Mount Terminus (32 page)

He describes here, said Isabella, whose legs had begun to embrace the material between them, the hundred strokes the attendant ran through Miranda's hair with a hard marble comb, and he writes in meticulous detail about the application of her face cream, in particular, the white face paint applied to Miranda's skin with a blunt knife and a dry cloth.

Isabella now became quiet. She was reading ahead, and as she did so, the openness of her face began to close. The entirety of this last section, she said with the concerned expression remaining fixed, charts the effects Manuel observed on Miranda's health over several years. The young woman with the pink pallor, the vital woman he adored, turned lethargic and pallid with hollow cheeks and wobbly legs. She is plumbed around the ankles and wrists, he writes. Suffers from what he calls
Saturnism
? Isabella now looked to Bloom, but Bloom could only shake his head. Miranda, Isabella said as she reached the end, grew so hopelessly ill, Manuel could no longer observe her. The sight of her, he wrote, saddened him too much to set his eyes on her.

And there, said Isabella, this volume ends. Isabella shut the cover and held it to her chest. What, she asked Bloom, would motivate her to do such a thing? She must have known what the application of the paint was doing to her. It appeared as if she were doing it deliberately.

I couldn't say.

If it's true, said Isabella. If what he depicts here has any truth to it, it would seem she intentionally destroyed herself. Destroyed her beauty.

Bloom tried to remove the journal from Isabella's hands, but she refused to let him take it. Please, she said, leave it with me.

Of course, said Bloom.

Is there more?

Bloom knew Roya would reveal the third part soon, so he said, Yes. Later. I'll show it to you later.

Isabella rolled onto her side, and when she did she allowed herself to feel Bloom's erection on her cheek. I think I'm going to draw myself a bath.

I think, perhaps, I'll do the same.

I'll see you at lunch?

Yes, said Bloom. At lunch.

Isabella dragged her cheek away from his lap. She withdrew slowly, watching Bloom's pants rise.

*   *   *

When Bloom had stepped outside Isabella's cottage, he looked up to the tower's pavilion, where he saw Roya looking down on him, calling him to her with a wave of her arm. He walked inside and made his way to the tower stairs and there found her standing beside the cellar door. Why, he asked her, are you choosing to show this to me now? Roya placed a finger to his lips, then reached for his hand and led him down into the cellar. She pulled him along through the empty vaults, and when they reached the chamber door, she pushed it open and pointed Bloom to the ladder. Why? he asked. Why now? Roya responded to his question by pressing her weight against his body. She pushed Bloom in, set his hand on one of the ladder's rungs, then pointed up into the darkness. Following Roya's command, he climbed, and when he reached the top, he opened the door to Manuel Salazar's room, where he saw the projection table leaning against the shelves opposite the door. Where the table had rested all these years, Bloom now saw a wooden hatch open in the floor, and at the edge of the hatch, a message from Roya written in charcoal.
Follow the silver thread.
Where these words were punctuated sat a lantern and box of matches. Bloom lit the lantern and held it over the opening where the table had been, and found there a ladder leading down some ten feet or so. With the lantern in hand he climbed to the bottom, and there he discovered a narrow passage and was reminded of the floor plans Roya had shared with him moments before he first entered the chamber those many years ago. On the wall of the passage just a few steps away, he encountered a fresco of a nymph draped in white robes. Cinched around her hips was a purple sash, crowning her head, a purple laurel. She stood in profile with her arm outstretched and she held in her hand the limp end of a silver thread that wilted to her feet and wound into a coil. A single mercuric strand looped into oblong circles, then stretched taut down the corridor. Bloom followed the line into the darkness. He turned left and then right, right and then left, until he reached the thread's end, which was woven into a tunic worn by a young warrior loping forward, taking flight, a dagger clutched in his hand. The silver stitching formed on the tunic's back an image of a grand kingdom at whose center stood the nymph and the warrior in miniature, the two of them locked in embrace. Towers rose above them, up to the warrior's shoulders. Turreted walls secured them, their stones hugging at the young man's waist. Held in the grip of these structures' stitching were the straps of a golden breastplate imprinted with a labyrinth so intricately plotted, its multitude of warrens appeared to Bloom as if they were changing shape before his eyes. At the point of the warrior's dagger was an open doorway, through which Bloom stepped, and there he found a room aglow with an image of the library reflecting off a mirror onto a projection table, the lens in this case shining through the eye of a Minotaur. Here, there was no chair, no shelves, only a motley heap of blankets, next to which he saw a decanter and an empty wineglass whose stem had snapped. Beside these items sat a flat box with an inkwell, a quill, and a candleholder. Bloom placed the lantern next to the decanter and carefully touched each of the items near it. When he arrived at the blankets, he pulled back the corner to see dark strands of human hair mingling with the blankets' worsted threads. Bloom considered if he really wanted to pull the blanket back any farther, to see what horrific sight was there. Knowing this was what Roya intended him to see, he shut his eyes for a moment and took a breath, and once he had gathered his courage, he pulled the woolen cover away altogether.

