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The refreshing scent of jasmine is like a proverbial trail of bread crumbs in the upper floor corridors, leading through the maze of hallways and rooms to a particular chamber in a high corner of the house… Blacker than black is the door,
but the light that peeks from beneath it is a shade of blush, and as that door swings wide, the colors in the air refuse to swell, and that sense of something delicate, something precise and carefully arranged, only grows.
The walls are hung with tapestries embroidered in metal threads - golden cranes on emerald shores and silver fish leaping from tangerine streams, clouds with the faces of dragons and gods, and gardens filled with dainty China roses. Like a pool of glistening oil, the black enameled floor reflects those pictures in mutation, giving them life in blurred, twisting smudges. The center of the room is platform to four simple wooden chairs, unremarkable
but for the fact that they are lacquered as dark and as lustrous as the floor. Their backs are rounded, their seats are padded with vinyl, and they are arranged in a square to face each other.
This chamber has no windows - the light comes from a set of standing lamps in the back corners. Wrought iron stands about six feet high bow out to hooks on the end, and hanging from those hooks are festive lamps, made from pleated rose-colored paper and lit from within by bare electric bulbs.
It could be a scene clipped from a seventies' decorating magazine, or a playboy bachelors' den. The scrutinizing eye, however, might catch a few details that are suspect.
There are coils of tawny cotton rope, for example, forming small heaps beneath each chair.
A set of heavy iron chains hang down the length of one wall, partially hidden by the folds where one tapestry meets the next.
And at the ceiling, where the romance of reds and oranges dissolves into darkness, can be seen part of an oblong shadow, the faint outline of a pulley wheel, and the lower curve of a bamboo cylinder suspended in silence.
[drip]
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