The Moor's Last Sigh Read online

  In 1916 Francisco da Gama joined the Home Rule campaign of Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, hitching his star to the demand for an independent Indian parliament which would determine the country’s future. When Mrs Besant asked him to found a Home Rule League in Cochin and he had the nerve to invite dock-labourers, tea-pickers, bazaar coolies and his own workers to join as well as the local bourgeoisie, Epifania was quite overcome. ‘Masses and classes in same club! Shame and scandal! Sense is gone from the man,’ she expostulated faintly, fanning herself, and then lapsed into sullen silence.

  A few days after the League was founded, there was a clash in the streets of the dockside Ernakulam district; a few dozen militant Leaguers managed to overpower a small detachment of lightly armed troops and sent them packing without their weapons. The next day the League was formally banned, and a motor-launch arrived at Cabral Island to place Francisco da Gama under arrest.

  He was in and out of prison during the next six months, earning his elder son’s contempt and the younger boy’s undying admiration. Yes, a hero, absolutely. In those prison spells, and in his furious political activism between jail terms, when in accord with Tilak’s instructions he deliberately courted arrest on many occasions, he acquired the credentials that made him a coming man, worth keeping an eye on, a fellow with a following: a star.

  Stars can fall; heroes can fail; Francisco da Gama did not fulfil his destiny.

  In prison he found time for the work that undid him. Nobody ever worked out where, in what reject-goods discount-store of the mind, Great-Grandfather Francisco got hold of the scientific theory that turned him from emerging hero into national laughing-stock, but in those years it came to preoccupy him more and more, eventually rivalling even the nationalist movement in his affections. Perhaps his old interest in theoretical physics had become confused with his newer passions, Mrs Besant’s Theosophy, the Mahatma’s insistence on the oneness of all India’s widely differing millions, the search among modernising Indian intellectuals of the period for some secularist definition of the spiritual life, of that worn-out word, the soul; anyhow, towards the end of 1916 Francisco had privately printed a paper, which he then sent to all the leading journals of the time for their kind attention, entitled Towards a Provisional Theory of the Transformational Fields of Conscience, in which he proposed the existence, all around us, of invisible ‘dynamic networks of spiritual energy similar to electromagnetic fields’, arguing that these ‘fields of conscience’ were nothing less than the repositories of the memory – both practical and moral – of the human species, that they were in fact what Joyce’s Stephen had recently spoken (in the Egoist magazine) of wishing to forge in his soul’s smithy: viz., the uncreated conscience of our race.

  At their lowest level of operation, the so-called TFCs apparently facilitated education, so that what was learned anywhere on earth, by anyone, at once became more easily learnable by anyone else, anywhere else; but it was also suggested that on their most exalted plane, the plane that was admittedly hardest to observe, the fields acted ethically, both defining and being defined by our moral alternatives, being strengthened by each moral choice taken on the planet, and, conversely, weakened by base deeds, so that, in theory, too many evil acts would damage the Fields of Conscience beyond repair and ‘humanity would then face the unspeakable reality of a universe made amoral, and therefore meaningless, by the destruction of the ethical nexus, the safety-net, one might even say, within which we have always lived’.

  In fact, Francisco’s paper propounded no more than the lower, educative functions of the fields with any degree of conviction, extrapolating the moral dimensions in one relatively short, and self-confessedly speculative passage. However, the derision it inspired was on the grand scale. A newspaper editorial in the Madras-based paper The Hindu, headed Thunderbolts of Good and Evil, lampooned him cruelly: ‘Dr da Gama’s fears for our ethical future are like those of a crackpot weatherman who believes our deeds control the weather, so that unless we act “clemently”, so to speak, there will be nothing overhead but storms.’ The satirical columnist ‘Waspyjee’ in the Bombay Chronicle – whose editor Horniman, a friend of Mrs Besant and the nationalist movement, had earnestly implored Francisco not to publish – inquired maliciously whether the famous Fields of Conscience were for human use alone, or if other living creatures – cockroaches, for example, or poisonous snakes – might learn to benefit from them; or whether, alternatively, each species had its own such vortices swirling around the planet. ‘Should we fear contamination of our values – call it Gama Radiation – by accidental field collisions? Might not praying-mantis sexual mores, baboon or gorilla aesthetics, scorpion politics fatally infect our own poor psyches? Or, Heaven forfend – perhaps they already have!!’

