The Moor's Last Sigh (2 page)

names, imposing his private universe bully-fashion upon the world): Isabella Ximena da Gama, the grandmother I never knew. Between her and Epifania it had been war from the start. Widowed at forty-five, Epifania at once commenced to play the matriarch, and would sit with a lapful of pistachios in the morning shadow of her favourite courtyard, fanning herself, cracking nutshells with her teeth in a loud, impressive demonstration of power, singing the while in a high, implacable voice, Booby Shafto'sgone to sea-ea Silver bottles on his knee-ee... Ker-rick! Ker-rack! went the nutshells in her mouth. He'll come back to bury me-ee Boney Booby Shafto. In all the years of her life only Belle refused to be scared of her. 'Four b-minuses,' the nineteen-year-old Isabella told her mother-in-law brightly the day after she entered the household as a disapproved-of but grudgingly accepted bride. 'Not booby, not bottles, not bury, not boney. So sweet you sing a love song at your age, but wrong words make it nonsense, isn't it.' 'Camoens,' said stony Epifania, 'inform your goodwife to shuttofy her tap. Some hot-water-trouble is leaking from her face.' In the days that followed she launched indomitably into a full medley of personalised shanties: What shall we do with the shrunken tailor? caused her new daughter-in-law much inadequately stifled merriment, whereupon Epifania, frowning, changed her tune: Row, row, row your beau, gently down istream, she sang, perhaps advising Belle to concentrate on her spousely duties, and then added the rather more metaphysical put-down: Morally, morally, morally, morally... ker-runch!... wife is not a queen. Ah, the legends of the battling da Gamas of Cochin! I tell them as they have come down to me, polished and fantasticated by many re-tellings. These are old ghosts, distant shadows, and I tell their tales to be done with them; they are all I have left and so I set them free. From Cochin harbour to Bombay harbour, from Malabar ii Coast to Malabar Hill: the story of our comings-together, tearings-apart, our rises, falls, our tiltoings up and down. And after that it's goodbye, Mattancherri, farewell, Marine Drive... at any rate, by the time my mother Aurora had arrived in that baby-starved household and grown into a tall and mutinous thirteen-year-old, the lines were clearly drawn. 'Too long for a girl,' was Epifania's disapproving verdict on her granddaughter as Aurora entered her teens. 'Trouble in her eye means devil in her heart. Shame on her front, also, as any eye can see. It stickofies too far out.' To which Belle angrily replied, 'And what so-so-perfect child has your darling Aires provided? At least one young da Gama is here, alive and kicking, and never mind her big booby-shaftoes. From Aires-brother and Sister Sahara, no sign of any produce: boobies or babies, both.' Aires's wife's name was Carmen, but Belle, mimicking her brother-in-law's fondness for inventing names, had named her after the desert, 'because she is barren-flat as sand and in all that waste ground I can't see any place to get a drink.' Aires da Gama, brilliantine struggling to keep slicked-down his thick, wavy white hair (premature whitening has long been a family characteristic; my mother Aurora was snow-white at twenty, and what fairy-tale glamour, what \cygravitas was added to her beauty by the soft glaciers cascading from her head!): how my great-uncle postured! In the small, two-inch-by-two-inch monochrome photographs I remember, what a ludicrous figure he cut in his monocle, stiff collar, and three-piece suit of finest gabardine. There was an ivory-topped cane in one hand (it was a swordstick, family history whispers in my ear), a long cigarette-holder in the other; and he was also, I regret to mention, in the habit of wearing spats. Add height, and a pair of twirling moustachios, and the picture of a comic-opera villain would be complete; but Aires was as pocket-sized as his brother, clean-shaven and a little shiny of face, so that his look of a counterfeit Drone was, perhaps, more to be pitied than hissed at. Here, too, on another page of memory's photograph album, is stooping, squint-eyed Great-Aunt Sahara, the Woman Without Oases, masticating betel-nut in those just-so-cameelious jowls and looking like she's got the hump. Carmen da Gama was Aires's first cousin, the orphan child of Epifania's sister Blimunda and a smalltime printer named Lobo. Both parents had been carried away by a malaria epidemic, and Carmen's marriage prospects had been lower than zero, frozen solid until Aires amazed his mother by agreeing to the making of a match. Epifania in a torment of indecision suffered a week of sleepless nights, unable to choose between her dream of finding Aires a fish worth hooking and the increasingly desperate need to palm Carmen off on someone before it was too late. In the end her duty to her dead