The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  Like werewolves, he shunned the light. The sun’s rays sought him out, however; they dogged him, no matter how doggedly he hunted for shadows. Tropical sundogs caught him unawares, they pounced, they licked him all over while he uselessly protested; whereupon the tiny champagne-bubbles of his allergy burst through the surface of his skin, and, like a mangy dog, he began uncontrollably to itch. A hangdog priest indeed, hounded by the unfailing brilliance of the days. At night he dreamed of clouds, of his faraway homeland where the sky rested cosily, in soft greys, just above his head; of clouds, but also – for though it was getting dark the tropic heat still clutched at his loins – of girls. Of, to be specific, a tall girl entering St Francis’s church in a floor-length red velvet skirt with her head wreathed in a distinctly un-Anglican white lace mantilla, a girl to make a lonely young priest perspire like a burst water-tank, to make him turn a most ecclesiastical shade of purple with desire.

  She would come in once or twice a week to sit for a while beside da Gama’s vacant tomb. The very first time she swept past D’Aeth, like an empress or a grand tragedienne, he was done for. Even before he saw her face the purpling of his own was well advanced. Then she turned towards him and it was as if he had drowned in sunlight. At once the violence of perspiration and itching assailed him; inflammations erupted on his neck and hands in spite of the cooling sweeps of the great punga fans that brushed the churchy atmosphere in long, slow strokes, as if it were a woman’s hair. As Aurora approached him, it worsened: the dreadful allergy of desire. ‘You look’, she said sweetly, ‘like a lobster quadrille. You look like a flea-ring circus after all the fleas escapofied. And what waterworks, sir! Let Bombay keep its Flora Fountain because here, Reverend, we got you.’

  She had him indeed. Palm of her hand. From that day on, the pain of his allergy was as nothing as compared to the pain of his unspoken, impossible love. He waited for her contempt, longed for it, for it was all she gave him. But slowly it changed something in him. Earnest and deliquescent and tongue-tied and Englishy-schoolboy as he was, a joke figure even for his own kind, teased for his inarticulacy by Emily Elphinstone the coir merchant’s widow who gave him steak and kidney pud on Thursdays and hoped for (but had not yet received) something in return, he turned, behind his façade of a churchy joke, into something else entirely; his fixation darkened slowly towards hate.

  Perhaps it was her attachment to the empty grave of the Portuguese explorer that made him begin to hate her, because of his own fears of dying, because how could she come by just to sit beside the tomb of Vasco da Gama and talk to it so softly, how, when the living were hanging on her every gesture, her every movement and syllable, could she prefer a morbid intimacy with a hole in the ground whence Vasco had been removed no more than fourteen years after being placed there, returning in death to the Lisbon which he left so long ago? Just once D’Aeth made the mistake of approaching Aurora and saying, is there some help you seek, daughter; at which she turned on him with all the haughty rage of the infinitely wealthy and told him, ‘This is family business; go and boilofy your head.’ Then, relenting slightly, she told him she came to make confession, and the Reverend D’Aeth was shaken by the blasphemy of seeking absolution from an empty grave. ‘We’re Church of England here,’ he limply said, and that brought her to her feet, she unfurled herself and dazzled him, Venus rising in red velvet, and then she shrivelled him with her scorn. ‘Soon,’ she said, ‘we will drive you into the sea, and you can take along this Church that only startofied because some Piss-in-Boots old king wanted a sexy younger wife.’

  She eventually asked him his name. When he told her she laughed and clapped her hands. ‘O, too much,’ she said. ‘Reverend Allover Death.’ After that he couldn’t talk to her any more, because she had touched a raw spot. India had unnerved Oliver D’Aeth; his dreams were either erotic fantasies of nude teas with the Widow Elphinstone on prickly brown lawns of coir matting, or else torture-nightmares in which he found himself in a place in which he was invariably beaten, like a carpet, like a mule; also kicked. Men with hats that were flat at the back so that they could stand with their backs to walls and prevent their enemies from creeping up behind them, hats made of a stiff and shiny black substance, these men waylaid him on rocky hillside paths. They pummelled him but did not speak. He, however, cried out loudly, giving up his pride. It was humiliating to be made to cry out, but he could not prevent the cries from escaping. Yet he knew, in his dreams, that this place was and would continue to be his home; he would continue to walk along this hillside path.

