clock. She emerged from the forest and strolled down the path, a cigarette between her fingers and both editions of Rooms by the Sea under her arm. She took a key from under a stone at the end of the path, unlocked the door, and entered the house. She was wearing a green dress, a green silk scarf imprinted with tridents, green shoes, and a blue suede hat with a peacock feather in the band. Her lipstick was coral, to match her fingernail polish. In the black-and-white photograph that comprised the frontispiece of Claudine Rementeria’s memoir, she was wearing the same hat.

Carmen walked down a long corridor with a dozen narrow white doors that had been salvaged from the Sabina, an ocean liner shipwrecked in the Bay of Biscay. She passed through the room with the door open to the sea, and sat down on a red sofa in the adjoining room, which had a window opened to the water, but no door. She removed the hat and scarf and unclipped the barrette that held up her wavy hair. She was tall, with fair but unfreckled skin, a fine delicate face, and strong hands. Her hazy blue eyes matched the curtains fluttering in the breeze.

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 to 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.”