The Moor's Last Sigh

by Salman Rushdie

  ‘Christ!’ Aurora swore, angrier than I had ever seen her. ‘This is how you payofy us back for everything we have done.’

  Minnie coloured, and you could see her wanting to tell her mother not to take the name of the Lord in vain, but she bit her lip until it bled, and went on hunger strike. ‘Let her die,’ said Aurora obdurately. ‘Better a corpse than a nun.’ But for six days little Minnie neither ate nor drank, until she started fainting and becoming more and more resistant to being revived. Under pressure from Abraham, Aurora relented. I did not often see my mother weep, but on that seventh day she wept, the tears being wrenched from her and emerging in harsh, hacking sobs. Sister John from the Gratiaplena nunnery was summoned – Sister John who had assisted at all our births – and she arrived with the serene authority of a conquering queen, as if she were Queen Isabella of Spain entering Granada’s Alhambra to accept the surrender of Boabdil the Moor. She was a large old boat of a woman with white sails around her head and soft billows of flesh under her chin. Everything about her took on symbolic resonances that day; she seemed to be the vessel in which our sister would sail away. There was a knotty tree-stump of a mole – signifying the recalcitrance of true faith – on her upper lip, and from it there protruded like arrows – hinting at the sufferings of a true believer – half a dozen needles of hair. ‘Blessed is this house,’ she said, ‘for it gives a bride to Christ.’ It took Aurora Zogoiby all her self-control not to kill her on the spot.

  So Minnie had become a novice and when she visited us in her Audrey Hepburn Nun’s Story outfit the servants called her – of all things – Minnie mausi. Little mother, they meant, but I couldn’t help finding the sound of it a bit creepy, as if Vasco Miranda’s Disney figures on our nursery wall were somehow responsible for my sister’s metamorphosis. Also, this new Minnie, this composed, remote, certain Minnie with the Mona Lisa smile and the devotional sparkle in her eternity-fixated eye, this Minnie felt as alien to me as if she had become a member of a different species: an angel, or a Martian, or a two-dimensional mouse. Her elder sister, however, acted as if nothing had changed in their relationship, as if Minnie – in spite of having been drafted into a different army – were still obliged to obey her Big Sis’s commands.

  ‘Talk to your nuns,’ Ina ordered her. ‘Get me a bed in their nursing home.’ (The Gratiaplena nuns of Altamount Road specialised in the two ends of life, in helping people in and out of this sinful world.) ‘I must be in such a place when my Jimmy Cash returns.’

  Why did we do it? – For we all collaborated in Ina’s plot, you know; Aurora sent the cancergram and Minnie persuaded the Altamount sisters to make a bed available on compassionate grounds, arguing that anything that might save a marriage, that might protect that high sacrament, was pure in the eyes of God. And when the cable worked and Jamshed Cashondeliveri flew into town, the fiction was maintained. Even Mynah, third and toughest of my sisters, who had recently been admitted to the Bombay Bar, and of whom we saw less and less in those days, rallied round.

  We have been a cussed lot, we da Gama-Zogoibys, each of us needing to strike out in a direction unlike the others, to lay claim to a territory we could call our own. After Abraham’s business and Aurora’s art came Ina’s professionalisation of her sexuality and Minnie’s surrender to God. As for Philomina Zogoiby – she dropped the ‘Mynah’ as soon as she could, and the magic child who imitated bird-calls had vanished long ago, though with the obstinacy of family we continued to annoy her by using the loathed nickname whenever she visited us at home – she had chosen to make a career out of what every youngest-daughter must do to get attention; that is, protest. No sooner had she qualified as an advocate than she told Abraham that she had joined a radical all-woman group of activists, film-makers and lawyers whose purpose was to expose the double scandals of invisible people and invisible skyscrapers out of which he had done so well. She took Kéké Kolatkar and his cronies at the Municipal Corporation to court, in a landmark case that lasted many years and shook the old F. W. Stevens Corporation building – ‘How old?’ – ‘Old. From Old Time’ – to its foundations. Years later she would succeed in putting crooked old Kéké in jail; Abraham Zogoiby, however, escaped, having been offered a deal by the court after negotiations with the tax authorities, much to his daughter’s fury. He paid a large fine cheerfully, testified for the prosecution against his old ally, was granted immunity from prosecution in return, and, some months later, bought the beautiful K. K. Chambers for a song from the jailed politico’s crumbling property company. And there was one further defeat for Mynah; for although she had successfully proved the existence of the invisible buildings, she failed to establish the reality of the invisible people who built them. They continued to be classified as phantoms, to move through the city like wraiths, except that these were the wraiths that kept the city going, building its houses, hauling its goods, cleaning up its droppings, and then simply and terribly dying, each in their turn, unseen, as their spectral blood poured out of their ghostly mouths in the middle of the bitch-city’s all-too-real, uncaring streets.

