Mount Terminus (39 page)

The smallest glimmer of life appeared in the corners of Isabella's eyes. She approached the light cabinet and ran her fingers over the rivulets of wax in Walgensten's lantern.

I didn't have the heart to move it.

Isabella returned to Bloom and pressed her gaunt cheek to his chest. May I sit in here alone for a few moments?

Of course. Bloom left her, but before he walked off into the hall, he observed her face and saw how absent of color and expression it was. However upsetting he found her condition, however impossible the actuality of her return seemed to him, however much he continued to question whether or not the experience he was having was, in fact, taking place, or if he had gone truly mad, he did as he promised he'd do. He let her be without questions. He found her belongings in the foyer—her valise and a trunk—and carried them to the cottage in which she resided when she was last on the estate, and he set them before the bed. He was tempted for a moment to search for clues within them, to see if he could puzzle together where she had been and what she had been through, but he restrained himself. Rather, he left her things alone and descended into the cellar, and climbed the rungs of the ladder to Manuel's chamber, and climbed down the rungs of the ladder to Manuel's labyrinthine passages, followed Ariadne's thread to the eye of the Minotaur, to Adora's tomb, and he watched Isabella sit in the library. She hadn't moved. Not a muscle. She sat upright, staring at the white sheet she and Dr. Straight had used to screen Gaspard's slides. For nearly a half hour he observed her sit as stiff as death, at which time Bloom couldn't take it anymore. He returned to her and, without a word, lifted her up in his arms, carried her to the cottage, and settled her into bed. He then sat through the night in the courtyard trying to believe it was true, wondering if he had somehow conjured her spirit to return to him during those nights spent with Estella, those nights he called out Isabella's name into the caws and squawks of Eduardo's shuffling birds. Throughout the night, he periodically stood up to look in, to see if her body was still at rest on the cottage's bed. Throughout the night, he sat and asked himself if this was how his mother had begun to see Leah when she was alert and awake. He felt himself at the precipice of madness all night, until early the following morning Meralda discovered him sitting upright in his chair, staring at the cottage's exterior, and asked him what in the world was he doing out here, and Bloom said, Please go to the window of the cottage and tell me what you see. Meralda asked what had gotten into him, and Bloom asked once again for her to do as he asked. She walked to the cottage window, and when she returned, she said, Is it her? Is it really her?

You see her, then? She
is
there?

Yes. She is there. Asleep in her bed.

You're certain?

Meralda clutched hold of Bloom and said, Yes! She is there. In one piece. Asleep. Dreaming. Waiting to awake to see you. And then Bloom's cook proclaimed it a miracle his angel had returned to her dear boy. Thank you, she said to the heavens, crossing herself. Please, may she bring him peace and joy.

*   *   *

Bloom and Isabella dined together in the early evenings, and then quietly walked through the hedgerows of the front gardens. For several weeks, they continued on in the same silence to which they had, in gradations, grown accustomed on Isabella's previous visit, but what Bloom once found deeply comforting then, he now considered unnatural. He wanted to talk, to know where she had been and what events had taken shape to so dramatically change her. He didn't want to put on this charade; yet he didn't have the heart to disappoint her. They kept to their regimen, until one night—when, Bloom noticed, Isabella appeared to have regained the smallest fraction of her luster—she finally spoke and asked him to tell her what he had done with himself since their last correspondence. If for no other reason than to hear something occupy their silence, Bloom took his time recounting for her the changes he had witnessed take place on the stretch of land leading to the sea. And because he had few of his own stories he could share that didn't in some way relate to her, he talked of Simon. About the scope of vision, the enormity of his will. She asked about
Death, Forlorn
, and he recounted the details of the production for her. And when she asked what more he had done, he said, without stating why, his rate of production had slowed considerably, but he had been preparing to work with Gottlieb on their largest picture yet.

Will you tell me about it?

Better, said Bloom, I will show you. Tomorrow.

The following day, Isabella insisted she had improved enough to walk the trail to Mount Terminus's peak. She was growing restless and needed a change of scene. Meralda packed a picnic for them, and together Bloom and Isabella walked arm in arm as they made a geriatric ascent to the top of the mountain. Once there, Bloom pointed out the aqueduct carrying water to the basin and told her of the thousands of men and the incalculable amount of material it took to build it. He recalled for her the image of the dam filling the canyon pass and the holocaust of dust generated by the construction in the basin, and he described the nightmarish sunsets cast through its cumulous plumes. He spared her the dismay he felt over the loss of Mount Terminus's former serenity. He left unspoken how disheartened he felt by the changes he saw every morning from the tower, the visions he had of walling himself in.

