She was right, of course. This deranged, late-period Vasco had become a heavy user. Vasco Miranda of the lost needle had found many new ones. So when he came for us at the end he would have dutch courage running in his veins. Suddenly, with a great wheezing shudder, I remembered how he had looked the day after he read my piece about Abraham Zogoiby’s venture into the child-care business; I saw again the lop-sided grin on his face as he gloated over us, and heard – with a dreadful new understanding – his voice on the stairs as he descended, singing:
Baby Softo, sing it louder,
Softo-pofto talcum powder,
Bestest babies are allowed-a
Softer Baby Softo.
Of course he would kill us. I imagined that he would sit between our corpses, cleansed of hatred by violence, and gaze upon my mother’s unveiled portrait: united with his beloved at last. He would wait with Aurora until they came for him. Then, perhaps, he would use one last silver bullet on himself.
No help came. Codes were not cracked, Salvador Medina suspected nothing, the ‘Larios sisters’ remained loyal to their master. Was this a talcum-powder loyalty, I wondered; did they go in for this type of needlework as well?
My story had arrived in Benengeli, and my mother, cradling nothing, looked out at me from the easel. Aoi and I barely spoke any more; and each day we awaited the end. Sometimes, while I waited, I interrogated my mother’s portrait, silently, for answers to the great questions of my life. I asked her if she had truly been Miranda’s lover, or Raman Fielding’s, or anyone’s; I asked her for a proof of her love. She smiled, and did not reply.
Often I stared across at Aoi Uë as she worked. This woman who was both intimate and stranger. I dreamed of meeting her later, when we had escaped this fate, at a gallery opening in a foreign city. Would we fall upon each other, or walk on by without showing recognition? After the trembling, clutching nights, and the cockroaches, would we mean everything to each other, or nothing? Perhaps worse than nothing: each of us would remind the other of the worst time of our lives. So we would hate each other, and turn furiously away.
O, I am deep in blood. There is blood on my shaking hands, and on my clothes. Blood smudges these words as I set them down. O the vulgarity, the garish unambiguity of blood. How tawdry it is, how thin … I think of newspaper accounts of violence, of mimsy scriveners revealed as murderers, of rotting corpses discovered under bedroom floorboards or garden turf. It is the faces of the survivors I remember: the wives, neighbours, friends. ‘Yesterday our lives were rich and various,’ the faces say to me. ‘Then the atrocity happened; and now we are just its things, we are bit-players in a story in which we don’t belong. In which we never dreamed we might belong. We have been flattened; reduced.’
Fourteen years is a generation; or, enough time for a regeneration. In fourteen years Vasco could have allowed bitterness to leach out of him, he could have cleansed his soil of poisons and grown new crops. But he had mired himself in what he had left behind, marinaded himself in what had spurned him, and in his bile. He, too, was a prisoner in this house, his greatest folly, which trapped him in his own inadequacy, his failure to approach Aurora’s heights; he was caught in a shrieking feedback loop of remembrances, a screaming of memories, whose note rose higher and higher, until it began to shatter things. Eardrums; glass; lives.
The thing we feared came to pass. Chained, we waited; and it came. When I had brought my story to the X-ray room and Aurora had burst through the weeping cavalier, at mid-day, he came to us in his Sultan outfit, with a black cap on his head, key-ring jangling on his belt, with his revolver in his hand, humming a talcum-powder shanty. It’s a Bombay remake of a cowboy movie, I thought. A showdown at high noon, except that only one of us is armed. It’s no use, Tonto. We’re surrounded.
His face was dark, strange. ‘Please don’t,’ said Aoi. ‘You’ll regret it. Please.’
He turned to me. ‘The lady Chimène is pleading for her life, Moor,’ he said. ‘Will you not ride to her rescue? Will you not defend her to your last breath?’
Sunlight slashes fell across his face. His eyes were pinkish and his arm, unsteady. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
‘There is no defence I can make,’ I said. ‘But unchain me, set down your gun, and sure: I’ll fight you for our lives.’ My breath brayed loudly, making a jackass of me once again.
‘A true Moor’, responded Vasco, ‘would attack his lady’s assailant, even if it meant his certain death.’ He raised his gun.
‘Please,’ said Aoi, her back to the red stone wall. ‘Moor, please.’
Once before, a woman had asked me to die for her, and I had chosen life. Now I was being asked again; by a better woman, whom I loved less. How we cling to life! If I flung myself at Vasco, it would prolong her life by no more than a moment; yet how precious that moment seemed, how infinite in duration, how she longed for it, and resented me for denying her that aeon!
‘Moor, for God’s sake, please.’
No, I thought. No, I won’t.
‘Too late,’ said Vasco Miranda merrily. ‘O false and cowardly Moor.’
Aoi screamed and ran uselessly across the room. There was a moment when her upper half was hidden by the painting. Vasco fired, once. A hole appeared in the canvas, over Aurora’s heart; but it was Aoi Uë’s breast that had been pierced. She fell heavily against the easel, clutching at it; and for an instant – picture this – her blood pumped through the wound in my mother’s chest. Then the portrait fell forward, its top right-hand corner hitting the floor, and somersaulted to lie face upwards, stained with Aoi’s blood. Aoi Uë, however, lay face downwards, and was still.