  When Ina holed up at the Altamount sisters’ nursing home to await Jimmy Cash’s return, Philomina surprised us all by paying her sister a visit. There was a Dory Previn song that you heard a lot back then – we sometimes got to things a little late – in which she accused her lover of being prepared to die for total strangers, though he would not live with her … Well, we thought much the same of our Philomina. Which was why her concern for poor Ina was so unexpected.

  Why did we do it? I think because we understood that something had broken, that this was Ina’s last throw of the dice. I think because we had always known that although Minnie was smaller and Mynah was younger it was Ina who was the most fragile, that she had never really been all there ever since her parents chopped her name in half, and that what with her nymphomania and all she had been cracking up for years. So she was drowning, she was clutching at straws as she had always clutched at men, and cheesy Jimmy was the last straw on offer.

  Mynah offered to collect Jamshed Cashondeliveri from the airport, reasoning that, what with his new life as a law student and all, he might find it easiest to open up to her. He arrived looking very scared and very young, and to put him at his ease she began prattling, as she drove into town, about her own work, her ‘struggle against the phallocracy’ – about the case of the invisible world, and also her women’s group’s efforts to fight the Emergency in the courts. She spoke of the climate of fear pervading much of the country and the importance of the struggle for democratic and human rights. ‘Indira Gandhi’, she said, ‘has lost the right to call herself a woman. She has grown an invisible dick.’ Because she was so absorbed in her own concerns and so convinced of their justness she failed to notice that Jimmy was becoming more tense by the minute. He was no intellectual – law school was proving a great struggle – and, even more importantly, he had not a single drop of political radicalism in his blood. So it was that Mynah was the first of us to put a spoke in Ina’s wheel. When she told him that she and her colleagues expected to be arrested any day now he thought seriously about jumping from the car and heading straight back to the airport before he became guilty by association with so tainted an in-law.

  ‘Ina is dying to see you,’ Mynah said at the end of her monologue, and then reddened at her choice of metaphor. ‘I mean, no, she’s not,’ she corrected herself, hotly, making matters worse. A silence opened. ‘Oh, hell, here we are, anyway,’ she added a while later. ‘Now you can see for yourself.’

  Minnie met them at the door of the Maria Gratiaplena nursing home, looking more like Audrey Hepburn than ever, and all the way to the room where Ina waited like a miserable balloon she spoke of hellfire and damnation and till-death-us-do-part in a seraphic voice as sharp as breaking glass. Jimmy tried to tell her that he and Ina had not signed the full, holy, brimstone-and-treacle type of contract, having opted instead for the fifty-dollar Midnight Special country-style civil nuptial ’n’ hoedown in a
Reno quickie ‘Wed-Inn’ parlour, that they had been married to the music of Hank Williams Sr rather than hymns ancient or modern, standing not before an altar but beside a ‘Hitching Post’; that there had been no priest officiating, but a man in a ten-gallon hat with a pair of pearl-handled six-guns riding on his hips, and that at the moment they were pronounced man and wife, a rodeo cowboy in chaps, and with a polka-dotted bandanna round his neck, had stepped up behind them with a mighty yahoo and lassoed them tightly together, crushing Ina’s bridal bouquet of yellow roses against her chest. Its thorns had pricked her bosom until it bled.

  My sister was unmoved by such secularist excuses. ‘That cowpoke’, she pronounced, ‘was – don’t you see? – the Messenger of God.’

  The encounter with Minnie intensified the flight-response which Mynah’s monologue had already prompted; and next, I must admit, I also did my inadvertent bit. When Minnie and Jimmy arrived outside Ina’s room I was leaning against a corridor wall, daydreaming. Absent-mindedly, as I saw in my mind’s eye a huge young Sikh bearing down upon me in a crowded alley, I spat on my deformed right hand. Jamshed Cashondeliveri leapt backwards in fright, colliding with Mynah, and I realised that I must have looked like the avenging brother, a six-and-a-half-foot giant preparing to strike down the man who had caused his sister so much misery. I tried putting up my hands in peace but he mistook this for a boxer’s challenge, and plunged into Ina’s room with a look of pure terror on his face.

