Mount Terminus (44 page)

A tablet. And something to write with.

Bloom handed her a tablet and a pencil, and on Isabella went, looking and writing down what came to mind.

*   *   *

Isabella stayed in that night. They sat together in the dining room and talked over
The Death of Paradise
in as many dimensions as they could think of. They began with its broadest elements. Isabella was of the opinion that Bloom had placed too much emphasis on Manuel's point of view in the second act. She argued that equal weight should be distributed among the three principal characters. Otherwise, the final scene, in which Miranda and Manuel were murdered by Fernando, wouldn't resonate with authentic emotion. At the moment, she thought Fernando too much a monster, Miranda too much a pawn in Manuel's fantasies. Instead of Manuel standing on his own, observing, as it is now, she said, all three of them should be present throughout, and given a full voice, as it were.

Fernando, perhaps, takes part at the massacre. Leads the soldiers. Gives the orders. Miranda, she can witness it from a distance, and show little concern for what's taking place. I can see her bothered by the inconvenience of having to wait yet another day to be settled at the end of her long journey. As if the clearing of the land were a pesky nuisance. And then there is Manuel, who you've treated exactly as he should be. The reluctant witness, the voice of reason, of conscience, who later dwells in his fantasies of Miranda in order to escape the haunting images he's seen, then turns the pathetic coward.

As for the soldiers, she continued, you would be amazed how casually men like these take to violence, how so many of them are inured to the savage acts they perpetrate. You've depicted them as wild beasts, but in reality, they would be used to inflicting pain and death. They would be numb to it, as familiar with the sickening stench of blood as any man who labors in an abattoir. They would hardly think anything of it to wear the blood of their victims on their armor for weeks at a time. More likely, they would be cold and methodical on the surface, indifferent to the suffering of the people they've destroyed.

*   *   *

They went on talking at length in the parlor after dinner, and for the first time in quite a long time, they went to bed together and held each other in their sleep. When they awoke the following morning, they took their coffee and their breakfast in the tower, and then went to the studio, where they continued to speculate about the movement of the narrative, and soon Bloom began to draft all the changes Isabella had recommended. He neither agreed nor disagreed with them, but he wanted to make them because he had managed to engage her. He had decided this picture would belong to her as much as it belonged to him.

They would now start the story in the past's present, with its emphasis on Don Fernando. They would begin with him and treat him as they would a saint. A man who had for many years governed his territory justly; a man who had sent his crops to the neediest of the surrounding pueblos. Housed the poor. Built a cathedral in which all were welcome to worship and take refuge.

To complicate matters, his old henchman, Roberto, would then arrive on the estate after a long absence to blackmail Fernando. He would threaten to reveal all the dark secrets of his past if he didn't provide him a portion of his land and some livestock. Fernando would agree to this, but before he delivered on his word, the picture would return to the past. To the time of Fernando, Miranda, and Manuel's youth. When Fernando's money and power gave him an inflated sense of importance; when Miranda saw only the promise of Fernando's position and nothing of his demeanor; when Manuel saw both of them for who and what they were, but forgave them for the promise of a better future.

In a series of short scenes, Fernando would be exposed as the hateful character he once was, the man quick to take a life at the slightest threat to his pride; Miranda an entitled beauty who expected the world to be given to her; Manuel, attached to his work, in desperate search of an opportunity to breathe life into the visions he carried around in his mind and his notebooks. And then would arrive the confluence of events following Fernando's exile. Fernando would turn brutal tyrant, destroyer of men, venal public official, Miranda's jailor. Miranda would turn caged bird looking to gain its freedom. Manuel would attain all he had strived for, then betray those who had provided him his chance. All of which would lead to the murders of Miranda, Manuel, and Adora, to Fernando's crisis of conscience. The haunting of Don Fernando by Miranda's ghost. She would show him what great suffering he was responsible for, take him on a journey through the evils of his past, an odyssey that would forge a path to his redemption. When Fernando had been convincingly transformed, the picture would return to its present, at which point Fernando would confront Roberto. He would refuse him the land and livestock he sought, and in doing so, Roberto would grow agitated and slay Fernando. And in the end, Fernando would be venerated and condemned equally, as devil and saint, by the very people he had subjected to death and destruction.

