The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  From Flory Zogoiby came a thin assenting wail. But Abraham’s argument was not complete. Consider this stolen crown, wrapped in rags, locked in a box, for four hundred years and more. If it was stolen for simple gain, would it not have been sold off long ago?

  ‘Because of secret pride in the royal link, the crown was kept; because of secret shame, it was concealed. Mother, who is worse? My Aurora who does not hide the Vasco connection, but takes delight; or myself, born of the fat old Moor of Granada’s last sighs in the arms of his thieving mistress – Boabdil’s bastard Jew?’

  ‘Evidence,’ Flory whispered in reply, a mortally wounded adversary pleading for the death-blow. ‘Only supposition has been given; where are hard-fast facts?’ Inexorable Abraham asked his penultimate question.

  ‘Mother, what is our family name?’

  When she heard this, Flory knew the coup-de-grace was near. Dumbly, she shook her head. To Moshe Cohen, whose old friendship he would, that day, forsake for ever, Abraham threw down a challenge. ‘The Sultan Boabdil after his fall was known by one sobriquet, and she who took his crown and jewels in a dark irony took the nickname also. Boabdil the Misfortunate: that was it. Anyone here can say that in the Moor’s own tongue?’

  And the old chandler was obliged to complete the proof. ‘El-zogoybi.’

  Gently, Abraham set down the crown beside defeated Flory; resting his case.

  ‘At least he fell for a pushy girl,’ Flory said emptily to the walls. ‘I had that much influence while he was still my son.’

  ‘Better you go now,’ said Sara to pepper-odorous Abraham. ‘Maybe when you marry you should take the girl’s name, why not? Then we can forget you, and what difference between a bastard Moor and a bastard Portugee?’

  ‘A bad mistake, Abie,’ old Moshe Cohen commented. ‘To make an enemy of your mother; for enemies are plentiful, but mothers are hard to find.’

  Flory Zogoiby, alone in the aftermath of one catastrophic revelation was granted another. In the sunset’s vermilion afterglow she saw the Cantonese tiles pass before her eyes one by one, for had she not been their servitor and their student, cleaning and buffing them these many years; had she not many times attempted to enter their myriad worlds, those universes contained within the uniformity of twelve-by-twelve and held captive on so-neatly-grouted walls? Flory who loved to draw lines was enthralled by the serried ranks of the tiles, but until this moment they had not spoken to her, she had found there neither missing husbands nor future admirers, neither prophecies of the future nor explanations of the past. Guidance, meaning, fortune, friendship, love had all been withheld. Now in her hour of anguish they unveiled a secret.

  Scene after blue scene passed before her eyes. There were tumultuous marketplaces and crenellated fortress-palaces and fields under cultivation and thieves in jail, there were high, toothy mountains and great fish in the sea. Pleasure gardens were laid out in blue, and blue-bloody battles were grimly fought; blue horsemen pranced beneath lamplit windows and blue-masked ladies swooned in arbours. O, and intrigue of courtiers and dreams of peasants and pigtailed tallymen at their abacuses and poets in their cups. On the walls floor ceiling of the little synagogue, and now in Flory Zogoiby’s mind’s eye, marched the ceramic encyclopaedia of the material world that was also a bestiary, a travelogue, a synthesis and a song, and for the first time in all her years of caretaking Flory saw what was missing from the hyperabundant cavalcade. ‘Not so much what as who,’ she thought, and the tears dried in her eyes. ‘In the whole place, no trace.’ The orange light of evening fell on her like thunderous rain, washing away her blindness, opening her eyes. Eight hundred and thirty-nine years after the tiles came to Cochin, and at the beginning of a time of war and massacres, they delivered their message to a woman in pain.

  ‘What you see is what there is,’ Flory mumbled under her breath. ‘There is no world but the world.’ And then, a little louder: ‘There is no God. Hocus-pocus! Mumbo-jumbo! There is no spiritual life.’

