The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  ‘I’ve been look-o’ing for a painter,’ Aurora told him.

  ‘I am he,’ began Vasco, striking an attitude, but Aurora cut him short.

  ‘House painter,’ she said, a little brutally. ‘Nursery requires to be decoratoed in no time flat. Are you up to it? Speak up! Pay is generous in this house.’

  Vasco Miranda was deflated, but also broke. After a few seconds he flashed her his most dazzling smile and inquired, ‘Your preferred subjects, madam?’

  ‘Cartoons,’ she told him, looking vague. ‘You go to the pictures? You read comic-cuts? Then, that mouse, that duck, and what is the name of that bunny. Also that sailor and his saag saga. Maybe the cat that never catchoes the mouse, the other cat that never catchoes the bird, or the other bird that runs too fast for the coy-oat. Give me boulders that only temporarily flattofy you when they drop down on your head, bombs that give black faces only, and running-over-empty-air-until-you-looko-down. Give me knottofied-up rifle-barrels, and bathfuls of big gold coins. Never mind about harps and angels, forget all those stinking gardens; for my kiddies, this is the Paradise I want.’

  Autodidact Vasco, just up from Goa, knew next to nothing about wicked woodpeckers or pesky wabbits. In spite of having no idea what Aurora was talking about, however, he grinned and bowed. ‘Madam, money talks. You have the hit-fortune to be addressing the absolutely-greatest number-one-in-the-parade Paradise-painter in Bombay.’

  ‘Hit-fortune?’ Aurora wondered.

  ‘Like hit-take, hit-alliance, hit-conception, hit-terious,’ Vasco explained. ‘Opposite of mis-.’

  Within days he had moved in; no formal invitation was ever issued, but one way and another he stuck around for thirty-two years. Aurora treated him, at first, like a sort of pet. She unhicked his hairstyle and convinced him to stop trimming his moustache, and, when it grew luxuriant and long, to wax it until it looked like a hairy Cupid’s-bow. She got her tailor to run up outfits for him: broad-striped silk suits and huge floppy bow-ties that convinced le tout Bombay that Aurora Zogoiby’s new discovery must be a raving queen (in fact he was a genuine fifty-fifty bisexual, as many young men and women in the Elephanta circle would learn over the years). She was attracted to his huge appetite for information, food, work, and above all pleasure; and for the nakedness with which, smiling his Binaca smile, he went after what he wanted. ‘Let him stay,’ she pronounced when Abraham wondered mildly if the fellow showed any sign of ever pushing off. ‘I like having him around. After all, as he said, he is my hit-fortune; think-o of him as a good-luck charm.’ When he had finished decorating the nursery, she gave him his own studio, and equipped it with easels, crayons, a chaise-longue, brushes, paints. Abraham Zogoiby like a sceptical parrot tucked his head into a doubtful shoulder; but let the matter rest. Vasco Miranda kept this studio long after he became rich, and had an American dealer and work-places scattered across the Western world. He spoke of it as his ‘roots’; and it was Aurora’s decision to uproot him that finally drove him over the edge …

  Vasco-speak quickly became Zogoiby-chat. Ina, Minnie and Mynah grew up dividing their teachers at Walsingham House School into ‘hits’ and ‘misses’. At home in Elephanta, nothing was turned on or off any more; telephones, light-switches, radiograms were always ‘opened’ or ‘closed’. Unaccountable gaps in the language were filled in: if the opposed answer-and-question pairs there/where, then/when, that/what, thither/whither, thence/whence all existed, then, Vasco argued, ‘every this must also have its whis, every these its whese, every those its whoase.’

  As for the nursery, he was as good as his word. In a large light room with a sea view, he created what my sisters and I would always think of as the closest we ever came to an earthly (though mercifully non-horticultural) Eden. For all his Bombay-talkie bendy-cane-twirling comic-uncle antics he was a diligent worker, and within days of his appointment had acquired a knowledge of his subject that far exceeded Aurora’s requirements. On the nursery walls he first painted a series of trompe-l’oeil windows, Mughal-palatial, Andalusian Moorish, Manueline Portuguese, roseate Gothic, windows great and small; and then, through these magic casements, which were windows both of and on the world of make-believe, he gave us glimpses of his fabulous throngs. Early-period Mickey on his steamboat, Donald fighting the hands of Time, Unca Scrooge with $ signs in his eyes. Huey-Dewey-Louie. Gyro Gearloose, Goofy, Pluto. Crows, chipmunks, and other couples that have passed beyond my recollection: Heckle’n’Jeckle, Chip’n’Dale, What’n’Not. He also gave us Looney Tunes: Daffy, Porky, Bugs and Fudd; and in the air above this two-dimensional portrait gallery he hung their cacophonetic expostulations – hahahaHAha, thuffering thuccotash, tawt-I-taw, beep-beep, what’s-up-Doc and wak. There were talking roosters, booted pussies and flying, red-caped Wonder Dogs; also great galleries of more local heroes, for he gave us more than we had bargained for, adding djinns on carpets and thieves in giant pitchers and a man in the claws of a giant bird. He gave us story-oceans and abracadabras, Panchatantra fables and new lamps for old. Most important of all, however, was the notion he implanted in all of us through the pictures on our walls: the notion, that is, of the secret identity.

