Mount Terminus (6 page)

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When this vision of Mount Terminus's past reached its conclusion, Bloom's nightstand in the morning was bare. Without the expectation he felt before he fell asleep and the excitement he experienced when he awoke, the ghostly visions of his mother, which had subsided in the intervening months, returned, and in her company he now could see in the lacunae of the estate's grounds, could hear in the clattering leaves of the groves, in the upsurge of the running spring, the phantoms of Mount Terminus's aborigines. Absent forethought, unaware of his intent, he began to draw scenes of the vivid chimera his imagination imposed on the estate. Not unlike the progression of events he had observed in the prints, he drew into the gardens and the groves life-affirming idylls. He set his mother in the company of children hanging from limbs of trees. She sat with women who ground acorn into meal. She presided over a feast held under a moonlit sky. And as he had witnessed his father do when he set out to perfect his topiary, the boy tended to these Arcadian hymns to his mother with the same fastidious and loving care. Bloom refined each line of each composition until the ink he pressed onto paper with a fountain pen resembled the heavy strokes of his mother's brush; and only when he was satisfied that they reflected in their totality what he had envisaged, in the instance the phantasmagorias were born, did he present the drawings to his father, who, upon receiving the very first one, and upon receiving many more thereafter, appeared elevated in spirit.

With each presentation of his handiwork, Bloom could see color flush his father's face. He took great pleasure watching him handle the paper's edges before studying the complexities, looking on the figments of his imagination as if he might discover within the details of the drawings' configurations a hidden map to free him from his present condition. Jacob sent the drawings to town with Meralda, to have them framed, and when they returned, he hung them in the parlor, on the cracked wall facing the chair in which he reclined at night to drink and smoke. Orderly rows formed, and by flickering gaslight, he stared at them, meditated over them, at times spoke to them under his breath.

Having witnessed the revival of his father's spirit, Bloom grew determined to further animate it. He was convinced if he continued to provide him more and more of what he saw in the stillness of his days, the elder Rosenbloom would begin to live in the world. Bloom, therefore, withdrew from the activities that provided him solace. He withdrew from his books. He withdrew from taking his daily sojourns to Mount Terminus's peak. Instead, in the estate's quietest corners, sometimes with Roya, sometimes without, he dutifully daydreamed and drew what he saw in the shadows. He didn't quite understand why, but the more absorbed his father became by his drawings, Bloom was visited again and again by the image of the serpentine trail formed by the missionaries and their soldiers. Again and again, he envisioned the events that followed their arrival, and as hard as he tried to resist the impulse to draw his mother into the violent, ghastly scenes they perpetrated, he couldn't stop himself. Not unlike the prints his silent companion had left for him at his bedside, his narrative devolved. His once sunny idylls darkened into subterranean spectacle. He thought to hide these images from his father, but, perhaps to better understand the reason he couldn't release them from his mind, when his father asked one morning over breakfast if he had more drawings to share with him, Bloom handed them over, and when he did, he watched his father's face change. His expression grew disturbed, and in an injured voice, he said, No, no, my dear, these won't do. No, we mustn't allow this to happen to you. Not to you, too.

He didn't send these drawings to the framer. Rather, he quietly hid them away. They disappeared to some secret place. Out of sight. When Bloom asked where they had gone, his father shook his head and said, It was wrong of me to encourage you. Jacob didn't admonish the boy. He didn't punish him. On the contrary, his tone was kind and contrite. But it was admonishment enough for Bloom to see, in the wake of this expression of regret, his father's features return to their fragile, disconsolate shape. It was punishment enough to see his fascination wane, to watch it turn limpid and resigned. Once again the idle glaze to which Bloom had grown accustomed frosted his father's eyes, and once again the inconsolable man escaped into his garden labyrinths, into the dark shadows of a past Bloom couldn't see, and within the passages of the narrow warrens, Jacob paced. Around plantings and trimmings, he mindlessly wandered, migrated from one figure to the next. From the tower's pavilion Bloom observed his father pace a tortuous route through the desert gales. On he paced when the fire season delivered flames to Mount Terminus's nearby canyons. He paced until, one day, he did not.

And on that day, Bloom watched him ride down the mountain dressed in a suit, cleaned and pressed. And for some weeks after this first trip down the switchback, he frequently repeated the journey, sometimes staying away for several nights at a time. When Bloom would ask where he had gone and what he had been doing, his father said he had been tending to a business matter he could no longer avoid.

