The Moor's Last Sigh Read online

  ‘It is my belief’, he told his dumbstruck daughter, ‘that your darling Mummy has come back to us. You know how she loved fresh breeze, how she fought with your grandmother for air; and now by magic the windows fly open. And, daughter mine, just look what-what items are missing! Only those she always hated, don’t you see? Aires’s elephant gods, she used to say. It is your uncle’s little hobby-collection of Ganeshas that has gone. That, and ivory.’

  Epifania’s elephant-teeth. Too many elephants sitting on this house. The late Belle da Gama had always spoken her mind. ‘I think so if I stay up tonight maybe I can look once more upon her dear face,’ Camoens yearningly confided. ‘What do you think? Message is clear as day. Why not wait with me? You and your father are in a same state: he misses his Mrs, and you are glum about your Mum.’

  Aurora, blushing in confusion, shouted, ‘But I at least don’t believe in blooming ghosts,’ and ran indoors, unable to confess the truth, which was that she was her dead mother’s phantom, doing her deeds, speaking in her departed voice; that the night-walking daughter was keeping the mother alive, giving up her own body for the departed to inhabit, clinging to death, refusing it, insisting on the constancy, beyond the grave, of love – that she had become her mother’s new dawn, flesh for her spirit, two belles in one.

  (Many years later she would name her own home Elephanta; so matters elephantine, as well as spectral, continued to play a part in our saga, after all.)

  Belle had been dead for just two months. Hell’s Belle, Aurora’s Aires-uncle used to call her (but then he was always giving people names, imposing his private universe bully-fashion upon the world): Isabella Ximena da Gama, the grandmother I never knew. Between her and Epifania it had been war from the start. Widowed at forty-five, Epifania at once commenced to play the matriarch, and would sit with a lapful of pistachios in the morning shadow of her favourite courtyard, fanning herself, cracking nutshells with her teeth in a loud, impressive demonstration of power, singing the while in a high, implacable voice,

  Booby Shafto’s gone to sea-ea

  Silver bottles on his knee-ee …

  Ker-rick! Ker-rack! went the nutshells in her mouth.

  He’ll come back to bury me-ee

  Boney Booby Shafto.

  In all the years of her life only Belle refused to be scared of her. ‘Four b-minuses,’ the nineteen-year-old Isabella told her mother-in-law brightly the day after she entered the household as a disapproved-of but grudgingly accepted bride. ‘Not booby, not bottles, not bury, not boney. So sweet you sing a love song at your age, but wrong words make it nonsense, isn’t it.’

  ‘Camoens,’ said stony Epifania, ‘inform your goodwife to shuttofy her tap. Some hot-water-trouble is leaking from her face.’ In the days that followed she launched indomitably into a full medley of personalised shanties: What shall we do with the shrunken tailor? caused her new daughter-in-law much inadequately stifled merriment, whereupon Epifania, frowning, changed her tune: Row, row, row your beau, gently down istream, she sang, perhaps advising Belle to concentrate on her spousely duties, and then added the rather more metaphysical put-down: Morally, morally, morally, morally … ker-runch! … wife is not a queen.

  Ah, the legends of the battling da Gamas of Cochin! I tell them as they have come down to me, polished and fantasticated by many re-tellings. These are old ghosts, distant shadows, and I tell their tales to be done with them; they are all I have left and so I set them free. From Cochin harbour to Bombay harbour, from Malabar Coast to Malabar Hill: the story of our comings-together, tearings-apart, our rises, falls, our tiltoings up and down. And after that it’s goodbye, Mattancherri, farewell, Marine Drive … at any rate, by the time my mother Aurora had arrived in that baby-starved household and grown into a tall and mutinous thirteen-year-old, the lines were clearly drawn.

  ‘Too long for a girl,’ was Epifania’s disapproving verdict on her granddaughter as Aurora entered her teens. ‘Trouble in her eye means devil in her heart. Shame on her front, also, as any eye can see. It stickofies too far out.’ To which Belle angrily replied, ‘And what so-so-perfect child has your darling Aires provided? At least one young da Gama is here, alive and kicking, and never mind her big booby-shaftoes. From Aires-brother and Sister Sahara, no sign of any produce: boobies or babies, both.’ Aires’s wife’s name was Carmen, but Belle, mimicking her brother-in-law’s fondness for inventing names, had named her after the desert, ‘because she is barren-flat as sand and in all that waste ground I can’t see any place to get a drink.’