  After he saw Aurora in St Francis’s Church she started appearing in these terrible, pummelling dreams. A man’s choices are unfathomable, she said to him once, seeing him dragging himself along after a particularly violent thrashing. Did she judge him? Sometimes he thought she must find him contemptible for putting up with such degradation. But at other times he detected the beginnings of wisdom in her eyes, in the solid musculature of her upper arms, in the birdlike angle of her head. If a man’s choices are unfathomable, she seemed to be saying, then they are also beyond judgment, beyond contempt. ‘I am being flayed,’ he told her in his dream. ‘It is my holy calling. We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins.’ When he woke he was not sure whether the dream had been inspired by his faith in the oneness of mankind, or by the photophobia that made his skin torment him so: whether it was a heroic vision, or a banality.

  India was uncertainty. It was deception and illusion. Here at Fort Cochin the English had striven mightily to construct a mirage of Englishness, where English bungalows clustered around an English green, where there were Rotarians and golfers and tea-dances and cricket and a Masonic Lodge. But D’Aeth could not help seeing through the conjuring trick, couldn’t help hearing the false vowels of the coir traders lying about their education, or wincing at the coarse dancing of their to-tell-the-truth-mostly-rather-common wives, or seeing the bloodsucker lizards beneath the English hedges, the parrots flying over the rather un-Home-Counties jacaranda trees. And when he looked out to sea the illusion of England vanished entirely; for the harbour could not be disguised, and no matter how Anglicised the land might be, it was contradicted by the water; as if England were being washed by an alien sea. Alien, and encroaching; for Oliver D’Aeth knew enough to be sure that the frontier between the English enclaves and the surrounding foreignness had become permeable, was beginning to dissolve. India would reclaim it all. They, the British, would – as Aurora had prophesied – be driven into the Indian Ocean – which, by an Indian perversity, was known locally as the Arabian Sea.

  Still, he thought, standards must be upheld, continuity must be maintained. There was the right way and the wrong, God’s road and the Left-Hand Path. Though obviously these were but metaphors, and it would not do to interpret them too literally, to sing too loud of Paradise or damn too many sinners to Hell. He added this codicil with a kind of ferocity, because India had been nibbling away at the edges of his mildness; India, where Doubting Thomas had established what one might have thought would be a Christianity of Uncertainty, in fact met the gentle reasonableness of the Church of England with great clouds of fervent incense and blasts of religious heat … he looked at the walls of St Francis’s, at the memorials to the young English dead, and became afraid. Eighteen-year-old girls came over with the man-hunting ‘fishing fleet’, set foot on Indian soil, and seemed to dive straight into the ground. Nineteen-year-old scions of great families had the earth rattling on their coffin-lids within months of arriving. Oliver D’Aeth, who wondered daily when the mouth of India would gobble him down as well, found Aurora’s joke about his name as tasteless as her chats with da Gama’s empty grave. He didn’t say so, of course. Wouldn’t be right. Besides, her beauty seemed to thicken his tongue; it increased his hot confusion – for when she transfixed him with her scornful, amused gaze, he wished the ground would swallow him up – and it also made him itch.

  Aurora, with lace-covered head, and smelling strongly of sex and pepper,
awaited her lover by Vasco’s tomb; Oliver D’Aeth, bursting with lusts and resentments, skulked in the shadows. The only other occupants of the darkening church, in which a few yellow wall-lamps did little to lift the gloom, were three English mem-sahibs, the sisters Aspinwall, who had clucked disapprovingly when Catholic Aurora swaggered past them in scarlet – one of them went so far as to raise a perfumed handkerchief to her nose – and had at once been rewarded with the rough edge of her tongue. ‘Who are you making chicken-noises at?’ Aurora had demanded. ‘Like chickens you don’t look. More like fishes with fishbones stuck in their throat.’