  It was these ‘Gama rays’ that finished Francisco off; he became a joke, light relief from the murderous war, economic hardship and the struggle for independence. At first he kept his nerve, and bloody-mindedly concentrated on thinking up experiments that could prove the first, lesser hypothesis. He wrote a second paper proposing that ‘bols’, the long strings of nonsense words used by Kathak dance instructors to indicate movements of feet arms neck, might be suitable bases for tests. One such sequence (tat-tat-taa dreegay-thun-thun jee-jee-kathay to, talang, taka-thun-thun, tai! Tat tai! &c.) could be used alongside four other strings of purposeless nonsense devised to be spoken in the same rhythmic pattern as the ‘control’. Students in a country other than India, having no knowledge of Indian dance instructions, would be asked to learn all five; and, if Francisco’s field theory held, the dance-class gobbledygook should prove much the easiest to memorise.

  The test was never performed. And soon his resignation from the banned Home Rule League was requested and its leaders, who now included Motilal Nehru himself, stopped answering the increasingly plaintive letters with which my great-grandfather bombarded them. Arty types no longer arrived by the boatload to carouse in either of Cabral Island’s follies, to smoke opium in papery East or drink whisky in pointy West, though from time to time, as the Frenchy’s reputation grew, Francisco was asked if he had indeed been the first Indian patron of the young man who was now calling himself ‘Le Corbusier’. When he received such an inquiry, the shattered hero would fire off a terse note in reply: ‘Never heard of the fellow.’ After a time these inquiries also stopped.

  Epifania was exultant. As Francisco sank into introversion and despondency, his face acquiring the puckered look common in men convinced that the world has inexplicably done them a great and unjustified wrong, she moved in swiftly for the kill. (Literally, as it turned out.) I have come to the conclusion that the years of her suppressed discontents had bred in her a vindictive rage – rage, my true inheritance! – that was often indistinguishable from true, murderous hatred; although if you had ever asked her if she loved her husband, the very question would have shocked her. ‘Ours was a love-match,’ she told her dejected spouse during an interminable island evening with only the radio for company. ‘For love or what else I gave in to your fancies? But see where they have brought you. Now for love you must give in to mine.’

  The detested follies in the garden were locked up. Nor was politics to be mentioned in her presence again: when the Russian Revolution shook the world, when the Great War ended, when news of the Amritsar Massacre filtered down from the north and destroyed the Anglophilia of almost every Indian (the Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, returned his knighthood to the King), Epifania da Gama on Cabral Island stopped up her ears and continued to believe, to a degree that was almost blasphemous, in the omnipotent beneficence of the British; and her elder son Aires believed it along with her.

  At Christmas, 1921, Camoens, eighteen, shyly brought the seventeen-year-old orphan Isabella Ximena Souza home to meet his parents (Epifania asked where they had met, was told with many blushes of a brief encounter at St Francis’s Church, and with a disdain born of her great ability to forget everything inconvenient about her own background, sn
orted, ‘Hussy from somewhere!’ But Francisco gave the girl his blessing, stretching out a tired hand at the to-tell-the-truth not-very-festive table and placing it on Isabella Souza’s lovely head). Camoens’s future bride was characteristically outspoken. Her eyes shining with excitement, she broke Epifania’s five-year-old taboo and expressed delight at Calcutta’s virtual boycott of, and Bombay’s large demonstrations against, the visit of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), praising the Nehrus, father and son, for the non-collaboration in court that had sent them both to jail. ‘Now the Viceroy will know what’s what,’ she said. ‘Motilal loves England, but even he has preferred to go to lock-up.’