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Out of pity, Bloom wondered, or perhaps because this was her preferred method of entertaining herself—through mysteries and intrigues—he began to receive from Roya unusual notes, which she left in the most peculiar places. The first he felt inside the toe of his left shoe when he was dressing one morning. As if written by a child with an unsteady hand, it read,
I have a secret.
The following day he discovered in the toe of his right shoe another note that read,
In the library is a book on whose cover is a blue pyramid.
For several hours Bloom browsed the library's lower shelves and for several hours more from the rungs of a ladder he browsed the library's upper shelves, and only after having glanced at nearly every book cover in their large collection did he locate on the highest shelf in the library's farthest corner the cover he was looking for. There on a thin volume titled
Too Loud a Solitude
was a blue pyramid, at the center of which was inset a figure of a pharaoh, sitting upright in a sarcophagus. The pharaoh's eyes were open and his mouth was agape, and behind the cover when he turned it over he found a bookmark on which was written in Roya's penmanship:
The house has a secret.
As it served no purpose to implore a woman who couldn't hear and didn't speak to reveal what she uncovered during her furtive movements through their corridors and rooms, Bloom trusted Roya would soon enough deliver a new clue to draw the mystery she had set in motion to a point of comprehension. Bloom's patience was rewarded one afternoon, when, at lunch, Roya served him a sandwich and a glass of lemonade. Rolled inside the cloth napkin accompanying his meal were three sheets of parchment. On each was a miniature drawing whose lines were straight and whose corners were square and whose images were three skeletal representations of each level of their home. These illustrations, however, delineated neither the rooms with which Bloom was familiar nor the passageways leading to these rooms, but rather an elaborate system of connecting stairwells and corridors that, so far as he knew, had never been built. To Roya, who was standing across from where he sat in the dining room, Bloom silently mouthed: Did you draw these? She turned and walked around the long table at whose center he sat, and when she arrived at his side she pointed to a corner of the parchment where he could see, obscured by the tint of the paper's border, a signature:
Manuel Salazar
. So she could see his lips, he looked up at her and asked, Who is Manuel Salazar? As she had done on the day she handed him his mother's drawing of his father, she reached into the pocket of her skirt and removed a clipping from a page of a book. It read:
The parallax of time helps us to the true positions of a conception.
Then, from her opposite pocket, she removed another clipping on which was printed:
As the parallax of space helps us to that of a star.
To this, Bloom shook his head. She looked at him with the same indifference with which she looked at everything. She replaced the slips of paper in her pocket, along with the illustrations she had presented to the boy with his meal, and pointed with the same hand to his sandwich and then to the lemonade, indicating to him that he should eat. So he ate, and while he ate, she stood over him and watched him eat, and when Bloom had taken his last bite, he looked up again to Roya's face to see, this time, a chink of light in the darkness of her eyes. For an instant, he could see a violet-tinged nimbus flare on the circumferences of her pupils, and he knew when she turned and walked away from him and rounded the head of the table, he was meant to follow her.

They entered the kitchen through a swinging door and walked past halved heads of cabbage arranged on a woodblock, and on they went to the service entrance at the base of the tower, where from a leather pouch nailed to the cellar door Roya removed two flashlights, one for him and one for her, and together they descended below ground. Shining his light onto the pleats of her skirt, Bloom followed her through the archways separating food stores from wine racks, old furniture from hot water tanks, empty space from empty space, and in one of the vacant vaults, in which the dry afternoon heat was trapped and felt most oppressive, in which the hiss and groan of the plumbing sounded most monstrous, Roya stopped and stood before a brick pillar wider than any of the other supports that bolstered the load of the villa. She paused for a moment to look at Bloom. She stood very still with the light shining up the middle of her blouse and onto her chin; then, for the first time Bloom had ever seen it happen, Roya smiled. She smiled not a radiant smile, or a smile that signified hope or delight. She smiled as she would if she were asleep and dreaming of something colorful and airy. And with this listless expression from which glistened a thin sliver of her teeth, she reached out her free hand, pressed it against the bricks, and, with only the slightest force of her weight leaning onto the pillar's exterior, its face gave way and swung inward to reveal at its crack the hinges of a door. When the door had opened fully, there before Bloom was a dark shaft.