It was a day of gentle breezes, which brought with them the smell of baked earth and the strong scent of citrus and eucalyptus. When Bloom shut his eyes, he was reminded of his earliest days on Mount Terminus, when he was a child, when the mountain and its vistas were open and clear. On this day, the air was still and the chaparral silent enough they could hear the sounds of quail nervously warbling about unseen. And here they reclined and slept, and when she was awake and alert, Bloom read to Isabella Chekhov's
The Lady with the Dog
, and when they finished this melancholy seaside tale, they watched for some time a condor ride the thermal currents around and about the ranches of the valley.

When they had tired of the sun, Bloom walked Isabella down the trail and then they continued ambling farther down to the plateau.

I have a small surprise for you.

Bloom had earlier tied a long sash of black velvet around his waist, which he now removed, and with Isabella's permission, he covered her eyes. He held her shoulder with one hand and folded his other hand over the curve of her hip. He guided her into the warehouse, where, once inside, he walked her up the stairs, sat her in a chair under a skylight, and told her to be still. When he had climbed to the part of the set he had finished only some weeks before her return, he instructed her to remove the blindfold, and when she did, she found herself looking into a vanity mirror, from where she could see in the mirror's reflection the image of Aphrodite.

Where are you?

Observing you from beyond.

Bloom, who was looking down on her from behind the peepholes of the goddess's eyes, stood up on a scaffold to reveal himself.

I had a tub carried into the villa's gallery some months ago, thinking I'd be able to more easily reflect on Miranda isolated in that room, but I couldn't bring myself to remove Mother's paintings. So I reconstructed her room here.

For what purpose?

It's their story I'm going to make into my next picture.

In the mirror's reflection Bloom could see the smallest of smiles take shape. He once again crouched down and looked at Isabella through the pinholes of Aphrodite's eyes, and from here he recalled how carefree and easy she had once been, and he knew from this vantage point, he was no longer looking at the same woman with whom he'd fallen in love. And while continuing to hide behind the façade, he was moved by a feeling of urgency he knew he would soon be incapable of containing. He understood that whatever ordeal Isabella had been through had been infinitely worse than his, but his experience had in its own way devastated him. And so, speaking from behind the goddess of love's mask, he apologized to Isabella.

I'm sorry, he said. I'm so sorry …

What for?

I can't continue on this way. I can't pretend any longer.

Isabella fixed her eyes on his, and said, My dear, sweet Joseph.

I need to know. I need to understand.

*   *   *

Instead of accompanying him to the gardens that night after dinner, Isabella led Joseph to the parlor, where she had set up the projector and the screen and arranged on a table a stack of film canisters. With her hand on top of the pile, she said, I've been here. What you need to know, you'll find inside these. What you will see, I have lived. And then she left Bloom to watch movies he would learn later that evening she had filmed. They were movies of the dead. The dead and the walking dead, the lamed and dismembered, the infected, the fevered, the deranged, the destroyed. For hours, Bloom sat in the dark, listening to the interminable clicks of his father's drive and loop, experiencing with open eyes one repulsive vision after the next. He watched reel after reel of healthy young men cut down by machine gun volleys, witnessed them mined and thrown into the air in pieces. He saw, through the eye of Isabella's lens, men vaporized by mortar and cannon rounds. Men disappearing into gaseous clouds from which they never emerged. He saw the half-faced, the crushed-faced, the gutted, the pulverized, men burned beyond recognition; the noseless, the eyeless, the jawless, the impaled, men with freshly bloodied stumps; the decomposed, the decomposing, the trench-footed, dead men hung over barbed wire, their sinew, their bowels eaten by rats, maggots bred within their open cavities eaten by ravens. He saw ravens shot down from the skies to be eaten by starving men. Most dreadful of all, Isabella had captured with her camera moments of death, bodies shuddering in death rattles, bodies exhaling their final breaths, the widening of eyes, the fixed glare of the newly dead, the cessation of the excruciating, the unbearable, the unjust, the inconceivable, horrific pain of men.