  Francisco stirred, an old light dawning in those long-dulled eyes. But Epifania spoke first. ‘In this God-fearing Christian house, British still is best, madder-moyselle,’ she snapped. ‘If you have ambitions in our boy’s direction, then please to mindofy your mouth. You want dark or white meat? Speak up. Glass of imported Dão wine, nice cold? You can have. Pudding-shudding? Why not. These are Christmas topics, frawline. You want stuffing?’

  Later, on the jetty, Belle was equally blunt about her findings, complaining bitterly to Camoens that he had not stood up for her. ‘Your family home is like a place lost in a fog,’ she told her fiancé. ‘Where is the air to breathe? Somebody there is casting a spell and sucking life out of you and your poor Dad. As for your brother, who cares, poor type is a hopeless case. Hate me don’t hate me but it is plain as the colours on your by-the-way-excuse-me too-horrible bush-shirt that a bad thing is growing quickly here.’

  ‘Then you won’t come again?’ Camoens wretchedly asked.

  Belle got into the waiting boat. ‘Silly boy,’ she said. ‘You are a sweet and touching boy. And you have no idea at all of what I will and will not do for love: to where I will come or not come, with whom I will or will not fight, whose magic I will un-magic with my own.’

  In the following months it was Belle who kept Camoens informed about the world, who recited to him Nehru’s speech at his re-sentencing to further imprisonment in May 1922. Intimidation and terrorism have become the chief instruments of government. Do they imagine that they will thus instil affection for themselves? Affection and loyalty are of the heart. They cannot be extorted at the point of a bayonet. ‘Sounds like your parents’ marriage to me,’ Isabella cheerily said; and Camoens, his nationalist zeal rekindled by his adoration of his beautiful, loudmouthed girl, had the grace to blush.

  Belle had made him her project. In those days he had begun to sleep badly and, asthmatically, to wheeze. ‘It’s all that bad air,’ she told him. ‘So, so. I must save one da Gama at least.’

  She ordered changes. Under her instructions – and to Epifania’s rage: ‘Don’t think-o for two secs I will cut out chicken in this house because your little chickie, that little floozy-fantoozy, wants you to eat beggar-people’s food’ – he became a vegetarian, and learned to stand on his head. Secretly, too, he broke a window-frame and climbed into the spider-webbed West house where his father’s library languished, and began to devour the books along with the bookworms. Attar, Khayyam, Tagore, Carlyle, Ruskin, Wells, Poe, Shelley, Raja Rammohun Roy. ‘You see?’ Belle encouraged him. ‘You can do it; you can become a person, too, instead of a doormat in an ugly-bug shirt.’

  They didn’t save Francisco. One night after the rains he dived off the island and swam away; perhaps he was trying to find some air beyond the island’s enchanted rim. The rip-tide took him; they found his bloated body five days later, bumping up against a rusty harbour buoy. He should have been remembered for his part in the revolution, for his good works, for his progressivism, for his mind; but his true legacies were trouble in the business (which had been badly neglected these past years), sudden death, and asthma.

  Epifania swallowed the news of his death without a tremor. She ate his death as she had eaten his life; and grew.

  3

  ON THE LANDING OF the wide, steep staircase leading to Epifania’s bedroom was the private family chapel, which Francisco had in the old days permitted one of his ‘Frenchies’ to redecorate in spite of Epifania’s piercing protests. Out had gone the gilded altarpiece with the little inset paintings in which Jesus worked his miracles against a background of coco-palms and tea-plantations, and the china dolls of the apostles, and the golden cherubs posing on teak pedestals and blowing their trumpets, and the candles in their glass bowls the shape of giant brandy glasses, and the imported Portuguese lace on the altar, and even the crucifix itself, ‘all the quality stuff,’ Epifania complained, ‘and Jesus and Mary lockofied in the box-room along-with,’ and not content with these desecrations the blasted fellow had gone and painted the whole place white as if it were a hospital ward, furnished it with the least comfortable wooden pews in Cochin, and then, in that windowless interior room, fixed giant paper cutouts to the walls, imitations of stained-glass windows, ‘as if we can not put proper windows if we want,’ Epifania moaned, ‘see how cheap it makes us look, paper windows in the house of God,’ and the windows didn’t even have decent pictures on them, just slabs of colour in crazy-paving patterns, ‘like a child’s party décor,’ Epifania sniffed. ‘In such a room one should not keep-o blood and body of Our Saviour, but only birthday cake.’