  Aires da Gama, brilliantine struggling to keep slicked-down his thick, wavy white hair (premature whitening has long been a family characteristic; my mother Aurora was snow-white at twenty, and what fairy-tale glamour, what icy gravitas was added to her beauty by the soft glaciers cascading from her head!): how my great-uncle postured! In the small, two-inch-by-two-inch monochrome photographs I remember, what a ludicrous figure he cut in his monocle, stiff collar, and three-piece suit of finest gabardine. There was an ivory-topped cane in one hand (it was a swordstick, family history whispers in my ear), a long cigarette-holder in the other; and he was also, I regret to mention, in the habit of wearing spats. Add height, and a pair of twirling moustachios, and the picture of a comic-opera villain would be complete; but Aires was as pocket-sized as his brother, clean-shaven and a little shiny of face, so that his look of a counterfeit Drone was, perhaps, more to be pitied than hissed at.

  Here, too, on another page of memory’s photograph album, is stooping, squint-eyed Great-Aunt Sahara, the Woman Without Oases, masticating betel-nut in those just-so-cameelious jowls and looking like she’s got the hump. Carmen da Gama was Aires’s first cousin, the orphan child of Epifania’s sister Blimunda and a smalltime printer named Lobo. Both parents had been carried away by a malaria epidemic, and Carmen’s marriage prospects had been lower than zero, frozen solid until Aires amazed his mother by agreeing to the making of a match. Epifania in a torment of indecision suffered a week of sleepless nights, unable to choose between her dream of finding Aires a fish worth hooking and the increasingly desperate need to palm Carmen off on someone before it was too late. In the end her duty to her dead sister took precedence over her hopes for her son.

  Carmen never looked young, never had children, dreamed of diddling Camoens’s side of the family out of its inheritance by fair means or foul, and never mentioned to a living soul that on her wedding night her husband had entered her bedroom late, ignored his terrified and scrawny young bride who lay virginally quaking in the bed, undressed with slow fastidiousness, and then with equal precision slipped his naked body (so similar in proportions to her own) into the wedding-dress which her maidservant had left upon a tailor’s dummy as a symbol of their union, and left the room through the latrine’s outside door. Carmen heard whistles borne towards her on the water, and rising sheet-shrouded while the heavy knowledge of the future fell upon her shoulders and pushed them down into a stoop, she saw the wedding-dress gleaming in moonlight as a young man rowed it and its occupant away, in search of whatever it was that passed, among such occult beings, for bliss.

  The story of Aires’s gowned adventure, which left Great-Aunt Sahara abandoned in the cold dunes of her unbloodied sheets, has come down to me in spite of her silence. Most ordinary families can’t keep secrets; and in our far-from-ordinary clan, our deepest mysteries usually ended up in oils-on-canvas, hanging on a gallery wall … but then again, perhaps the whole incident was invented, a fable the family made up to shock-but-not-too-much, to make more palatable – because more exotic, more beautiful – the fact of Aires’s homosexuality? For while it’s true that Aurora da Gama grew up to paint the scene – on her canvas the man in the moonlit dress sits primly, facing a bare perspiring oarsman’s torso – it would be possible to argue that for all her bohemian credentials this double portrait was a domesticating fantasy, only conventionally outrageous: that the story, as told and painted, put Aires’s secret wildness into a pretty frock, hiding away the c
ock and arse and blood and spunk of it, the brave determined fear of the runt-sized dandy soliciting hefty companions among the harbour-rats, the exalted terror of bought embraces, sweet alley-back and toddy-shack fondlings by thick-fisted stevedores, the love of the deep-muscled buttocks of cycle-rickshaw-youths and of the undernourished mouths of bazaar urchins; that it ignored the fretful, argumentative, amour fou reality of his long, but by no means faithful liaison with the fellow in the wedding-night boat, whom Aires baptised ‘Prince Henry the Navigator’ … that it sent the truth offstage titillatingly dressed, and then averted its eyes.

  No, sir. The painting’s authority will not be denied. Whatever else may have happened between these three – the unlikely late-life intimacy between Prince Henry and Carmen da Gama will be recorded in its place – the episode of the shared wedding-dress was where it all began.