  It isn’t hard to demolish Abraham’s arguments. What’s in a name? The da Gamas claimed descent from Vasco the explorer, but claiming isn’t proving, and even about that ancestry I have my serious doubts. But as for this Moor-stuff, this Granada-yada, this incredibly loose connection – a surname that sounds like a nickname, for Pete’s sake! – it falls down even before you blow on it. Old leather-bound notebook? Gas! Never seen it. Not a trace. As for the emerald-laden crown, I don’t buy that, either; it’s a fairy tale of the sort we folks love to tell ourselves about ourselves, and, gents & gentesses, it does not wash. Abraham’s had never been a wealthy family, and if you believe that a boxful of gems would have remained untouched for four centuries, then, busters and busterinas, you’ll believe anything. Oh, but they were hair-looms? Well, roll my eyes and strike my brow! What a blank-blank joke! Who in the whole of India cares two paisa about heirlooms if he’s given the choice between old stuff and money in the bank?

  Aurora Zogoiby painted some famous pictures, and passed away in horrific circs. Reason requires that we put the rest down to the self-mythologising of the artist, to which, in this instance, my dear father lent more than just a hand … you want to know what was in the box? Listen: forget about jewelled turbans; but emeralds, yes. Sometimes more, sometimes less. – Not heirlooms, though. – What then? – Hot rocks, that’s what. Yes! Stolen goods! Contraband items! Loot! You want family shame, I’ll tell you its true name: my granny, Flory Zogoiby, was a crook. For many years she was a valued member of a successful gang of emerald smugglers; for who would ever look under the synagogue altar for boodle? She took her cut of the proceeds, kept it safe, and was not so foolish as to spend spend spend. Nobody ever suspected her; and the time came when her son Abraham came to claim his illegal inheritance … it’s illegitimacy you want? Never mind about genetics; just follow the cash.

  The above is my understanding of what lay behind the stories I was told; but there is also a confession I must make. In what follows you will find stranger tales by far than the one I have just attempted to debunk; and let me assure you, let me say to-whom-it-may-concern, that of the truth of these further stories there can be no doubt whatsoever. So finally it is not for me to judge, but for you.

  And as for the yarn of the Moor: if I were forced to choose between logic and childhood memory, between head and heart, then sure; in spite of all the foregoing, I’d go along with the tale.

  Abraham Zogoiby walked out of Jewtown and towards St Francis’s Church, where Aurora da Gama was waiting for him by Vasco’s tomb with his future in the palm of her hand. When he reached the waterfront he looked back for a moment; and thought he saw, silhouetted against the darkening sky, the impossible figure of a young girl capering upon the roof of a storehouse painted in gaudy horizontal stripes, can-canning her skirt and petticoat and uttering familiar sorceries as she challenged him to fight: Step across this line.

  ‘Obeah, jadoo, fo, fum,

  chicken entrails, kingdom come.’

  Tears filled his eyes; he pushed them away. She was gone.

  7

  CHRISTIANS, PORTUGUESE AND JEWS; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns … can this really be India? Bharat-mata, Hindustan-hamara, is this the place? War has just been declared. Nehru and the All-India Congress are demanding that the British must accept their demand for independence as a precondition for Indian support in the war effort; Jinnah and the Muslim League are refusing to support the demand; Mr Jinnah is busily articulating the history-changing notion that there are two nations in the sub-continent, one Hindu, the other Mussulman. Soon the split will be irreversible; soon Nehru will be back in Dehra Dun jail, and the British, having imprisoned the Congress leadership, will turn to the Leaguers for support. At such a time of upheaval, of the ruinous climax of divide-and-rule, is this not the most eccentric of slices to extract from all that life – a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and horribly unravelling) plait?

&nb
sp; No, sahibzadas. Madams-O: no way. Majority, that mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority, will not crush my tale beneath her feet. Are not my personages Indian, every one? Well, then: this too is an Indian yam. That’s one answer; but here’s another: everything in its place. Elephants are promised for later. Majority and Major-Minority will have their day, and much that has been beautiful will be tusked & trampled by their flap-eared, trumpeting herds. Until then, I continue to guzzle this last supper; to exhale, albeit wheezily, this aforementioned dernier soupir. To hell with high affairs of state! I have a love story to tell.