  Who was that masked man? It was from the walls of my childhood that I first learned about the wealthy socialite Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson, beneath whose luxury residence lurked the secrets of the Bat-Cave, about mild-mannered Clark Kent who was the space-immigrant Kal-El from the planet Krypton who was Superman, about John Jones who was the Martian J’onn J’onzz and Diana King who was Wonder Woman the Amazon Queen. It was from these walls that I learned how profoundly a super-hero could yearn for normality, that Superman who was brave as a lion and could see through anything except lead wanted more than life itself that Lois Lane should love him as a meek wimp in specs. I never thought of myself as a super-hero, don’t get me wrong; but with my hand like a club and my personal calendar losing pages at super-speed I was exceptional all right, and had no desire to be. Learning from the Phantom and the Flash, from Green Arrow and Batman and Robin, I set about devising a secret identity of my very own. (As had my sisters before me; my poor, damaged sisters.)

  By the age of seven-and-a-half I had entered adolescence, developing face-fuzz, an adam’s apple, a deep bass voice and fully-fledged male sexual organs and appetites; at ten, I was a child trapped in the six-foot-six body of a twenty-year-old giant, and possessed, from these early moments of self-consciousness, by a terror of running out of time. Cursed with speed, I put on slowness the way the Lone Ranger wore a mask. Determined to decelerate my evolution by sheer force of personality, I became ever more languid of body, and my words learned how to stretch themselves out in long sensual yawns. For a time I affected the drawling-aristo speech-mannerisms of Billy Bunter’s Indian chum, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the Dusky Nabob of Bhanipur: I was never merely thirsty in that period, but ‘the thirstfulness was terrific’. My sister Mynah the mimic cured me of what she called ‘being in a hurree’ by becoming my ridiculing echo, but even after I left the Dusky Nabob behind she continued to convulse the family with slow-motion, moon-walking impersonations of my half-paced mannerisms; but this ‘Slomo’ – her name for me – was only one of my secret identities, only the most visible of my layers of disguise.

  Southpaw, sinister, cuddy-wiftie, keggy-fistie, corrie-paw: what a vocabulary of denigration clusters around left-handedness! What an infinity of small humiliations await the non-dextrous round every corner! Where, pray, is one to find a left-handed trouser-fly, chequebook, corkscrew, or flatiron (yes, an iron; imagine how awkward for a lefty that the flex always emerges from the right)? A left-handed cricketer, being a valued member of any middle order, will have no trouble finding a bat to suit him; but in all the hockey-mad land of India there’s no such creature as a wrong-way hockey-stick. Of potato peelers and cameras I will not deign to speak … and if life is hard for ‘natural’ left-handers, how much harder it was for me – for it turned out that I was a right-handed entity, a dexter whose right
hand just happened to be a wreck. It was as hard for me to learn to write with my left as it would be for any righty in the world. When I was ten, and looked twenty, my handwriting was no better than a toddler’s early scrawls. This, too, I overcame.

  What was hard to overcome was the feeling of being in that house of art, surrounded by makers of beauty, both resident and visiting, and knowing that in my life such making must remain a closed book; that where my mother (and Vasco too) went for their greatest joy, there I could not follow. What was harder still was the feeling of being ugly; malformed, wrong, the knowledge that life had dealt me a bad hand, and a freak of nature was obliging me to play it out too fast. What was hardest of all was the sense of being an embarrassment, a shame.

  All this, too, I concealed. The first lessons of my Paradise were educations in metamorphosis and disguise.

