The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  The locals – or so I guessed – were less befuddled by the town’s narcotic quality than the Parasites; but the prevalent mood of vacuous alienation and apathy did affect them to some degree. Felicitas and Renegada needed to be asked three times about the visit to Benengeli of the young woman, mentioned by Gottfried Helsing, who had been asking after Vasco Miranda not long ago. On the first two occasions they shrugged and reminded me that Helsing was not to be trusted; but when I returned to the subject one evening, Renegada looked up from her sewing and burst out, ‘Oh, yes, my goodness, now that I think of it, a woman did come – a bohemian type, some sort of art specialist from Barcelona, a picture restorer, or something similar. She got nowhere with her coquettish ways; and by now she must be safely back in Catalonia where she belongs.’ Once again I had the strong feeling that Felicitas disapproved of her half-sister’s indiscretion. She scratched at her mole and pursed her lips, but said nothing. ‘So this Catalan woman got to see Vasco, after all?’ I said, excited by the realisation. ‘We didn’t say that,’ snapped Felicitas. ‘There’s no point in discussing this any further.’ Renegada bowed her head in submission and returned to her needlework.

  On my wanderings I occasionally encountered the heavily perspiring figure of the Guardia chief, Salvador Medina, who invariably frowned at me, and removed his cap to scratch his sweat-soaked locks, as if trying to remember who the dickens I might be. We never spoke, partly because my Spanish was still poor, although it was slowly improving, both through the nocturnal study of books and thanks to the daily lessons I was being given, in return for a supplementary charge added to my weekly bill for board and lodging, by the Larios sisters; and partly because the English language had vanquished all Salvador Medina’s attempts to get hold of it, like a master criminal who remains always two steps ahead of the law.

  I was happy that Medina was so unconcerned about me as to forget me so readily, because it suggested that the Indian authorities had expressed no interest in my whereabouts. I reminded myself that I had recently committed the crime of murder; and reflected that the explosion at my victim’s home had evidently succeeded in obliterating my deed. The greater violence of the bomb had been painted over the scene in which I had participated, and hidden it for ever from the investigators’ eyes. Further confirmation that I was not under suspicion came from my bank accounts. During my years in my father’s Tower I had managed to stash away sizeable sums in overseas banks, including numbered accounts in Switzerland (so you see that I was not the mere thug and ‘stupe’ that ‘Adam Zogoiby’ had taken me for!). As far as I knew there had been no recent attempt to interfere with my arrangements, even though so many aspects of the crashed Siodicorp were under investigation, and so many bank accounts had been placed under the official receiver’s administration, or blocked.

  It was strange, however, that my crime – murder, after all; murder most foul, and the one and only murder for which I was ever responsible – had slipped so quickly to the back of my brain. Perhaps my unconscious mind had also accepted the greater authority, the successfully overwhelming reality of the bombs, and wiped my moral slate clean. Or perhaps this absence of guilt – this suspended moral animation – was Benengeli’s gift to me.

  Physically, too, I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. Even my asthma had improved; how lucky for my chest, I thought, to have fallen in with the only two non-smokers in town – for it was true that everywhere I went people were puffing away like mad. To avoid the stench of cigarettes I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town. The village blacksmith, whose speciality was the manufacture of chains and manacles for the Avellaneda jail, nodded to me as he nodded to all passers-by and called out, in the heavily accented Spanish of the region, ‘Sti’ walki’ free, huh? Som’ day soo’, soo’,’ upon which he would rattle his heavy chains and roar with laughter. As my Spanish improved, I strayed ever further from the Street of Parasites and thus gained a few glimpses into Benengeli’s other self, that village defeated by history in which jealous men in stiff suits stalked their fiancées, sure of those chaste maidens’ infidelity, and where the hoofs of the horses of long-dead philanderers were heard galloping down the cobbled streets at night. I began to understand why Felicitas and Renegada Larios spent their evenings at home, with the shutters closed, talking to each other in low voices while I studied Spanish in the comfort of my tiny room.