When Bloom had watched each reel to its completion, he searched the villa for Isabella and found her lying still on the chaise in his mother's gallery. The night was half gone, but she was awake, listlessly staring up at one of his mother's many paintings. He lay down next to her and took her in his arms and held her. And soon she began to talk. She explained to him that while crossing the North Atlantic, Dr. Straight suffered a heart attack. The grief, she said, I thought it had passed. I thought he was prepared to travel. When they reached Paris, the doctor had recovered to some degree but was too weak to continue on. Isabella hospitalized him for several weeks and then took him to a rented room. He willed his home and all his possessions to her. He encouraged her to return to Mount Terminus to be with Bloom. He regretted having taken her along to experience this. A few nights later, he had a stroke and died. In his last conscious moments, he saw in a mirror a reflection of his wife. I'll only be a moment, Julia, he said at the end, and then he was gone. Isabella sent his body to be cremated, so she might easily carry it with her when she returned. She intended to inter his ashes beside his wife's, but they would be lost in the chaos that followed. For a time, she said, she sat still and read. In the flat was a French translation of Ivan Turgenev's
Fathers and Sons.
She drew strength from Bazarov's cold nihilism, from his calculated, unfeeling sensibility. For a time, she became numb. Until she wasn't. She packed her things, took along her camera and film, the invertiscope, and volunteered for the ambulance corps in time for the Battle of the Somme. She carried away men from the trenches and drove them to the field hospitals. One afternoon, when she was en route to the aid station, she crashed her ambulance, and she, herself, became a war casualty. She suffered a concussion and broke a bone in her leg and one in her arm, and in the aftermath of the accident she experienced what they said was a nervous state of exhaustion. Her entire body, as if a switch had been shut off inside it, ceased to function. She convalesced at a quiet sanitarium in the South by the sea, where, fate would have it, she was put in the care of Pierre Janet, the expert on brainwave entrainment who had invited Dr. Straight to join him on the battlefield. Dr. Janet helped Isabella recover to the degree he could help anyone recover from the horrors they had seen, and she, in turn, detailed for the doctor how to administer Dr. Straight's invertiscope experiment. One day, not long after the armistice had been declared, she left her invention in Janet's care, packed up the film she had shot, boarded a ship, and, not knowing where else to go, she returned to Bloom.

Bloom expected Isabella to expel the horror of this nightmare with tears after she had recounted her story, but instead she reported these details as if they were part of someone else's narrative. Perhaps this was necessary, Bloom thought. If she felt it right away, all at once, the burden of it might destroy her. Perhaps it was healthier, he thought, that she saw these experiences from a distant remove, as she would have had she been wearing the invertiscope.

*   *   *

That night they remained in the gallery and Bloom held her close to him until he was certain she had fallen asleep. He drew the heavy curtains to darken the brightening room and went out into the morning light to the rose garden with a pair of pruning shears. He clipped red roses whose heads had opened recently enough their petals were still intact, yet opened long enough to the elements that they could easily be shaken free. He filled a bucket of these overripe roses and returned to the house, where he requested from Meralda a few items from her toilette, some perfume and bath oils, some powder, shampoo, a scrub brush, and he took all these things to the gallery and set them about the tub. When he returned to Isabella, he found her asleep with her body curled tightly around a pillow, her fingers clenched in fists as if she were shielding her face, and there was a noise, a loud and disturbing sound of pebbles rubbing against one another, grinding and churning, in a tedious and persistent rhythm. Bloom momentarily wondered what Isabella was squeezing in her fists, but it wasn't until the grinding ceased and was followed by an incomprehensible mumbling, and then a restrained whimper like that of a dog who'd been shamed by its master, that he realized the noise was emanating from Isabella's mouth. It was only when he eased her fists away from her face, he saw—as the grinding recommenced—that the horrible noise was being made by her teeth. Her jaw was clenching and pressing, gnashing in communion with an invisible force inside her. To help her release whatever it was she was reliving in her dreams, Bloom took hold of her face and whispered her name. Isabella, he said, Isabella. Isabella, he repeated, sounding the word out in his mouth, accentuating each syllable, speaking it as he had so many times when summoning her memory on his visits to Santa Ynez. He now reached out to touch her, to smooth over her hair, and just as the tip of his finger brushed her brow, she turned to him violently, thrashing her arms about. She grabbed hold of Bloom's chest and pressed herself into him. Only then did she briefly awaken, enough to recognize it was him beside her. Oh, Joseph, she said wearily. I'm so sorry. And when her jaw relaxed and she grew calm, Bloom said, There, there. There, there. It's all right. With Bloom holding her, the rest of her body, the muscles in her face, her arms and hands and legs, relaxed and stretched, and the lines of her body straightened into the self-possessed woman he once knew. In this peaceful state, he could see the Isabella he saw so clearly in his dreams on those nights he spent with La Reina del Fuego, when he dreamed of the Isabella he had held in his arms in this very room, and he knew in this instant the love and affection he once felt for her still lived inside him.