  In the perfumed half-light of C-50 Godown No. 1, Aurora da Gama grabbed Abraham Zogoiby by the chin and looked deep into his eyes … no, men, I can’t do this stuff. This is my mother and father I’m talking about, and even though Aurora the Great was the least bashful of women I guess on this matter I am in possession of her share of bash as well as my own. Did you ever see your father’s cock, your mother’s cunt? Yes or no, doesn’t matter, the point is these are mythical locations, surrounded by taboo, put off thy shoes for it is holy ground, as the Voice said on Mount Sinai, and if Abraham Zogoiby was playing the part of Moses then Aurora my mother sure as eggs was the Burning Bush. Handing down commandments, pillar of fire, I am that I am … yes, indeed, she had made a study of the Old Testament god. Sometimes I think she practised partings of waters in the bath.

  ‘I couldn’t wait-o,’ that is how Aurora herself used to tell it. In her gold-and-orange drawing-room full of cigarette-smoke, with young beauties stretched out on sofas while men sat on Isfahani rugs and pressed their ankle-braceleted, mauve-nailed feet, and while her ageing husband leaned in a corner in a business suit, mouth twitching in an embarrassed smile, hands flapping helplessly until at last they settled around my young ears, Aurora drank champagne from an opalescent glass like an opening flower and was casually explicit about her own deflowering, laughing lightly at her youthful audacity. ‘By the chin, I swear. I just pulled at him and he followed, popped right up out of his chair like a cork from a bottle, and I led him on. My very own yahoody. My in-those-days beloved Jew.’

  In-those-days … there will be more to say about the cruelty of that phrase, so easily tossed out with a little wave of the hand, a dismissive little bangle-jingle. But right now we are indeed in those days, we are on that very day, and so: by the chin she led him, and he followed; abandoning his post, and disapprovingly watched, I have no doubt, by the ledger-inscribing high trinity of clerks, Kalonjee, Mirchandalchini and Tejpattam, he pursued his chin, surrendering himself to his fate. Beauty is destiny of a sort, beauty speaks to beauty, it recognises and assents, it believes it can excuse everything, so that even though they knew no more about each other than the words Christian heiress and Jewish employee, they had already made the most important decisions of all. Throughout her life Aurora Zogoiby was quite clear about the reason why she led her duty manager into the murky depths of the godown, and why, motioning him to follow, she climbed a long and bouncy ladder to the highest level of the most remote stacks. Resisting all efforts at psychological analysis, she angrily rejected the theory that in the aftermath of too-many-deaths-in-the-family she had been vulnerable to the charms of an older man, that she had been first held, then captured, by Abraham’s look of wounded kindness: that it had been a simple case of innocence being drawn towards experience. ‘In the first place,’ she would argue, to cheers and applause, while Daddy Abraham earned my contempt by skulking shamefacedly away, ‘excuse me, but who drewofied whom towards where? Seems to me I was the puller, not the pulled. Seems to me that Abie was the know-nothing and I was one smart fifteen-year-old cookie. And in the second place, I always was a sucker for a heero, a loverboy, a hunk.’

  Way up there near the roof of Godown No. 1, Aurora da Gama at the age of fifteen lay back on pepper sacks, breathed in the hot spice-laden air, and waited for Abraham. He came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, until … phew! Boy! Over and done with! – No. There’s more. The whole thing must be told.

  This I will say: what they had was certainly hot & hungry. Mad love! It drove Abraham back to confront Flory Zogoiby, and then it made him walk away from his race, looking back only once. That for this favour, He presently become a Christian, the Merchant of Venice insisted in his moment of victory over Shylock, showing only a limited understanding of the quality of mercy; and the Duke agreed, He shall do this, or else I do recant The pardon that I late pronounced here … What was forced upon Shylock would have been freely chosen by Abraham, who preferred my mother’s love to God’s. He was prepared to marry her according to the laws of Rome – and O, what a storm that statement conceals! But their love was strong enough to withstand all the buffetings, to survive the full force of the scandal; and it was my knowledge of their strength that would give me the strength, when I, in my turn, – when my beloved and I, – but on that occasion she, my mother, – instead of, – when I fully expected, – she turned on me, and, just when I needed her most, she, – against her own flesh and blood … you see that I am not able, as yet, to tell this story either. Once again, the words have let me down.