  The nakedness beneath the borrowed wedding outfit, the bridegroom’s face beneath the bridal veil, is what connects my heart to this strange man’s memory. There is much about him that I do not care for; but in the image of his queenliness, where many back home (and not only back home) would see degradation, I see his courage, his capacity, yes, for glory.

  ‘But if it wasn’t prick in the bottom,’ my dear mother, inheritor of her own mother’s fearless tongue, used to say of life with her unloved Aires-uncle, ‘then, darling, it was strictly pain in the neck.’

  And while we’re getting down to it, to the root of the whole matter of family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art, let’s not forget who started the whole thing, who was the first one to go out of his element and drown, whose watery death removed the linchpin, the foundation-stone, and began the family’s long slide, which ended up by dumping me in the pit: Francisco da Gama, Epifania’s defunct spouse.

  Yes, Epifania too had once been a bride. She came from an old, but now much-reduced trader family, the Menezes clan of Mangalore, and there was great jealousy when, after a chance encounter at a Calicut wedding, she landed the fattest catch of all, against all reason, in the opinion of many disappointed mothers, because a man so rich ought to have been decently revolted by the empty bank accounts, costume jewellery and cheap tailoring of the little gold-digger’s down-and-out clan. At the dawn of the century she came on Great-Grandfather Francisco’s arm to Cabral Island, the first of my story’s four sequestered, serpented, Edenic-infernal private universes. (My mother’s Malabar Hill salon was the second; my father’s sky-garden, the third; and Vasco Miranda’s bizarre redoubt, his ‘Little Alhambra’ in Benengeli, Spain, was, is, and will in this telling become, my last.) There she found a grand old mansion in the traditional style, with many delightfully interlinking courtyards of greeny pools and mossed fountains, surrounded by galleries rich in woodcarving, off which lay labyrinths of tall rooms, their high roofs gabled and tiled. It was set in a rich man’s paradise of tropical foliage; just what the doctor ordered, in Epifania’s opinion, for though her early years had been relatively penurious she had always believed she had a talent for magnificence.

  However, a few years after the birth of their two sons, Francisco da Gama came home one day with an impossibly young and suspiciously winsome Frenchman, a certain M. Charles Jeanneret, who put on the airs of an architectural genius even though he was barely twenty years old. Before Epifania could blink, her gullible husband had commissioned the jackanapes to build not one but two new houses in her precious gardens. And what crazy structures they turned out to be! – The one a strange angular slabby affair in which the garden penetrated the interior space so thoroughly that it was often hard to say whether one was in or out of doors, and the furniture looked like something made for a hospital or a geometry class, you couldn’t sit on it without bumping into some pointy corner; the other a wood and paper house of cards – ‘after the style Japanese’, he told an appalled Epifania – a flimsy fire-trap whose walls were sliding parchment screens, and in whose rooms one was not supposed to sit, but kneel, and at night one had to sleep on a mat on the floor with one’s head on a wooden block, as if one were a servant, while the absence of privacy provoked Epifania into the observation that ‘at least knowledge of stomach health of household members is no problem in a house with toilet-paper instead of bathroom walls’.

  Worse still, Epifania soon discovered that once these madhouses were ready her husband frequently tired of their beautiful home, would smack his hand on the breakfast table and announce they were ‘moving East’ or ‘going West’; whereupon the whole household had no choice but to move lock, stock and barrel into one or other of the Frenchman’s follies, and no amount of protests made the slightest jot of difference. And after a few weeks, they moved again.

  Not only was Francisco da Gama incapable of living a settled life like ordinary folks, but, as Epifania discovered despairingly, he was also a patron of the arts. Rum-and-whisky-drinking hemp-chewing persons of low birth and revolting dress-sense were imported for long periods and filled up the Frenchy’s houses with their jangling music, poetry marathons, naked models, reefer-stubs, all-night card-schools and other manifestations of their in-all-ways-incorrect behaviour. Foreign artists came to stay and left behind strange mobiles that looked like giant metal coathangers twirling in the breeze, and pictures of devil-women with both eyes on the same side of their noses, and giant canvases that looked like an accident had befallen with the paint, and all these calamities Epifania was obliged to put on the walls and in the courtyards of her own beloved home, and look at every day, as if they were decent stuff.

  ‘Your art-shart, Francisco,’ she told her husband venomously, ‘it will blindofy me with ugliness.’ But he was immune to her poisons. ‘Old beauty is not enough,’ he told her. ‘Old palaces, old behaviour, old gods. These days the world is full of questions, and there are new ways to be beautiful.’