  Francisco had rejoined, in defence of his protégé’s work, that in it shape and colour not only took the place of content but demonstrated that, properly handled, they could in fact be content: provoking Epifania’s contemptuous reply, ‘So maybe we have no need of Jesus Christ, because just shape of cross will do, why bother with any crucifixion, isn’t it? What a blasphemy your Frenchy type has made: a church that lettofies off the Son of God from dying for our sins.’

  The day after her husband’s funeral Epifania had it all burned, and back came the cherubs, lace and glass, the thickly padded chapel chairs covered in dark red silk and the matching cushions edged in golden braid upon which a woman of her position in the world might decently kneel before her Lord. Antique tapestries from Italy depicting kababed saints and tandooried martyrs were restored to the walls and surrounded by ruched and gathered drapes, and soon the disconcerting memory of the Frenchy’s austere novelties had been obliterated by the familiar mustinesses of devotion. ‘God’s in his heaven,’ the brand-new widow announced. ‘All is tip-top with the world.’

  ‘From now on,’ Epifania determined, ‘it is the simple life for us. Salvation is not to be found in Little Man Loincloth and his ilks.’ And indeed the simplicity she sought was anything but Gandhian, it was the simplicity of rising late to a tray of strong, sweet bed-tea, of clapping her hands for the cook and ordering the day’s repasts, of having a maid come in to oil and brush her still-long but quickly greying and thinning hair, and of being able to blame the maid for the increasing quantities left each morning in the brush; the simplicity of long mornings scolding the tailor who came over to the house with new dresses, and knelt at her feet with mouthfuls of pins which he removed from time to time to unloose his flatterer’s tongue; and then of long afternoons at the fabric stores, as bolts of magnificent silks were flung across a white-sheeted floor for her delight, cloth after cloth flowing thrillingly through the air to settle in soft fold-mountains of brilliant beauty; the simplicity of gossip with her few social equals, and of invitations to the ‘functions’ of the British in the Fort district, their Sunday cricket, their dancing teas, the seasonal carolling of their plain heat-beaten children, for they were Christian after all, even if it was only the Church of England, never mind, the British had her respect though they would never have her heart, which belonged to Portugal, of course, which dreamed of walking beside the Tagus, the Douro, of sashaying through the streets of Lisbon on the arm of a grandee. It was the simplicity of daughters-in-law who would attend to most of her needs while she made their lives a living hell, and of sons who would keep the money supply flowing as freely as was required; of everything-in-its-place, of being, at long last, at the heart of the web, the top of the heap, ofloungi
ng dragonwise upon a pile of gold and letting loose, when it pleased her, a burst of cleansing, terrorising flame. ‘It will cost a fortune to keep your Mama in her simplicity,’ Belle da Gama, prefiguring a remark often made about M. K. Gandhi, complained to her husband (she married Camoens early in 1923). ‘And if she has her way it will cost-o us our youth as well.’

  What ruined Epifania’s dreams: Francisco left her nothing except her clothes, her jewellery and a modest allowance. For the rest, she learned to her fury, she would be dependent upon the goodwill of her sons, to whom everything had been bequeathed on a fifty-fifty basis, with the proviso that the Gama Trading Company should not be broken up ‘unless business circumstances dictated otherwise’, and that Aires and Camoens ‘should seek to work together lovingly, lest the family’s assets be damaged by disharmony or discord’.

  ‘Even after death,’ Great-Grandmother Epifania wailed at the reading of the will, ‘he slaps me on both sides of the face.’

  This, too, is part of my inheritance: the grave settles no quarrels.