  And the young priest, unable to approach her, unable to leave her be, driven half-mad by her powerful odour, felt the Widow Elphinstone recede to the back of his mind, even though, at only twenty-one, she was a handsome woman, by no means without admirers. We may not have much but we are choosy, she had told him. Many men knocked at a young widow’s door, not all of them with gentlemanly intentions. Many call but few are answered, she said. A line must be drawn that is not easy to cross. Emily Elphinstone, an upstanding young woman and a poisonously vile cook, would be at her stove, expecting Oliver D’Aeth to happen by; and so he would, so he would. In the meanwhile, however, he stayed where he was, even though his stolen glances at the woman of his dreams felt like a kind of infidelity.

  Abraham arrived in a rush, and all but ran to Vasco’s tomb. When Aurora clasped his hands between her own, and the two of them began to speak in urgent whispers, Oliver D’Aeth felt a surge of anger. He turned abruptly and walked away, the heels of his black boots clicking on the stone floor, the yellow pools of light revealing, to the watching Aspinwall sisters, that the young man’s fists were clenched. They rose, and intercepted him at the door: had he smelled what, fanned across the church by the long, slow pungas, was unmistakable and could not be denied? – Ladies, he had. – And had he observed her, the Papist hussy, making love before their very eyes? – And perhaps he did not know, being so recently arrived, that the fellow pawing at her in God’s house was not only her family’s lowly employee, but, in addition, it has to be said, of the Jewish faith? – Ladies, he did not know, he was most grateful for the information. – But it was not to be tolerated, he was not to stand for it, and did he intend to act? – Ladies, he would; not at this moment, there must be no ugly scene here, but action would certainly be taken, most decisively, they need have no fear on that account. – Well! He should see to it that it was. They were returning to Ooty in the morning, but would certainly wish to see progress by their next descent. ‘You samjao that baysharram pair’, said the eldest sister Aspinwall, ‘that this sort of tamasha is simply not the cheese.’ – Ladies, your humble servant.

  Later that night, Oliver D’Aeth, while taking a little port wine with the young widow, and recovering from the heaped platefuls of burned and leathery corpses which she had set before him, mentioned the evening’s events in St Francis’s Church. But no sooner had he spoken Aurora da Gama’s name than the sweating and itches returned, even her name had the power to inflame him, and Emily burst out in shocking and uncharacteristic rage: ‘Those people don’t belong here any more than we do, but at least we can go home. One day India will turn against them, too, and they’ll have to sink or swim.’ No, no, D’Aeth demurred, here in the South there was little communal trouble of that sort, but she rounded on him ferociously. They were outcasts, she shouted, these peculiar Christians with their unrecognisable hobson-jobson services, not to mention these dying-out Jews, they were the least important people in the world, the tiniest of the tiny, and if they wanted to, to rut, then it was the least interesting thing on Earth, certainly not a thing she wished to ruin such an agreeable evening thinking about, and even if those old gargoyles from snooty Ootacamund, those tea-ladies, were raising a hue and cry she had no intention of spending another instant on the subject, and she was bound to say that he, Oliver, had gone down in her estimation, she would have thought he would have had the delicacy not to raise such a topic, let alone turn bright red and start dripping when he spoke that person’s name. ‘The late Mr Elphinstone’, she said, her voice unsteady, ‘had a weakness for chhi-chhi women. But he did me the politeness of keeping his nautch-girl infatuations to himself; whereas you, Oliver – a man of the cloth! – you sit at my table and drool.’

  Oliver D’Aeth, having been informed by the Widow Elphinstone that he need no longer trouble to call upon her, took his leave; and vowed revenge. Emily had put it well. Aurora da Gama and her Jew were no more than flies upon the great diamond of India; how dare they so shamelessly challenge the natural order of things? They were asking to be squashed.