Roya stepped back now and stretched out her free hand. Twice she pressed at the air with her palm. Then a third time. At which point the boy stepped inside and pointed his flashlight upward. The dim bulb cast a cone of orange incandescence onto the rungs of a wooden ladder that so far as Bloom could see climbed into a thicker darkness. He turned to look back at Roya, but she was no longer there. Into the darkness of the cellar, she had silently withdrawn. Into the darkness, she had noiselessly stepped away as only she could. The boy thought for a moment he hadn't the courage to climb the ladder to see what secret was at its top. But as soon as he placed his flashlight in his trouser pocket, whatever trepidation he felt was overtaken by curiosity, and in no time at all he had scaled high enough so that when he looked down to see what progress he had made, darkness filled the space below him. At the ladder's end, he arrived at a door, behind which he anticipated finding a corridor like one of those he had seen in the diagrams presented to him by Roya in the dining room, one that would take him on a Thesean journey through internal passageways, but when he lifted the door's lever and pushed it away from him, instead of encountering what he saw imprinted on the parchment, he was met by a soft expulsion of stale air and the sight of an enclosed room whose ceiling slanted with the pitch of the roof.

There were no windows here, yet, strangely, the space filled with a dull gray glow that misted out into the chamber and clung to him as would a fine silt. He stepped into the pall, and with each footfall forward, the floorboards creaked with vague, cacophonous sounds, not unlike those a chick might hear from the interior of its shell at the moment of its birth. On the wall adjacent to the door was painted in fresco the face of Cyclops, whose eye was a convex piece of glass rimmed with gold. Out of it, a beam of light illuminated an oval mirror hung at an angle on the opposite wall, and, on this day, the mirror projected onto a round table a granular image—awash in grays—of Roya, who was now sitting on the chaise longue in the gallery. She faced the frieze above the fireplace, staring through it to him with a knowing grin. For quite some time Bloom marveled at Roya's unmoving image and then gravitated to the wall opposite the entrance, where encased behind beveled glass were shelves on which he found all the objects his silent companion had brought to his bedside. And a great deal more. Stacks of unused parchment. Baskets filled with nibs and quills. Tins of pigment. Etched woodblocks bundled in twine. In a brass chamber pot, a collection of hairpins, each rusted tooth crowned by a bouquet of black roses. Above the shelves was a long cabinet anchored to the wall, behind whose doors he discovered a leather-bound diary written in Spanish and signed on the opening page by the same hand that had drawn the hidden labyrinths. Although he didn't read a word of Spanish, there were a great number of drawings in these pages to hold the boy's interest, sketches of the pastoral and gruesome scenes with which he was already familiar, and then more detailed drawings of grand villas that might have been, variations on rooms and gardens and statuary, on towers and their arcaded pavilions. And finally appeared the plans for the villa that would be. That was.

Before the table holding Roya's still image, he sat in an armchair positioned so whoever occupied its seat saw the gallery projected upright. And there, in his silent companion's company, he sorted through the remaining pages, in which landscape and architecture no longer existed as Manuel Salazar's sole preoccupations. In these pages lived evidence of a burgeoning obsession with a woman who appeared at first as a shadow on the periphery of the estate's construction, and who, slowly, after many months, inched closer and closer to the foreground, until she occupied it completely. From thereafter, the scale of the unfinished buildings and the unfinished grounds diminished, receded, to vanishing points, until they disappeared altogether and were replaced by the woman, alone. As if floodlit on an empty stage. Bloom had yet to reach the age at which he could appreciate what moved a man of free will to devote himself to what he beheld in a single subject, but he was nevertheless captivated, image after image, by the only facet of this woman's countenance that was at all telling. Whereas her face was a vision of cold, hard balance and structure, whereas her eyes were perfect orbs that reflected neither light nor warmth, whereas her neck was slim and fixed, poised with the rigidity of an idealized human form, her left hand, whether it was at rest on her hip or holding a charm to the outline of her breast, held its fingers splayed, with a single digit dimpling a soft curve of flesh, a detail that, had it not been there, would have moved the boy to wonder if a woman such as the one drawn by Manuel Salazar could have ever been conceived in a world other than that of a man's dream. More engrossing still were the pages he discovered at the end of this volume, in which he saw drawings as exacting as he would ever see. Only to these, his attention focused not on this grand lady's face or the way she positioned her hands on her body, but to her garments, which were not the style of dress one would presume a woman would wear into the untidiness of desecrated ground. Rather, she was dressed in gowns and robes so rich with ornamentation that—if stretched flat and hung on cloistered walls—they could have been medieval tapestry. In their stitching, however, were no obvious symbols from which to divine any religious design. Instead, woven into the fabric were visions of unrequited love and architectural despair, of ruined Eastern cities, topographies of shattered teeth, decaying civilizations, home to no one but one man and one woman, who, from great distances, stood apart, the woman never seeing the man, the man always gazing from atop the rubble of fallen minarets, through cracks in ruptured walls, across dry beds of garden oases, his arms entwined in vines of tropical trees, in ivy clinging to crumbled walls, the man looking at the woman, his expression, like his father's, entrenched with lines formed from ceaseless longing, from never-ending despair.