The Moors Last Sigh Read Free Page B

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 cock 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