sister took precedence over her hopes for her son. Carmen never looked young, never had children, dreamed of diddling Camoens's side of the family out of its inheritance by fair means or foul, and never mentioned to a living soul that on her wedding night her husband had entered her bedroom late, ignored his terrified and scrawny young bride who lay virgina Uy quaking in the bed, undressed with slow fastidiousness, and then with equal precision slipped his naked body (so similar in proportions to her own) into the wedding-dress which her maidservant had left upon a tailor's dummy as a symbol of their union, and left the room through the latrine's outside door. Carmen heard whistles borne towards her on the water, and rising sheet-shrouded while the heavy knowledge of the future fell upon her shoulders and pushed them down into a stoop, she saw the wedding-dress gleaming in moonlight as a young man rowed it and its occupant away, in search of whatever it was that passed, among such occult beings, for bliss. The story of Aires's gowned adventure, which left Great-Aunt Sahara abandoned in the cold dunes of her unbloodied sheets, has come down to me in spite of her silence. Most ordinary families can't keep secrets; and in our far-from-ordinary clan, our deepest mysteries usually ended up in oils-on-canvas, hanging on a gallery wall... but then again, perhaps the whole incident was invented, a fable the family made up to shock-but-not-too-much, to make more palatable--because more exotic, more beautiful--the fact of Aires's homosexuality? For while it's true that Aurora da Gama grew up to paint the scene--on her canvas the man in the moonlit dress sits primly, facing a bare perspiring oarsman's torso--it would be possible to argue that for all her bohemian credentials this double portrait was a domesticating fantasy, only conventionally outrageous: that the story, as told and painted, put Aires's secret wildness into a pretty frock, hiding away the cock and arse and blood and spunk of it, the brave determined fear of the runt-sized dandy soliciting hefty companions among the harbour-rats, the exalted terror of bought embraces, sweet alley-back and toddy-shack fondlings by thick-fisted stevedores, the love of the deep-muscled buttocks of cycle-rickshaw-youths and of the undernourished mouths of bazaar urchins; that it ignored the fretful, argumentative, amour fou reality of his long, but by no means faithful liaison with the fellow in the wedding-night boat, whom Aires baptised 'Prince Henry the Navigator'... that it..-sent the truth offstage titillatingly dressed, and then averted its eyes. No, sir. The painting's authority will not be denied. Whatever else may have happened between these three--the unlikely late-life intimacy between Prince Henry and Carmen da Gama will be recorded in its place--the episode of the shared wedding-dress was where it all began. The nakedness beneath the borrowed wedding outfit, the bridegroom's face beneath the bridal veil, is what connects my heart to this strange man's memory. There is much about him that I do not care for; but in the image of his queenliness, where many back home (and not only back home) would see degradation, I see his courage, his capacity, yes, for glory. 'But if it wasn't prick in the bottom,' my dear mother, inheritor of her own mother's fearless tongue, used to say of life with her unloved Aires-uncle, 'then, darling, it was strictly pain in the neck.' And while we're getting down to it, to the root of the whole matter of family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art, let's not forget who started the whole thing, who was the first one to go out of his element and drown, whose watery death removed the linchpin, the foundation-stone, and began the family's long slide, which ended up by dumping me in the pit: Francisco da Gama, Epifania's defunct spouse. Yes, Epifania too had once been a bride. She came from an old, but now much-reduced trader family, the Menezes clan of Mangalore, and there was great jealousy when, after a chance encounter at a Calicut wedding, she landed the fattest catch of all, against all reason, in the opinion of many disappointed mothers, because a man so rich ought to have been decently revolted by the empty bank accounts, costume jewellery and cheap tailoring of the little gold-digger's down-and-out clan. At the dawn of the century she came on Great-Grandfather Francisco's arm to Cabral Island, the first of my story's four sequestered, serpented, Edenic-infernal private universes. (My mother's Malabar Hill salon was the second; my father's sky-garden, the third; and Vasco Miranda's bizarre redoubt, his 'Little Alhambra' in Benengeli, Spain, was, is, and will in this telling become, my last.) There she found a grand old mansion in the traditional style, with many delightfully interlinking courtyards of greeny pools and mossed fountains, surrounded