The Moors Last Sigh Read Free Page A

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