  When I was very young (though not so small), Vasco Miranda would creep into my bedroom while I slept and change the pictures on the walls. Certain windows would shut, others would open; mouse or duck or cat or rabbit would change position, would move from one wall, and one adventure, to the next. For a long time I believed that I did indeed inhabit a magic room, that the fantasy-creatures on the walls came to life after I fell asleep. Then Vasco gave me a different explanation.

  ‘You are changing the room,’ he whispered to me one night. ‘It is you. You do it in your sleep, with this third hand.’ He pointed in the general direction of my heart.

  ‘Whis third hand?’

  ‘Why, this one here, this invisible hand, with these invisible fingers on which are those rough-rough, those badly bitten nails … ’

  ‘Whese? Whoase?’

  ‘ … the hand you can only see clearly in your dreams.’

  No wonder I loved him. I would have loved him for the gift of the dream-hand alone; but as soon as I was old enough to understand he whispered an even greater secret into my nocturnal ear. He told me that as a result of a botched appendix operation many years ago there was a needle lost inside him. It gave him no trouble but one day it would reach his heart and he would die instantly, speared from within. This was the secret of his hyperactive personality – he slept no more than three hours a night, and when awake, was incapable of sitting still even for three minutes. ‘Until the day of the needle I have much to do,’ he confided. ‘Live until you die, that is my creed.’

  I’m like you. That was his kind, fraternal message. I also am short of time. And maybe he was just trying to reduce my feeling of being alone in the universe, because as I grew I found his story harder to believe, I could not understand how a man so outrageous and unconventional as the famous V. Miranda could accept such a dreadful fate so passively, why he did not seek to have the needle traced and then removed; so I came to think of the needle as a metaphor – as, perhaps, the prick of his ambitions. But that childhood night, when Vasco tapped at his chest and made wincing faces, when he rolled his eyes and fell to the floor with his feet in the air, playing dead for my entertainment – then, then I believed him utterly; and, recalling this absolute belief in later years (recalling it even now, after finding him again in Benengeli, in thrall to other needles, his youthful slenderness swollen into old-aged obesity, his lightness grown dark, his openness slammed shut, the wine of love spoiled in him long ago, and turned into the vinegar of hate), I was able – I am able – to find a different meaning in his secret. Perhaps the needle, if indeed it really was in there, lost in the haystack of his body, was in truth the source of his whole self – perhaps it was his soul. To lose it would be to lose his life at once, or at least its meaning. He preferred to work, and wait. ‘A man’s weakness is his strength, and vercy visa,’ he told me once. ‘Would Achilles have been a great warrior without his heel?’ and remembering that I can almost envy him his sharp, wandering, enabling angel of death.

  In the well-known Hans Andersen story the young Kay, escaping the Snow Queen, is left with a splinter of ice in his veins, a splinter that pains him for the rest of his life. My whitehair mother had been Vasco’s Snow Queen, whom he loved, and from whom, in the grip of an enraging humiliation, he finally fled, with the cold splinter of bitterness in his blood; which continued to ache, to lower his body temperature, and to chill that once-warm heart.

  Vasco with his silly clothes and verbal inventions, with his frivolous disrespect of all shibboleths, conventions, sacred cows, pomposities and gods, and with, above all, his legendary inexhaustibility, as effective in the pursuit of commissions, bed-mates and squash-balls as of love, became my first hero. When I was four years old, the Indian Army entered Goa, ending 451 years of Portuguese colonial rule, and Vasco was plunged for weeks into one of his black-dog depressions. Aurora encouraged him to see the event as a liberation, as many Goans did, but he was inconsolable. ‘Up to now I had only three Gods and the Virgin Mary to disbelieve in,’ he complained. ‘Now I have three hundred million. And what Gods! For my taste, they have too many heads and hands.’ He bounced back soon enough, and spent days in the kitchens of Elephanta, winning over our at-first-outraged old cook Ezekiel by teaching him the secrets of Goan cuisine and entering them in a new green copybook of recipes which he hung by the kitchen door on a length of wire; and for weeks after that it was all pork, we were obliged to eat Goan chourisso sausage and pig’s liver sarpotel and pork curries with coconut milk until Aurora complained that we were all starting to turn into pigs; whereupon Vasco returned grinning from market bearing immense claw-clacking baskets of shellfish and finny-toothy packets of shark, and when our sweeper-woman caught sight of him she threw down her stick-broom and ran out of the gates, informing Lambajan that she would not return to her sweeping job so long as those ‘unclean’ monsters were in residence.

