by Grand, David
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.
* * *
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 h
ung 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.
* * *
The attraction of Manuel Salazar’s secret chamber drew Bloom back to face the eye of Cyclops many times in the months that followed. He often lay awake at night preoccupied with the dark cavity hidden inside the villa’s walls, and he imagined there the face of a man resembling his father’s, and he imagined reflected on the projection table the unblemished visage he had come to memorize from Salazar’s diary, and he wondered, Had she sat as still for Salazar as Roya sat for him? Did she know he was there observing her? Could she feel his need to be nearby? On one such night he weighed these thoughts, Bloom’s father appeared to him in what he thought at first was a dream. A barely visible outline of a man, a shock of white hair glimmering like the twilight’s gloaming, rose up over him, and said, Come, my dear, we have a journey to take.
Bloom reached out to touch his father, and when he was convinced that what he saw and heard was real, he protested, But, Father, the sun hasn’t risen.
It will soon enough.
I want to sleep.
Later, Jacob said, you’ll sleep.
Bloom, as he neared the end of his twelfth year, had grown to the height of a man, still thin and lanky, but sizable enough that his father grunted when he pulled his weight upright. Jacob wet his hands in the washbasin on the dressing table, and with more attention than Bloom was accustomed to receiving from him, the elder Rosenbloom crept his fingers through his hair and pulled back the tight coils that stubbornly clung to the corners of his eyes when his forehead moistened in the heat.
There now, he said. Dress yourself and meet me downstairs.
Outside, Jacob sat atop the buckboard, holding the reins of the mare, which appeared to Bloom hypnotized by the lightening colors stratifying the sky. When he climbed on board and took his seat, his father placed an attaché case on his lap, and just as Jacob was about to turn away from him, he looked onto his son’s face not unlike the way the horse had become transfixed by the aurora. The grooves between his brow squeezed shut, and appearing as if he wanted to elaborate on the purpose of their trip, or on something else altogether, Jacob shook his head to cast away whatever was on his mind, and turning his focus to the mare’s ass, he snapped the leather straps, sending them on their way. They rode over the gravel drive dividing the gardens in which Jacob spent his days, and because it was rare he and Bloom ever ventured beyond Mount Terminus’s gates, because Bloom felt a deepening connection to the estate’s creator, he was drawn back to the villa’s grandeur. He watched it fade into the distance, and as he did so, he noticed, standing in silhouette between two pillars of the tower’s arcaded pavilion, the diminutive figure of Roya. He watched her stand there before a crimson sky for as long as he could see her and looked away only when his father said in a conciliatory voice, There, there, we are not going very far.
They switched back and forth down the mountain road without talking, and cantered past citrus groves rooted to ruts of desiccated earth. Extending into the distance as far as they could see, baubles of fruit weighted down muscular limbs. Dust devils formed in the wake of their tracks and spun into Aeolian wisps of smoke whose tendrils dispersed upward into vapor trails, on which a condor lofted and circled about. When some hours later they reached the bluff overlooking the ocean’s expanse, they descended a slope to the coastal trail, not far from whose head stood alone at the edge of the beach a blinding structure, tall and long and molten white. Illuminated by the morning sun, it appeared to Bloom a mirage, as liquid and formless as the sea. As they neared it, the building’s shape solidified into what looked like a steamship three tiers high, along each of whose decks ambled figures neutered of their gender by white gowns and wide-brimmed hats. Beyond this building was a smaller vessel, where a horseshoe hung on a brace over a pair of barn doors. It was to this structure the father steered the mare, and here the man and his son disembarked, and left the horse and buckboard with a liveryman. Jacob handed the attendant a coin and said they would only be a moment. He then took the attaché case from Bloom and pressed his hand to his b
ack to set him in motion. They walked together onto white planks filling the gap between the two buildings, where, before they reached its end, Jacob halted. He turned to his son and looked into his eyes with the same probing uncertainty with which he had searched his face earlier that morning. As if he were apologizing in advance for doing something he knew to be of questionable judgment, he said, You needn’t say a word. You must come with me, but if you don’t feel moved to, you needn’t utter a sound. It was impossible for Bloom to comprehend the meaning of his father’s caution, the reason for his contrition, but when they reached the end of the boardwalk and turned the corner, it became clear. Spread out before him on a deck overlooking a significant region of the beach, the same gowned figures he had witnessed ambling along the landings reclined in rows of white chaises arranged like the groves they had just ridden through, and standing in contrast to everyone and everything about them at the far end, were the three dark figures who came and went, to and from Mount Terminus, dressed in black long coats and bowler hats.