  He skidded to a halt a few inches away from Aurora Zogoiby herself. Behind my mother, on the bed, Ina had gone into a routine of moans and groans; but Jimmy had eyes only for Aurora. The great lady was at that time a woman in her fifties, but time had only increased her allure; she froze Jimmy like a dumb animal caught in the headlamps of her power, she turned the great beam of her attention upon him, wordlessly, and made him her slave. Afterwards, when that tragic farce was over, she told me – she actually admitted – that she should not have done it, she should have stood aside and let the estranged couple make what they could of their wretched lives. ‘What to do?’ she told me (I was her model then, and she was chatting as she worked). ‘I just wanted to see if an old hen like me could still stoppofy a young fellow in his tracks.’

  I couldn’t help it, my scorpion-mother meant. It was in my nature.

  Ina, behind her, was quickly losing control. It had been her pathetic plan to win back Jimmy’s love by telling him how slim her chances were, how the cancer was systemic, it was pernicious, it was invasive, the lymph nodes were diseased, and the odds were that it had been discovered too late. Once he had fallen to his feet and begged forgiveness, she would allow him to sweat for a few weeks while she pretended to undergo chemotherapy (she was prepared to starve, even to thin her hair in the pursuit of love). Finally she would announce a miracle cure and they would live happily ever after. All these schemes were undone by the look of mooncalf adoration with which her husband was regarding her mother.

  At that moment Ina’s panicky need for him spilled over into insanity. In her frenzy she made the irreversible mistake of accelerating her plan. ‘Jimmy,’ she shrieked, ‘Jimmy, it’s a miracle, men. Now that you are here I am fixed, I know it, I swear it, let them test me and you will see. Jimmy, you saved my life, Jimmy, only you could do it, it is the power of love.’

  He looked carefully at her then, and we could all see the scales falling from his eyes. He turned to each of us in turn and saw the conspiracy standing naked in our faces, saw the truth we could no longer hide. Ina, defeated, unleashed a foaming cascade of grief. ‘What a family,’ said Jamshed Cashondeliveri. ‘I swear. Absolutely crack.’ He left the Gratiaplena nursing home and never saw Ina again.

  Jimmy’s parting shot was a prophecy; Ina’s humiliation was a cracking-point in our family history. After that day and for all the next year she was mad, entering a kind of second childhood. Aurora had her put back into Vasco’s nursery where she–where all of us – began; when her madness increased she was placed in a straitjacket and padding was put up against the walls, but Aurora would not permit her to be committed to a mental home. Now that it was too late, now that Ina had snapped, Aurora became the most loving mother in the world, spoonfeeding her, washing her like a baby, hugging and kissing her as she had never been hugged or kissed when she was sane – giving her the love, that is to say, which, had it been offered earlier, might have built in her eldest daughter the fortitude to resist the catastrophe that had ruined her mind.

  Soon after the end of the Emergency, Ina died of cancer. The lymphoma developed quite suddenly, and gobbled up her body like a beggar at a feast. Only Minnie, who had completed her novitiate and been reborn as Sister Floreas – ‘sounds like the blooming Fountain,’ Aurora snorted in frustrated scorn – had the nerve to say that Ina had called the illness down upon herself, that she had ‘chosen her own gathering’. Aurora and Abraham never spoke of Ina’s death, honouring it in silence, the silence which had once helped make Ina a celebrated beauty, and which was now the silence of the tomb.

  So Ina was dead, and Minnie was gone, and Mynah was briefly in jail – for she was arrested at the very end of the Emergency, but quickly released, her reputation much enhanced, after Mrs Gandhi’s electoral defeat. Aurora wanted to tell her youngest daughter how proud she was of her, but somehow she never got round to it, somehow the coldness, the brusqueness of Philomina Zogoiby’s manner whenever she had any contact with her folks succeeded in stopping her mother’s loving tongue. Mynah did not often visit Elephanta; which left me.