  By the empty grave of the legendary Portuguese, Abraham Zogoiby placed his hands between his young beloved’s and confessed: quarrel, chucking-out, homelessness. Tears, once again, were brimming. But he had left his mother for an even tougher cookie; Aurora took charge at once. She spirited Abraham away and installed him in the refurbished Western-style Corbusier folly on Cabral Island. ‘Unfortunately you are too tall and broad in the shoulder,’ she told him, ‘so my poor dead Daddy’s little suits won’t fitto on you. Tonight, but, you will not require suits.’ Both of my parents would afterwards call this their true wedding night, in spite of earlier events on high among sacks of Malabar Gold, because of what happened,

  after the fifteen-years-young spice-trade heiress entered the bedchamber of her lover the twenty-one-years-older duty manager dressed in nothing but moonlight, with garlands of jasmine and lily-of-the-valley plaited (by old Josy) in and out of the loose black hair which hung down behind her like a monarch’s cloak, reaching almost to the cool stone floor over which her bare feet moved so lightly that for a moment the awestruck Abraham thought she was flying;

  after their second spice-fragrant love-making, in which the older man surrendered completely to the will of the younger woman, as though his ability to make choices had been exhausted by the consequences of the act of choosing her;

  after Aurora murmured her secrets in his ear, because for many years I have confessed only to a hole, but now, my husband, I can tell you everything, the murder of her grandmother, the old woman’s dying curse, everything, and Abraham without flinching accepted his fate; banished from the fellowship of his own people, he took upon himself the matriarch’s last malediction, which Epifania whispered into Aurora’s ear and whose sweet poison the young woman now dropped into his: a house divided against itself cannot stand, that’s what she said, my husband, may your house be for ever partitioned, may its foundations turn to dust, may your children rise up against you, and may your fall be hard;

  after Abraham comforted Aurora by vowing to disprove the curse, to stand beside her, shoulder to shoulder, through the worst life had to offer;

  and after he said, yes, to marry her he would take the great step, he would accept instruction and enter the Church of Rome, and in the presence of her naked body which inspired in him a kind of religious awe the thing did not seem so difficult to say, in this matter too he would surrender to her will, her cultural conventions, even though she had less faith than a mosquito, even though there was a voice within him uttering a command he did not repeat aloud, a voice which told him that he must guard his Jewishness in the innermost chamber of his soul, that at the core of his being he must build a room nobody could enter and keep his truth there, his secret identity, and only then could he give up the rest of himself for love:

  then,

  the door of their nuptial chamber flew open, and there, in pyjamas with a lantern and a Wee Willie Winkie nightcap, was Aires da Gama looking like a storybook picture except for his expression of counterfeit wrath; and in one of Epifania’s old muslin mob-caps and ruffled-neck nighties, Carmen Lobo da Gama, doing her best to look horrified but failing to push the envy off her face; and slightly behind them was the avenging angel, the traitor, bright pink and sweating profusely: of course, Oliver D’Aeth. But Aurora was not able to contain herself, would not behave according to the rules of
this tropicalised Victorian melodrama. ‘Aires-uncle! Aunty Sahara!’ she cried, gaily. ‘But where have you dumpoed dear Jaw-jaw? Won’t he be upset? Because tonight you are taking for a walk a dog of a different collar.’ At which Oliver D’Aeth grew even redder.

  ‘Whore of Babylon,’ Carmen roared, attempting to get things back on track. ‘Harlot’s seed is harlot indeed!’ Aurora under a white linen bedsheet stretched her long body for maximum provocation; a breast burst into view, caused a sharp ecclesiastical gasp, and obliged Aires to address his remarks to the Telefunken radiogram. ‘Zogoiby, for God’s sake. Do you lack all common decency, man?’

  ‘ “That, sir, is my niece!” Waugh-waugh-waugh! So pompous, with his track record!’ my mother guffawed when the story was told on Malabar Hill. ‘Folks, I split my sides. “What is the meaning of this?” Stupid ass. I told him straight. The meaning of this is marriage, I told him. “Look,” I said, “here is a priest, and close family members are present, and you are cho chweetly giving me away. Turn on the radiogram and maybe they’ll play a wedding march.” ’

  Aires ordered Abraham to dress and leave; Aurora countermanded the order. Aires threatened the lovers with police intervention; Aurora replied, ‘And, Aires-uncle, is there nothing for you to fear from nosy cops?’ Aires coloured deeply, and with a muttered we’ll discuss this further in the a.m. beat a retreat, followed hastily by Oliver D’Aeth. Carmen stood in the doorway for a moment, with her mouth hanging open. Then she also staged her exit: slamming the door. Aurora rolled over to Abraham, who had covered his face with his hands. ‘Here I come, ready or not,’ she whispered. ‘Mister, here comes the bride.’