Revealed to him were the mummified remains of a woman wearing the very uniform he had seen Miranda's attendant, Adora, wearing in Manuel Salazar's journal. He reached for his lantern and hung it over her face to find an image he had seen before only in photographs, of the unwrapped remains found in Egyptian tombs. She looked like a doll whittled from mahogany, brown and varnished, with no nose or lips or eyes to speak of. She appeared to be wearing a fright mask too large for her face. Her mouth was agape, her teeth discolored and bucked, all her soft tissue long ago shriveled or decomposed. Bloom sat beside her for some time, long enough to grow accustomed to the sight, and soon he lost his fear to touch her. He touched first her hair and found upon contact it turned to dust. Her skin was a petrified shell, brittle in texture, and when he jabbed at her fingers, which were clasped together over her chest, the digits clattered. He spoke to her now. Promised her that one day he would return to give her a proper burial in the gardens. But for the time being, he covered her over once again, and turned to the box. In it, he found wrapped in cloth, a stack of parchment, each page filled with writing.

*   *   *

Bloom waited until after dinner to show Isabella these papers. When they had finished eating, he escorted her to the gallery, and as they had done that morning, they reclined together, and Isabella translated the testimony Adora had written after she had been entombed alive.

She writes here at the beginning, said Isabella, she's been made a prisoner to keep her from telling anyone what she's seen. Here, Isabella said, she expresses her love for Miranda, and asks God's forgiveness for having transgressed in ways for which she should feel shame, but can't, because the sins she's committed were bound by the love she felt for her mistress.

What had she done? asked Bloom.

She writes that Fernando was a savage and a monster, who from the moment he married Miranda suffocated her with an affection she couldn't return. She recounts the circumstances of their exile. Explains here that the incident between Fernando and the king's man wasn't the honorable confrontation Fernando claimed it to be, but rather an act of murder, a spontaneous assault committed against the man for doing little more than make a passing gesture to Miranda in a corridor, a simple greeting directed in his and his wife's direction. He saw something that wasn't there, she writes, and he grew so impassioned with rage, he dashed the poor man's head in with the silver handle of his walking stick. It was for this they were sent away from everyone and everything they knew. And for this, for having solicited the man's attention, for creating a circumstance in which he was forced to defend her honor, Fernando punished Miranda. He locked her away. Behind the closed doors of the ship's cabin when they made their passage, behind closed doors here in this house. Her only authority, said Isabella, was over her servants, so she took great liberties with them as a form of rebellion against Fernando.