  One last person had fallen through the crack in the world. Dilly Hormuz had been dismissed. Miss Jaya Hé, whose job in the household had evolved from ayah into housekeeper, had taken advantage of her position to pull off one final heist. From Aurora’s studio she stole three charcoal sketches of me as a young boy, sketches in which my ruined hand had been wondrously metamorphosed, becoming, variously, a flower, a paintbrush and a sword. Miss Jaya took these sketches to my Dilly’s flat and said they were a gift from the ‘young Sahib’. Then she told Aurora that she had seen the teacher pinching them, and, excuse me, Begum Sahib, but that woman’s attitude to our boy is not a moral one. Aurora visited Dilly the same day, and the pictures, which the sweet woman had placed in the silver frames on the piano, concealing her own family portraits, were all the proof my mother needed of the teacher’s guilt. I tried to plead Dilly’s case, but once my mother’s mind was closed, no force on earth could open it. ‘Anyhow,’ she told me, ‘you are too old for her now. There is nothing more you can learnofy from her.’

  Dilly spurned all my overtures – my telephone calls, letters, flowers – after she was sacked. I walked one last time down the hill to the house by Vijay Stores and when I got there she would not let me in. She opened the door about three inches and refused to move out of the way. That long stripe of her, framed in teak, that mutinous jaw and short-sighted blink, was my sweaty journey’s only reward. ‘Go your ways, you poor boy,’ she told me. ‘I wish you well on your hard road.’

  Such was Miss Jaya Hé’s revenge.

  13

  THE SO-CALLED ‘MOOR paintings’ of Aurora Zogoiby can be divided into three distinct periods: the ‘early’ pictures, made between 1957 and 1977, that is to say between the year of my birth and that of the election that swept Mrs G. from power, and of Ina’s death; the ‘great’ or ‘high’ years, 1977–81, during which she created the glowing, profound works with which her name is most often associated; and the so-called ‘dark Moors’, those pictures of exile and terror which she painted after my departure, and which include her last, unfinished, unsigned masterpiece, The Moor’s Last Sigh (170 × 247 cms., oil on canvas, 1987), in which she turned, at last, to the one subject she had never directly addressed – facing up, in that stark depiction of the moment of Boabdil’s expulsion from Granada, to her own treatment of her only son. It was a picture which, for all its great size, had been stripped to the harsh essentials, all its elements converging on the face at its heart,
the Sultan’s face, from which horror, weakness, loss and pain poured like darkness itself, a face in a condition of existential torment reminiscent of Edvard Munch. It was as different a picture from Vasco Miranda’s sentimental treatment of the same theme as could possibly be imagined. But it was also a mystery picture, that ‘lost painting’ – and how striking that both Vasco’s and Aurora’s treatments of this theme should disappear within a few years of my mother’s death, the one stolen from the private collection of C. J. Bhabha, the other from the Zogoiby Bequest itself! Gents, gentesses: permit me to titillate your interest by revealing that it was a picture within which Aurora Zogoiby, in her fretful last days, had concealed a prophecy of her death. (And Vasco’s fate, too, was bound up with the story of these canvases.)

  As I set down my memories of my part in those paintings, I am naturally conscious that those who submit themselves as the models upon whom a work of art is made can offer, at best, a subjective, often wounded, sometimes spiteful, wrong-side-of-the-canvas version of the finished work. What then can the humble clay usefully say about the hands that moulded it? Perhaps simply this: that I was there. And that during the years of sittings I made a kind of portrait of her, too. She was looking at me, and I was looking right back.

  This is what I saw: a tall woman in a paint-spattered, mid-calf-length homespun kurta worn over dark blue sailcloth slacks, barefoot, her white hair piled up on her head with brushes sticking out of it, giving her an eccentric Madame Butterfly look, Butterfly as Katharine Hepburn or–yes! – Nargis in some zany Indian cover version, Titli Begum, might have played her: no longer young, no longer prinked and painted, and certainly no longer bothered about any pathetic Pinkerton’s return. She stood before me in the least luxurious of studios, a room lacking so much as a comfortable chair, and ‘non-A.C.’ so that it was as hot and humid as a cheap taxi, with one slow ceiling fan moving lazily above. Aurora never showed any signs of giving a damn about the weather conditions; so neither, naturally, did I. I sat where and how she set me, and made a point of never complaining of the aches in my variously arranged limbs until she remembered to ask if I’d like a break. In this way a little of her legendary stubbornness, her determination, seeped through the canvas into me.