“Varatorta is not only a lighthouse keeper but also an excellent cook.” Ibaibarriaga clapped him on the back. “He spent years in the kitchens at a restaurant in Cangas before coming here.”
“I’m not that good,” he said, winking his dark eyes, “but better than them at least.”
“It smells wonderful.” Roberto’s stomach rumbled as if to drive home the obvious—much to his embarrassment. “I haven’t had a proper meal in days.”
“Well, you’ll love this.” Varatorta lifted the lid off a pot, sniffed, and let out a grunt of satisfaction. “A few more minutes.”
“Why don’t you show our visitor around?” said Ibaibarriaga. “I’m sure he’d love to see what life is like here.”
“Of course.” The cook again gave that gap-toothed grin. “Come on, it’s this way.”
Roberto followed the lighthouse keeper down a hallway. As they advanced, he could not help but marvel at such an unusual mixture of old architecture and furniture, and state-of-the-art gadgets. As they entered one of the rooms, he exclaimed, “What on earth’s that?”
He pointed to what looked like a set of children’s play blocks, only giant-sized. It was a unit made up of large plastic cells, emitting a softhum. In that wood-paneled room, with its nineteenth-century furniture, they looked like cast-off pieces from an alien spacecraft.
“They’re the backup batteries.” Varatorta rested a hand on the unit. “This used to be the private dining room for the head lighthouse keeper’s family, almost a century ago. Now we use it for this: There’re over a hundred interconnected batteries, in case of an outage.”
“And how are they charged?”
“With the solar panels on the back of the lighthouse,” said Varatorta, pointing to the rainy window. “They work a bit better in the summer, obviously.”
“Do you need to use them often?”
“Only sometimes, especially if lightning strikes near the lighthouse.” Varatorta shrugged. “Sometimes it blows out the transformer.”
“Must be a pretty hard life,” Roberto said, shaking his head.
“Oh, hardly. We do just fine. You have to be cut from the right sort of cloth, but we also have lots of things to pass the time.”
“Oh?”
“Of course! You can go fishing, go out walking, we’ve got a small vegetable garden ...”
“And what about days like today?” Roberto said. “It must be like this a lot in the winter.”
“Yes, well.” Varatorta shrugged resignedly. “It’s true; we sometimes get several weeks of this.”
Roberto looked out at the rain, wind, and gloom, and shuddered. He could imagine little worse.
“Not my thing,” he muttered.
“Hence our secret weapon.” Varatorta winked. “Allow me to share it with you.”
Roberto duly followed as Varatorta led the way into the next room. He was struck dumb by what he saw.
The room was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves, all completely filled with books. Like any booklover who gets access to someone else’s library, Roberto stepped forward and eagerly began runninghis fingers over the nearest spines, hopping from one title to the next. There was a real mixture of genres and styles, from romance novels to military history, classics to modern bestsellers. Some were very old leather-bound editions, while others had the garish finishes of more recent cover designs.
“We’ve got more than three thousand books here,” Varatorta declared. “It’s a joint effort, the work of everyone who has lived and worked here, going back more than a century now. When we finish, we’ll leave all these for whoever comes next, and they’ll go on adding to it.”
Roberto was so absorbed in what he was seeing that he only half listened. He wondered at the stories behind each book, at who might have read them and when.
“You’re right, this lot would see you through plenty of storms.”
“And that’s not all.” Varatorta pointed to the far side of the library.
There was a crackling woodburning stove, with a couple of armchairs and a comfortable-looking couch in front of it. Right next to it, a cabinet crammed with DVDs housed an old television.
“Where do I sign up?” said Roberto with a smile. The brief moment of intimacy had allowed him to forget all his pressing problems. “You guys know what you’re about.”