*   *   *

They now held up these images and this progression of events above those Bloom had posted to the walls of his studio and they saw two versions of the same story, and they were satisfied with the work they had done together.

*   *   *

They began filming
The Death of Paradise
some weeks later. Isabella accompanied Bloom every morning to the sets, and over Gottlieb's objections, she helped Bloom keep all the details of the production in order. Without asking anyone's permission, she began briefing the crew and the actors every morning about how the day would proceed, and because she played a significant part in creating the vision of the picture, and often knew what Gottlieb would be asking of them, she coached them on what they could expect from their mercurial director. In turn, both the crew and the actors were often able to provide Gottlieb what he asked of them in the first take. Isabella thrived on the work, and she and Bloom found themselves as happy and connected as they had been when Isabella first arrived on Mount Terminus with Dr. Straight. They had reached such a level of contentment, Bloom convinced himself what he'd seen in Manuel's chamber on the night of the party was little more than an innocent moment between brother and sister. If it was anything more than that, if it were a scene from an affair, he preferred not to know, preferred not to ask. Even if he had learned this was the case, he no longer cared, as Isabella, of her own free will, had chosen to return to him, and this was most important of all. She preferred to stay in with him at night, and on those occasions Bloom felt she had become restless and needed to escape Mount Terminus, he found it within himself to overcome his discomfort with the world at large, and accompany her to town after they had completed their work for the day, and there he would walk with her, look into shop windows, take in a picture show, a meal. He even summoned the wherewithal to accept a dinner invitation on Isabella's behalf, and he began to learn through his wife's example—not unlike what Gottlieb's Myron Bishop had learned from the woman of his affection—how to tolerate the company of people with whom he wouldn't otherwise choose to spend time. He discovered how easy it was to remain silent—to play the role of the observer—when in a room full of people who had cast themselves at the center of their own little dramas and comedies. Bloom would never become entirely comfortable in the society where Isabella circulated, but he would learn to accept it, well enough, so on his own volition, he asked Isabella to teach him how to dance.

They set up the Victrola in the courtyard, and for some weeks after a late dinner Isabella taught him how to fox-trot, and when Bloom believed he was able to dance without needing to apply his mind to the steps, they drove down the mountain and into town to a music hall, where they danced into the night.

When on a short visit to the set one afternoon, Simon, upon seeing what harmony had returned to their marriage, started to drop in for dinner at the villa several times a week, usually on his own, occasionally with a companion. Bloom noticed from time to time Isabella and Simon exchanging glances; every now and again they would linger on each other's eyes for a while, then move on. But Bloom felt affirmed enough in his connection to his wife, he allowed them this small thrill, as each time Simon came and went, Bloom benefited from a change in Isabella's spirit. After Simon departed, she was often enlivened, but not as if she were inspired by his brother's presence, rather as if she were trying to counteract an urge, struggling against an unwelcome impulse. After these dinners with his brother, she grew that much more affectionate and attentive to Bloom, that much more uninhibited in her advances toward him. Perhaps he should have felt disturbed by this, but he had come to understand this inner tension Isabella needed in order to feel fully alive. He would only be able to recognize it for what it was, the hunger she tried to describe to him that day in the rose garden after she had been sequestered in the gallery all those months. He could only guess it was an inner turmoil derived from having witnessed how random and anarchic was the logic of Death, how indiscriminate and blind it was in its selection of the living. After having lived in the face of such a dark force, after experiencing the darkest human behavior, he presumed, she would never be fully satisfied with peace and tranquility alone. She had witnessed in her brief existence too many enlightened people shatter their most sacred values.