  On the Wednesday of my fifth week in Benengeli, I returned to my lodgings after a walk during which an uncouth young one-legged woman thrust into my unwilling hand a cheaply produced pamphlet enumerating the anti-abortionist demands of ‘Suffer Ye Little Children, the revolutionary crusade for unborn Christians’, and invited me to a meeting. I turned her down flat, but was at once beset by memories of Sister Floreas, who took the pro-life war into the most overpopulated regions of Bombay, and who had gone to a place in which unwanted pregnancies were presumably no longer a problem; sweet, fanatical Minnie, I thought, I hope you’re happy now … and I thought, too, about my erstwhile boxing coach, the similarly peg-legged Lambajan Chandiwala Borkar, and of Totah – that parrot which I had always loathed, and which had disappeared after the Bombay bombings, never to be seen again. As I contemplated the vanished bird I was overcome by nostalgia and grief, and began to weep in the street, to the consternation and embarrassment of the young militant, who quickly hurried away to join her SYLC colleagues in their den.

  The Moor who returned to the Larios women’s little house on the Calle de Miradores was therefore a changed man, one restored by coincidence to the world of feelings and pain. Emotions, so long anaesthetised, were flowing around me like flood-waters. Before I could explain this development to my landladies, however, they launched into eager speech, interrupting each other in their haste to inform me that the stolen paintings had indeed arrived, as expected, at the ‘Little Alhambra’.

  ‘There was a van …’ began Renegada.

  ‘– in the dead of night; it went right past our door –’ added Felicitas.

  ‘– so I wrapped myself in my rebozo and ran out –’

  ‘– and I ran out, too –’

  ‘– and we saw the gate to the big house open, and the van –’

  ‘– passed through –’

  ‘– and today in the fireplaces there was lots of cheap wood –’

  ‘– like packing-case wood – you know –’

  ‘– he must have been up all night chopping it up! –’

  ‘– and in the garbage there were piles of that plastic stuff–’

  ‘– that children like to make go pop –’

  ‘– bubble-wrap, that’s it –’

  ‘– yes, bubble-wrap, and corrugated cardboard, and metal hoops, too –’

  ‘– so there were big parcels in that van, and what else could they be?’

  It was not proof, but I knew it was the closest I would get, in this village of uncertainty, to a sure thing. I began for the first time to imagine my meeting with Vasco Miranda. Once I had been a child who loved to sit at his feet; now we were both old men, fighting over the same woman, you could say, and the fight would be no less strenuous because the lady in question was dead.

  It was time for the next step to be planned. ‘If he will not see me, you will have to smuggle me in,’ I said to the Larios sisters. ‘I can see no other way.’

  Very early next morning, while the sun was still a rumour running along the crests of distant mountains, I accompanied Renegada Larios to work. Felicitas, the larger-boned and bulkier of the two women, had given me her loosest black skirt and blouse. On my feet I wore anonymous rubber sandals bought in the Spanish part of town. In the crook of my right arm I carried a basket containing my own clothes, concealed ben
eath an array of dusters, sponges and sprays; my right hand, like my head, was concealed under a rebozo, which my left hand clutched tightly to keep it in place. ‘You make a poor counterfeit of a woman,’ Felicitas Larios said, surveying me with her ever-critical eye. ‘But luckily it’s still dark and there’s not so far to go. Stoop a little and take short steps. Be off with you! We are endangering our livelihoods for your sake, I hope you know that.’

  ‘For the sake of a dead mother,’ Renegada corrected her half-sister. ‘We have a dead mother also. That is why we understand.’

  ‘I leave my dog in your care,’ I told Felicitas. ‘He won’t be any trouble.’

  ‘You’re quite right he won’t,’ she said, grumpily. ‘He’s going straight in that cupboard the moment you’re out of the door, and you needn’t imagine he’ll be coming out before you return. We’ve got better sense in this house than to take a stuffed dog for a walk.’

  I said my farewells to Jawaharlal. His had been a long journey, too, and it deserved a better end than a broom-cupboard in a foreign land. But a broom-cupboard it had to be. I was off for my showdown with Vasco Miranda, and Jawaharlal had, after all, become just another abandoned Andalusian dog.

