Spain

Spain matters to the novel chiefly as the place from which Cy Goldman acquires the objects that fill his California castle—and as the home of a convent whose treasures Juan de Castillo believes Goldman has wrongfully taken. The country’s religious art and architecture become more than a collector’s trophies: their passage across the Atlantic drives a conflict over who can claim ownership and what justice requires.

Acquisitions and the Castle Collection

Cy describes his journeys through Spain as purchases from religious houses in need of money, while Stella Brightwell characterizes his activity as raiding convents and monasteries. He buys antiquities to furnish the castle he is building above the Pacific, valuing age and visual effect more than historical precision: when Stella corrects his confusion over the century of stained-glass windows, he dismisses the distinction because, to him, old is old. His acquisitions include carved oak paneling, fifteenth-century stained glass, and a chapel he plans to dismantle and ship across the ocean stone by stone and window by window.

Among the most prized Spanish acquisitions are a pair of jewel-encrusted golden candlesticks and an El Greco Madonna. At the castle, Cy says the painting had hung behind a side altar in a chapel, and that the convent sold it while its roof and plumbing needed repair. He presents the transaction as a bargain and the objects as exquisite possessions; Stella’s account and Juan’s later testimony cast the same collecting practice in a more troubling light.

The Convent and the Disputed Provenance

Juan identifies the candlesticks and painting as coming from the convent where his great-aunt is mother superior. He says women in his family have entered that convent for centuries, and argues that the sisters, though holy and in need of repairs, did not understand the objects’ market value. In his account, they saw a Madonna with child where Cy saw an El Greco, and sold the candlesticks without grasping what they represented or were worth.

The competing descriptions expose a gap between legal purchase and cultural belonging. Cy insists that the convent accepted money and that the deal was therefore fair; Juan regards the sale as the loss of his family’s religious and cultural inheritance. The castle’s display—where sacred objects are removed from their original setting and arranged among an eclectic collection—makes that disagreement material. The chapel’s planned conversion into a bathhouse changing room sharpens it: what Cy treats as an architectural acquisition, Juan sees as the profanation of a holy place.

From Spanish Provenance to Revenge

Juan says that he met Cy in Spain, where Cy promised to make him a star and Juan hoped fame and money would help his family maintain its hacienda. After arriving in the United States, Juan concluded that Cy had deceived him and stolen his heritage. He decided to recover the convent’s property on the sisters’ behalf, describing his aim as justice for his people and country.

That claim culminates in the castle library. Juan hides there after pretending to go to bed, waits until Cy is alone, and confronts him as he is putting the candlesticks away. When Cy refuses to return them and calls them his own property, Juan strikes him once across the head with a candlestick. Spain thus remains present even far from its soil: the convent’s history and the objects’ disputed origins shape Juan’s motive, while the candlestick itself becomes both the contested relic and the instrument of Cy’s death.