The Moors Last Sigh Read Free

mercantile bustle of the lagoon his silhouette seemed like a figure out of a fantasy, a leprechaun dancing in a glade, perhaps, or a benign djinni escaped from a lamp, he confided in a secret hiss his great and heartbreaking news. Named after a poet and possessed of a dreamy nature (but not the gift), Camoens timidly suggested the possibility of a haunting.
    ‘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