The painting had been damaged. The woman had been killed.
So it was I who had gained that moment, so eternal in anticipation, so brief in retrospect. I turned my tearful eyes away from Aoi’s fallen form. I would look my assassin in the face.
‘ “Well may you weep like a woman,” ’ he told me, ‘ “for what you could not defend like a man.” ’
Then he simply burst. There was a gurgling in him, and he was jerked by invisible strings, and the titles of his blood were unleashed, they poured from his nose, his mouth, his ears, his eyes. – I swear it! – Bloodstains spread across the front and rear of his Moorish pantaloons, and he fell to his knees, splashing in his own, and fatal, pools. There was blood and more blood, Vasco’s blood mingling with Aoi’s, blood lapping at my feet and running away under the door to drip downstairs and tell Abraham’s X-rays the news. – An overdose, you say. – One needle too many in the arm, causing the insulted body to spring a dozen leaks. – No, this was something older, an older needle, the needle of retribution that had been planted in him before he had even committed a crime; or, and, it was a needle of fable, it was the splinter of ice left in his veins by his encounter with the Snow Queen, my mother, whom he had loved, and who had made him mad.
When he died he lay upon his portrait of my mother, and the last of his lifeblood darkened the canvas. She, too, had gone beyond recall, and she never spoke to me, never made confession, never gave me back what I needed, the certainty of her love.
As for me, I went back to my table, and wrote my story’s end.
The rough grass in the graveyard has grown high and spiky and as I sit upon this tombstone I seem to be resting upon the grass’s yellow points, weightless, floating free of burdens, borne aloft by a thick brush of miraculously unbending blades. I do not have long. My breaths are numbered, like the years of the ancient world, in reverse, and the countdown to zero is well advanced. I have used the last of my strength to make this pilgrimage; for when I had gathered my wits, when I had freed myself of my shackles by using the keys on Vasco’s ring, when I had finished my writing, to do proper honour and dishonour to the two who lay dead – then my last purpose in life became clear. I put on my greatcoat, and, leaving my cell, found the rest of my text in Vasco’s studio, and stuffed the thick furl of paper into my pockets, along with a hammer and some nails. The ho
usekeepers would find the bodies soon enough, and then Medina would begin his search. Let him find me, I thought, let him not think I do not wish to be found. Let him know everything there is to know and give the knowledge to whomsoever he desires. And so I left my story nailed to the landscape in my wake. I have kept away from roads, in spite of these lungs that no longer do my bidding I have scrambled over rough ground and walked in dry watercourses, because of my determination to reach my goal before I was found. Thorns, branches and stones tore at my skin. I paid no attention to these wounds; if my skin was falling from me at last, I was happy to shed that load. And so I sit here in the last light, upon this stone, among these olive-trees, gazing out across a valley towards a distant hill; and there it stands, the glory of the Moors, their triumphant masterpiece and their last redoubt. The Alhambra, Europe’s red fort, sister to Delhi’s and Agra’s – the palace of interlocking forms and secret wisdom, of pleasure-courts and water-gardens, that monument to a lost possibility that nevertheless has gone on standing, long after its conquerors have fallen; like a testament to lost but sweetest love, to the love that endures beyond defeat, beyond annihilation, beyond despair; to the defeated love that is greater than what defeats it, to that most profound of our needs, to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of the boundaries of the self Yes, I have seen it across an oceanic plain, though it has not been given to me to walk in its noble courts. I watch it vanish in the twilight, and in its fading it brings tears to my eyes.
At the head of this tombstone are three eroded letters; my fingertip reads them for me. RIP. Very well: I will rest, and hope for peace. The world is full of sleepers waiting for their moment of return: Arthur sleeps in Avalon, Barbarossa in his cave. Finn MacCool lies in the Irish hillsides and the Worm Ouroboros on the bed of the Sundering Sea. Australia’s ancestors, the Wandjina, take their ease underground, and somewhere, in a tangle of thorns, a beauty in a glass coffin awaits a prince’s kiss. See: here is my flask. I’ll drink some wine; and then, like a latter-day Van Winkle, I’ll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay my head beneath these letters RIP, and close my eyes, according to our family’s old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.
Acknowledgments
The words spoken by the Resident on this page–this page are for the most part taken from Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘On the City Wall’, included in the collection In Black and White (reissued by Penguin, 1993).
The italicised passage on this page is for the most part taken from R. K. Narayan’s novel Waiting for the Mahatma (Heinemann, 1955).
The letter from Jawaharlal Nehru to Aurora Zogoiby on this page–this page draws on an actual letter written by Mr Nehru to Indira Gandhi on 1 July 1945 and published, as Letter 274, in Two Alone, Two Together: Letters Between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru 1940–64, edited by Sonia Gandhi (Hodder & Stoughton, 1992).
The illustration of the ‘Common Man’ on this page is by R.K. Laxman.
The extract from the Ramayana on this page is taken from the verse translation by Romesh C. Dutt, first published in 1944; Jaico Books edition, 1966.
The extract from the Iliad on the same page is taken from the verse translation by Sir William Marris, OUP, 1934.
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