  My first experience of being in women’s clothing reminded me of the story of Aires de Gama climbing into his wife’s wedding-dress and setting off for a wild night in the company of Prince Henry the Navigator; but what a falling-off was here, how much lowlier these dark threads were than Aires’s fabulous frock, and how much less suited I was to such attire! As we set off, Renegada Larios told me that the ex-mayor of the village – that same fellow who now sat, nameless and friendless, sipping coffee in the Street of Parasites – had once been obliged to walk these streets dressed as his own grandmother, because near the end of his captivity his house had been scheduled for demolition and the family had had to move. So I had local as well as familial precedents for my disguise.

  It was the first time Renegada and I had been by ourselves without Felicitas to chaperone us, but although she flashed me a series of explicitly meaningful looks I was too inhibited (both by my female dress and on account of the nervousness engendered by the unpredictability of what lay ahead) to respond. We reached the servants’ entrance to the Little Alhambra unobserved, as far as I could tell, though it was impossible to be sure if there were curious eyes watching from the darkened windows of Miradores Street as we ascended it towards Vasco’s detestable and incongruous elephant fountain. I caught a glimpse of a bright scrap of green flying over the folly’s walls. ‘Are there parrots in Spain?’ I whispered to Renegada, but obtained no reply. Perhaps she was sulking at my refusal to take this rare opportunity for flirtation.

  There was a small electronic key-pad next to the door, set into the terracotta-red wall, and Renegada quickly punched in a series of four numbers. The door clicked open, and we entered Miranda’s lair.

  At once I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu, and my head whirled. When I had recovered myself a little I marvelled at the skill with which Vasco Miranda had modelled the interior of his folly upon Aurora Zogoiby’s Moor paintings. I was standing in an open courtyard with a chequerboard-tiled central piazza and arched cloisters round the sides, and through the windows on the far side I could see a spreading plain, shimmering in dawn light, like an ocean. A palace set by a mirage of the sea; part-Arab, part-Mughal, owing something to Chirico, it was that very place which Aurora once described to me as one ‘where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drown in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air.’ Even in its present state of slight dilapidation and horticultural decay, I had truly found Mooristan.

  In room after empty room I found the settings of Aurora’s pictures brought to life, and I half-expected her characters to walk in and enact their sad narratives before my disbelieving eyes, half-expected my own body to grow into that lozenged, particoloured Moor whose tragedy – the tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One – had been the sequence’s uniting principle. And perhaps my crumpled hand might burst, at any moment, into flower, or light, or flame! Vasco, who had always believed that Aurora had pinched the idea for the Moor pictures from his kitsch portrayal of a lachrymose rider, had spent fortunes, and the kind of energy born of the most profound obsession, to appropriate her vision for himself. Was this a house built of love or hate? If the stories I’d heard were to be believed, it was a true Palimpstine, in which his present bitter wrath lay curdling over the memory of an old, lost sweetness and romance. For there was something sour here, some envy in the brilliance of the emulation; and as the first shock of recognition wore off, and the day rose up, I began to see the flaws in the grand design. Vasco Miranda was still the same vulgarian he had always been, and what Aurora had imagined so vividly and finely had been rendered by Vasco in colours that could be seen, as the daylight brightened, to have missed lightness by the small but vital distance that distinguishes the pleasingly apt from the crudely inappropriate. The building’s sense of proportion was also poor, and its lines were misconceived. No, it was not a miracle, after all; my first impressions had been illusory, and the illusion had already faded. The ‘Little Alhambra’, for all its size and flamboyance, was no New Moorusalem, but an ugly, pretentious house.

  I had seen no sign of the purloined paintings, nor of the machinery of which Renegada and Felicitas had spoken. The door leading to the high tower was firmly locked. Vasco must be up there, with his contraptions and stolen secrets.

  ‘I want to change my clothes,’ I said to Renegada. ‘I can’t confront the old bastard looking like this.’