  Pepper love: that’s how I think of it. Abraham and Aurora fell in pepper love, up there on the Malabar Gold. They came down from those high stacks with more than their clothes smelling of spice. So passionately had they fed upon one another, so profoundly had sweat and blood and the secretions of their bodies mingled, in that foetid atmosphere heavy with the odours of cardamom and cumin, so intimately had they conjoined, not only with each other but with what-hung-on-the-air, yes, and with the spice-sacks themselves – some of which, it must be said, were torn, so that peppercorns and elaichees poured out and were crushed between legs and bellies and thighs – that, for ever after, they sweated pepper’n’spices sweat, and their bodily fluids, too, smelled and even tasted of what had been crushed into their skins, what had mingled with their love-waters, what had been breathed in from the air during that transcendent fuck.

  There; keep worrying at a subject for long enough, and in the end some words do come. But Aurora on the same topic was never one to be shy. ‘Ever since then, let me tell you, I have had to keep-o old Abie here away from the kitchen, because that stink of grinding spices, my dears, it makes him paw the ground. Speaking for myself, however, I tubbofy, I scrubbofy, I brush, I groom, I fill-o the room with fine perfume, and that is why, as all can see, I’m just as sweet as I can be.’ O, father, father, why did you let her do it to you, why were you her daily-nightly butt? Why were we all? Did you really still love her so much? Did we really love her at all in those days, or was it just her long dominance over us, and our passive acceptance of our enslavement, that we mistook for love?

  ‘From now on I will always look after you,’ my father told my mother after the first time they made love. But she was beginning to be an artist, she answered, and so ‘the most important part of me, I can take care of by myself’.

  ‘Then,’ said Abraham, humbly, ‘I will look after the less important part, the part that needs to eat, enjoy, and rest.’

  Men in conical Chinese hats punted slowly across the darkening lagoon. Red-and-yellow ferryboats made the day’s last journeys, moving stolidly between the islands. A dredger stopped work, and with the halting of its boom-yacka-yacka-yacka-boom a silence fell over the harbour. There were yachts at anchor and little boats with patchwork leather sails making their way home to Vypeen village for the night; there were rowboats and motor-boats and tugs. Abraham Zogoiby, leaving behind the phantom of his mother capering on a Jewtown roof, was on his way to meet his darling at St Francis’s Church. The Chinese fishing-nets had b
een hauled up for the night. Cochin, city of nets, he thought, and I have been netted just like any fish. Twin-stacked steamers, the cargo ship Marco Polo, and even a British gunboat hung out there in the last light, like ghosts. Everything looks normal, Abraham marvelled. How does the world manage to preserve this illusion of sameness when in fact everything has been changed, irreversibly transformed, by love?

  Perhaps, he thought, because strangeness, the idea of difference, is a thing to which we react with unease. The newly besotted lover makes us wince, if we are truthful; he is like the pavement-sleeper talking to an invisible companion in an empty doorway, the rummy woman staring out to sea with, in her lap, an enormous ball of string; we see them and pass on by. And the colleague at work of whom we learn, by chance, that he has unusual sexual preferences, and the child preoccupied by uttering repeated sequences of sounds without any apparent meaning, and the beautiful woman seen by chance at a lighted window, allowing her nipples to be licked by her lap-dog; oh, and the brilliant scientist who spends his time at parties in corners, scratching at his posterior and then carefully examining his fingernails, and the one-legged swimmer, and … Abraham stopped in his tracks and blushed. How his thoughts were running on! Until this morning he had been the most methodical and ordered of men, a man of ledgers and columns, and here, Abie, just listen to yourself, all this airy-fairy tommyrot, pick up your pace now, the lady will already be in church, for the rest of your life you must do your level best not to keep your young Mrs waiting …

  … Fifteen years old! Okay, okay. In our part of the world that’s not so young.

  At St Francis’s: Who’s this, moaning softly in church? This short-arsed ginger-haired paleface scratching wildly at the backs of his hands? This bucktooth cherub with sweat running down his trouser-leg? – a priest, sirs. What should one expect to find in churchy surroundings if not a dog-collar? In this case, the Reverend Oliver D’Aeth, a young dog of fine Anglican pedigree, not long off the boat, and suffering, in Indian heat, from photophobia.