To spite him, she dispensed with decorum. To humiliate him, she paraded herself around as she pleased within the confines of her chambers. Every day she prayed Fernando would tire of her antics and return her to Spain. When this appeared unlikely, she changed her tactic and began to pursue Manuel, whom she knew loved her. One day, not very long after the villa had been completed, Fernando rode out into the valley to inspect his cattle, when, on Miranda's order, Adora carried a message to Manuel. Miranda invited him into this room, Isabella said, and she and Adora together seduced him and made love to him. They repeated this experience for some months until Manuel had grown accustomed to their affections. The women then began withdrawing their warmth, and soon grew cold. He begged them, she writes, to accept his love and devotion. Miranda offered to be his if he could arrange their escape. She said if he returned with her and Adora to Spain, she would devote herself to him entirely. Manuel agreed, and one morning, not long afterward, he sent word with Adora that he'd organized safe passage to the port; the two women, he said, should be prepared to leave that evening. That night, however, passed into morning, and Manuel never came. Miranda sent Adora to him, and Adora found him sitting in his studio on the hill in an agitated state. His work, he told her, his position, was more important to him than he had realized, more important to him than the love he felt for them. He couldn't bring himself to sacrifice Fernando's patronage. To have done what Miranda had asked of him, he explained, would mean the end of his dreams. I am a coward, he said to Adora. You chose your hero poorly. Miranda, Adora writes, now grew despondent. Nothing she could do for her would lift her from her despair. And here, Isabella said, is the answer I was searching for earlier today. Miranda decided she would no longer allow these men to enjoy her as their object of desire. She would show them how she truly felt by manifesting her sorrow in her appearance. So she began poisoning herself in the manner we saw in the notebook. It took only months, Adora writes, before she became thin and frail, and a few months more before she was gravely ill, so ill and so ugly to behold, both Fernando and Manuel were grief-stricken at the sight of her. They diverted their eyes away from her when she passed, wept at the mere mention of her name. And when Fernando began to see how her condition affected Manuel, he began to suspect his sadness derived not from a cousinly concern, but from a deeper affection. Unknown to him, Fernando ordered his man, Roberto, to keep a watchful eye on Manuel, and it was at this time Roberto discovered Manuel's secret chamber. Roberto told Fernando, and Fernando, one morning while Manuel was away at work, climbed the ladder to see his wife take her morning bath, and saw in what manner Adora attended to her, and he saw the poison she had been applying to her face. At the sight of this, Fernando descended the shaft's ladder and charged upstairs to his wife's room, and in front of Adora, he brutalized Miranda, who, as she was being beaten, courageously expressed her contempt for him, encouraged him to beat her harder. And he did just that. And the harder he beat her, the more she insulted him, swore to him that any love she ever felt for him was false. As she bled from her nose and mouth, she bragged of her affair with Manuel, told him what great comfort she had taken in his body. She needn't have said any more than this, Adora writes. She could have saved herself the beating had she only said this at the start, as Fernando in that instant threw Miranda over his shoulder and carried her to the tub, where he submerged her in the bath. With one hand he held her under the water by the throat, with the other he fended off Adora. Miranda struggled for several minutes, kicked and scratched at her husband, but she eventually grew still. Adora, at this point, ran off to hide, but when she entered the courtyard, she saw Manuel descending the steps from the studio. She ran to him and told him what Fernando had done. She told him Fernando knew of their attachment and begged him to run away and hide with her. Manuel, instead, charged off in a rage. Adora, intent to stop him, followed him to the boudoir, where he discovered Miranda on the bed, her body … Isabella lifted her hand to her mouth.

What is it? asked Bloom. On Isabella's face was an expression of profound disgust.

He defiled her, she said. It wasn't enough to brutalize her and drown her. He went so far as to …

What?

He lodged a candle inside her, she said, and lit the wick. When Adora and Manuel walked in, it had just begun to singe the bedspread. Adora blew out the flame and covered her over, and Manuel, he was now in an even greater rage. He called out Fernando's name. In response, Fernando called his, from somewhere below. And down Manuel went, Adora writes. From the landing she watched Fernando and Roberto drag him out to the courtyard, where Roberto restrained his arms and Fernando drove over and over again the blade of a knife into his chest. They then let him go, to stumble away and fall face-first into the reflecting pool. It was then Roberto turned away from Manuel's corpse to her. He walked upstairs and grabbed hold of her by the hair, dragged her into the cellar, where he struck her on the head. When she awoke, she found herself entombed, trapped in the void of the villa, where she was left with a pen and some paper, three candles, and one decanter of water. God forgive me, she writes here at the bottom. And then at the end, Miranda, my love, I am coming to you.