  Nor was his counter-revolution confined to the dining table. Our days grew full of tales of the heroism of Alfonso de Albuquerque who conquered Goa from the Sultan of Bijapur, one Yusuf Adilshah, on St Catherine’s Day, 1510; and of Vasco da Gama, too. ‘A pepper-spice family like yours should understand how I feel,’ he told Aurora, plaintively. ‘Ours is a common history; what do these Indian soldiers know about it?’ He sang us mando love songs and served the adults contraband cashew and coconut feni liquor and at night I would sit with him in the room of magic casements while he told me his fishy Goan tales. ‘Down with Mother India,’ he cried dismissively, striking an attitude, while I giggled under my sheet. ‘Viva Mother Portugoose!’

  After forty days Aurora put an end to our very own Goan invasion. ‘Mourning period is over,’ she announced. ‘Henceforth history will proceedofy.’

  ‘Colonialist,’ complained Vasco dolefully. ‘Cultural supremacist, plus.’ But – as we all did when Aurora issued a command – he obediently complied.

  I loved him; but for a long time I did not see – how could I? – the crossfire within him, the battle between his rage-to-become and his shallowness, between loyalty and careerism, between ability and desire. I did not understand the price he had paid on his way to our gates.

  He had no friends who preceded our knowledge of him; at least, none was ever mentioned or produced. He never spoke about his family, and rarely about his early life. Even his village of origin, Loutulim with its houses of red laterite stone and its windows with panes of oyster-shell, was a fact we had to take on trust. He did not speak of it, though he did let slip a reference to a period as a market porter in the north Goan town of Mapusa, and at another time there was some mention made of a casual job in the port of Marmagoa. It seemed that in the pursuit of his chosen future he had shed all affiliations of blood and place, a decision which implied a certain ruthlessness, and hinted, too, at instability. He was his own invention, and it should have occurred to Aurora–as it occurred to Abraham and to many members of their circle, as it occurred to my sisters but not to me – that the invention might not work, that in the end it might fall apart. For a long time, however, Aurora refused to hear the slightest criticism of her pet; as, afterwards, in the matter of Uma Sarasvati, anot
her self-inventor, I refused in my turn. When a mistake of the heart is revealed as folly, we think of ourselves as fools, and ask our near-and-dear why they failed to save us from ourselves. But that is an enemy against whom no-one can defend us. Nobody could save Vasco from himself; whatever that was, whoever he might have been, or have become. Nobody could save me.

  In April 1947, when my siseer Ina was just three months old and Aurora’s pregnancy with the future Minnie-the-mouse had been confirmed, Abraham Zogoiby, proud husband and father, approached Vasco Miranda in a gruff, awkward attempt at friendliness. ‘So, if you are supposed to be a proper painter, why not make a portrait of my carrying wife and child?’

  This portrait was Vasco’s first work on canvas, which Abraham bought for him and Aurora showed him how to prime. His early work had been done on board or paper, for economic reasons; and soon after he moved into his Elephanta studio he destroyed everything he had done before that date, declaring himself to be a new man who was only now making his real start in life; only now, as he put it, being born. The Aurora portrait was that new beginning.

  I say ‘the Aurora portrait’ because, when Vasco finally unveiled it (he had refused to let anyone view the work in progress), Abraham discovered, to his fury, that Baby Ina had been wholly ignored. Having already lost half her name, my poor eldest-sister had succeeded in vanishing completely from the work of which she was a principal subject, and which had been commissioned as a direct result of her recent arrival on the scene. (New Minnie-the-bump was omitted too, but at that early stage in Aurora’s second pregnancy this was more easily excused.) Vasco had depicted my mother sitting cross-legged on a giant lizard under her chhatri, cradling empty air. Her full left breast, weighty with motherhood, was exposed. ‘What in tarnation?’ Abraham roared. ‘Miranda, men, you got eyes in your head or stones?’ But Vasco waved away all naturalistic criticisms; when Abraham pointed out that his wife had at no time posed with uncovered bosom, and that the obliterated Ina was not being breast-fed anyway, the painter’s face grew heavy with disdain. ‘Next you will be telling me there is no outsize chipkali kept upon the premises as a pet,’ he sighed. When Abraham heatedly reminded Vasco who was paying the bills, however, the artist lifted a haughty nose into the air. ‘Genius is no rich man’s slave,’ he averred. ‘A canvas is not a mirror to reflect a goo-goo smile. I have seen what I have seen: a presence, and an absence. A fullness, and an emptiness. You wanted a double portrait? Behold. He who hath eyes to see, let him see.’