*   *   *

One night after Simon had visited, Bloom found Isabella had lapsed into a mood as serious as the one he found her in when she first returned to Mount Terminus after the war. As they lay together in bed, in the dark, Bloom asked her what was the matter. There's something I need to tell you, she said. When Bloom asked what it was she needed to say, she told him how she feared to begin. To this, Bloom said nothing. He waited. And waited. And eventually Isabella began to speak. She confided in Bloom about the events that had precipitated the nervous exhaustion she experienced when she came to after her accident. She was alone, she told Bloom. She shouldn't have been alone. But she was. She was transporting to the hospital a man she believed to be a wounded French soldier. The man had a head wound, serious, but one from which he would recover. He lay unconscious on a cot in the back of the ambulance as Isabella drove through wheat fields overgrown from neglect. Halfway between the battlefield and the hospital, she heard the soldier rouse to his feet, and she told him he should lie back and rest until they arrived. He wasn't in a state to be sitting up. When she turned to see if he had done as she asked, she found the point of a bayonet at her nose. The man spoke to her in German and calmly gestured to the side of the road. When she had pulled the ambulance over, the soldier pushed her out of her seat onto the muddy shoulder. He marched her out into one of the fields, through tall stalks of grain, and again he pushed her, down onto her back. She could see he wasn't interested in having her, rather, she could see, from the cold, lifeless expression on his face, he simply intended to kill her and take the ambulance. He turned his rifle on her now, and without acknowledging that before him lay prostrate a human being, he pulled the trigger. Until that moment, she told Bloom, she hadn't feared death. She hadn't felt it a threat to her. In fact, given what she had seen, what she had documented, given the death of Dr. Straight and his wife, a small part of her had wished it upon herself. But when the rifle misfired, she felt all the apprehension one would expect to feel when confronted with one's own end, and she wanted more than anything to live. The soldier's face was unchanged, but Isabella's spirit had been altered. She didn't want to die. Not there. Not then. And so when the man raised the bayonet to check his weapon, she took hold of a rock she felt pressing into the small of her back, and charged the soldier. She sprang up so quickly, in his lethargic state he didn't have time to lower his weapon, and Isabella hit him hard where his head had already been concussed. She continued to beat him back with heavier and heavier blows until he dropped his weapon and fell, and when he fell, she picked up the rifle and turned the bayonet on him. It all happened so quickly, she told Bloom. She pointed the bayonet at his chest and instinctively lunged with all her weight bearing down on him. She drove the blackened blade between his ribs and did as she had seen the soldiers do on the battlefield: she twisted it and twisted it, back and forth, removed it, plunged it in again, twisted and twisted. She felt cartilage resist the blade. She felt the blade scrape and crack bone. She then lunged some more. She lunged and lunged until the man became still, and she continued to twist and lunge until she heard his last breath expel from his lungs, saw the skin around his eyes relax, smelled the putrid evacuation of his bowels. Isabella became silent at this point. Bloom had been holding her as she spoke and now held her tighter. What troubled her, she told Bloom next, was what she hadn't felt when she had acknowledged to herself what she had done. It was what she couldn't feel that preoccupied her so much when she walked back to the ambulance and started driving. For having taken this man's life, she felt neither remorse nor regret. She felt absolutely nothing, as lifeless as the expression on the soldier's face when he pulled the rifle's trigger. And it was the thought of the absence of feeling that distracted her from the road, from not seeing the ditch she drove into.

And when she awoke after the accident, it wasn't her injury or the memory of the death she had seen on such a monumental scale that had so deeply affected her. Her affliction was the absence of conscience. The voice. That small, rational voice that resided in her innermost thoughts had disappeared. She had been reshaped, delivered to a void whose weightless vacuum she had no power to maneuver within. She was frequently horrified by the memory of the killing itself, how it felt when she lodged the blade between the man's ribs, the rank smell of him, the sound of him gasping for breath when his lung had been punctured, the image of him choking on his own blood, but she had yet to feel as if she had acted in an unnatural way. She so very much expected her inner voice to intervene, to plague her in some manner, but each time she recalled the killing in her mind, she admitted to reliving not the torment for having acted against God, but the triumph of having done away with her attacker before he could do away with her. She could still recall the great relief she enjoyed when she had overcome him and was given the chance to live. Never again, she told Bloom, would she hold herself above human fallibility and weakness. And while she abided by the laws of men, she could never again live in harmony with the mores of a civilized society. I often feel lost, she told Bloom. As if I'm balancing between two opposing worlds.