  ‘Go ahead and change,’ she answered, bold as brass. ‘There’s nothing you’ve got I haven’t seen already.’ In fact it was Renegada who had changed; ever since we entered the ‘Little Alhambra’ her manner had become proprietorial, assertive. No doubt she had detected the growing distaste with which – after a few initial exclamations of delight – I had been inspecting the property for which, after all, she had cared over many years. It would not be unnatural for her to be annoyed by my lack of enthusiasm for the place. Nevertheless, this was a flagrant, shameless remark, and I would not stand for it.

  ‘Be careful what you say,’ I warned her, and went into an adjoining chamber to have some privacy, ignoring her angry glare. While I was changing I became aware of a noise, coming from some distance away. It was the vilest of dins – a mixture of female shrieks and feedback screeches, ululations of indeterminate gender, computer-generated whines and bangs, and a background clattering and clanking that put me in mind of a kitchen in an earthquake. This must be the ‘avant-garde music’ that had been mentioned. Vasco Miranda was awake.

  Renegada and Felicitas had told me quite clearly that they had not seen their reclusive boss for over a year, so I was extremely surprised, on emerging from my changing-room, to find the voluminous figure of old Vasco himself awaiting me in the chequerboard piazza, with his housekeeper by his side; and not only by his side, but tickling him playfully with a feather duster while he giggled and squealed with delight. He was indeed wearing Moorish fancy dress, as the half-sisters had said he was prone to do, and in his baggy pantaloons and embroidered waistcoat, worn open over a ballooning collarless shirt, he looked like a wobbling mound of Turkish rahat lacoum. His moustache had dwindled – its stalagmites of wax-stiffened hair had vanished completely – and his head was as bald and pocked as the surface of the Moon.

  ‘Hee, hee,’ he chortled, slapping Renegada’s duster away. ‘Hola, namaskar, salaam, Moor, my boy. You look awful: ready to drop down dying-shying at a moment’s notice. Haven’t my two ladies been feeding you properly? Hasn’t this little holiday been to your liking? How long has it been now? My, my – fourteen years. Well! They haven’t been kind to you.’

  ‘If I had known you were so … approachable,’ I said, looking crossly at the housekeeper, ‘I would have dispensed with th
is stupid charade. But it seems that these reports about your reclusiveness have been much exaggerated.’

  ‘Whese reports?’ he demanded, disingenuously. Then, ‘Well, perhaps, but only as regards a few small details,’ he said in a placatory voice, waving Renegada away. She put the duster down without a word and backed away to a corner of the courtyard. ‘It is true that we in Benengeli value our privacy – as do you, by the way, considering what a fuss you’ve just made about changing your clothes in private! Renegada there was highly amused. – But what was my point? Ah, yes. Have you not noticed that Benengeli is defined by what it lacks – that unlike much of the region, certainly unlike the whole Costa, it is devoid of such excrescences as Coco-Loco nightclubs, coach parties on guided tours, burro-taxis, currency cambios, and vendors of straw sombreros. Our excellent Sargento, Salvador Medina, drives all such horrors away by administering nocturnal beatings, in the village’s many dark alleys, to any entrepreneur who seeks to introduce them. Salvador Medina dislikes me intensely, by the way, as he dislikes all the town’s newcomers, but like all well-settled immigrants – like the great majority of the Parasites – I applaud his policy of repulsing the new wave of invaders. Now that we’re in, it’s only right that somebody should slam the door shut behind us.

  ‘Don’t you find it admirable, my Benengeli?’ he went on, sweeping an arm vaguely in the direction of the mirage-ocean visible through his windows. ‘Goodbye to dirt, disease, corruption, fanaticism, caste politics, cartoonists, lizards, crocodiles, playback music and, best of all, the Zogoiby family! Goodbye, Aurora the great and cruel – farewell, crooked, scornful Abe!’

  ‘Not exactly,’ I dissented. ‘For I see that you’ve tried – with, may I say, limited success – to build my mother’s imaginative world around you, to use it like a fig-leaf to hide your own inadequacies; and then, too, there is this remaining Zogoiby to face, and a little matter of some stolen pictures to resolve.’