  Francisco was hero material from the day he was born, destined for questions and quests, as ill-at-ease with domesticity as Quixote. He was handsome as sin but twice as virtuous, and on the coir-matting cricket-pitches of the time he proved, when young, a devilish slow left arm tweaker and elegant number four bat. At college he was the most brilliant student physicist of his year, but was orphaned early and chose, after much reflection, to forgo the academic life, do his duty, and enter the family business. He grew up, becoming an adept of the age-old da Gama art of turning spice and nuts into gold. He could smell money on the wind, could sniff the weather and tell you if it was bringing in profit or loss; but he was also a philanthropist, funding orphanages, opening free health clinics, building schools for the villages lining the back-waterways, setting up institutes researching coco-palm blight, initiating elephant conservation schemes in the mountains beyond his spice-fields, and sponsoring annual contests at the time of the Onam flower festival to find and crown the finest oral storytellers in the region: so free with his philanthropy, in fact, that Epifania was driven to wailing (uselessly): ‘And then, when funds are frittered, and children are cap-in-hand? Then can we eatofy your thisthing, your anthropology?’

  She fought him every inch of the way, and lost every battle except the last. Francisco the modernist, his eyes fixed on the future, became a disciple first of Bertrand Russell – Religion and Science and A Free Man’s Worship were his ungodly Bibles – and then of the increasingly fervent nationalist politics of the Theosophical Society of Mrs Annie Besant. Remember: Cochin, Travancore, Mysore, Hyderabad were technically not part of British India; they were Indian States, with their own princes. Some of them – like Cochin – could boast, for example, of educational and literacy standards far in excess of those prevailing under British direct rule, while in others (Hyderabad) there existed what Mr Nehru called a condition of ‘perfect feudalism’, and in Travancore even the Congress was declared illegal; but let us not confuse (Francisco did not confuse) appearance with reality; the fig-leaf is not the fig. When Nehru raised the n
ational flag in Mysore, the local (Indian) authorities destroyed not only the flag but even the flagpole the moment he had left town, lest the event annoy the true rulers … Soon after the Great War broke out on his thirty-eighth birthday, something snapped inside Francisco.

  ‘The British must go,’ he announced solemnly at dinner beneath the oil-paintings of his suited-and-booted ancestors.

  ‘O God, where are they going?’ asked Epifania, missing the point. ‘In such a bad moment they will abandon us to our fate and that boogyman, Kaiser Bill?’

  Francisco exploded, and twelve-year-old Aires and eleven-year-old Camoens froze in their seats. ‘The Kaiser is one bill we are already paying,’ he thundered. ‘Taxes doubled! Our youngsters dying in British uniform! The nation’s wealth is being shipped off, madam: at home our people starve, but British Tommy is utilising our wheat, rice, jute and coconut products. I personally am required to send out goods below cost-price. Our mines are being emptied: saltpetre, manganese, mica. I swear! Bombay-wallahs getting rich and nation going to pot.’

  ‘Too many crooks and books have filled your ears,’ Epifania protested. ‘What are we but Empire’s children? British have given us everything, isn’t it? – Civilisation, law, order, too much. Even your spices that stink up the house they buy out of their generosity, putting clothes on backs and food on children’s plates. Then why speakofy such treason and filthy up my children’s ears with what-all Godless bunk?’

  After that day they had little to say to each other. Aires, defying his father, took his mother’s side; Epifania and he were for England, God, philistinism, the old ways, a quiet life. Francisco was all bustle and energy, so Aires affected indolence, learned how to infuriate his father by the luxuriant ease of his lounging. (In my youth, for different reasons, I also was apt to lounge. But I was not seeking to annoy; my vain intent was to set my slowness against the accelerated rush of Time itself. This tale, too, will be revisited at its proper location.) It was in the younger boy, Camoens, that Francisco found his ally, inculcating in him the virtues of nationalism, reason, art, innovation, and above all, in those days, of protest. Francisco shared Nehru’s early contempt for the Indian National Congress – ‘just a talk-shop for wogs’ – and Camoens gave his grave assent. ‘Annie this and Gandhi that,’ Epifania scolded him. ‘Nehru, Tilak, all these rogue gangsters from the North. Ignore your mother! Keep it up! Then it’ll be the jailhouse for you, chop-chop.’