by galleries rich in woodcarving, off which lay labyrinths of tall rooms, their high roofs gabled and tiled. It was set in a rich man's paradise of tropical foliage; just what the doctor ordered, in Epifania's opinion, for though her early years had been relatively penurious she had always believed she had a talent for magnificence. However, a few years after the birth of their two sons, Francisco da Gama came home one day with an impossibly young and suspiciously winsome Frenchman, a certain M. Charles Jeanneret, who put on the airs of an architectural genius even though he was barely twenty years old. Before Epifania could blink, her gullible husband had commissioned the jackanapes to build not one but two new houses in her precious gardens. And what crazy structures they turned out to be!--The one a strange angular slabby affair in which the garden penetrated the interior space so thoroughly that it was often hard to say whether one was in or out of doors, and the furniture looked like something made for a hospital or a geometry class, you couldn't sit on it without bumping into some pointy corner; the other a wood and paper house of cards--'after the style Japanese', he told an appalled Epifania--a flimsy fire-trap whose walls were sliding parchment screens, and in whose rooms one was not supposed to sit, but kneel, and at night one had to sleep on a mat on the floor with one's head on a wooden block, as if one were a servant, while the absence of privacy provoked Epifania into the observation that 'at least knowledge of stomach health of household members is no problem in a house with toilet-paper instead of bathroom walls'. Worse still, Epifania soon discovered that once these madhouses were ready her husband frequently tired of their beautiful home, would smack his hand on the breakfast table and announce they were 'moving East' or 'going West'; whereupon the whole household had no choice but to move lock, stock and barrel into one or other of the Frenchman's follies, and no amount of protests made the slightest jot of difference. And after a few weeks, they moved again. Not only was Francisco da Gama incapable of living a settled life like ordinary folks, but, as Epifania discovered despairingly, he was also a patron of the arts. Rum-and-whisky-drinking hemp-chewing persons of low birth and revolting dress-sense were imported for long periods and filled up the Frenchy's houses with their jangling music, poetry marathons, naked models, reefer-stubs, all-night card-schools and other manifestations of their in-all-ways-incorrect behaviour. Foreign artists came to stay and left behind strange mobiles that looked like giant metal coathangers twirling in the breeze, and pictures of devil-women with both eyes on the same side of their noses, and giant canvases that looked like an accident had befallen with the paint, and all these calamities Epifania was obliged to put on the walls and in the courtyards of her own beloved home, and look at every day, as if they were decent stuff. 'Your art-shart, Francisco,' she told her husband venomously, 'it will blindofy me with ugliness.' But he was immune to her poisons. 'Old beauty is not enough,' he told her. 'Old palaces, old behaviour, old gods. These days the world is full of questions, and there are new ways to be beautiful.' Francisco was hero material from the day he was born, destined for questions and quests, as ill-at-ease with domesticity as Quixote. He was handsome as sin but twice as virtuous, and on the coir-matting cricket-pitches of the time he proved, when young, a devilish slow left arm tweaker and elegant number four bat. At college he was the most brilliant student physicist of his year, but was orphaned early and chose, after much reflection, to forgo the academic life, do his duty, and enter the family business. He grew up, becoming an adept of the age-old da Gama art of turning spice and nuts into gold. He could smell money on the wind, could sniff the weather and tell you if it was bringing in profit or loss; but he was also a philanthropist, funding orphanages, opening free health clinics, building schools for the villages lining the back-waterways, setting up institutes researching coco-palm blight, initiating elephant conservation schemes in the mountains beyond his spice-fields, and sponsoring annual contests at the time of the Onam flower festival to find and crown the finest oral storytellers in the region: so free with his philanthropy, in fact, that Epifania was driven to wailing (uselessly): 'And then, when funds are frittered, and children are cap-in-hand? Then can we eatofy your thisthing, your anthropology?' She fought him every inch of the way, and lost every battle except the last. Francisco the modernist, his eyes fixed on the future, became a disciple first of Bertrand Russell--Religion and Science and A Free Man's Worship were his ungodly Bibles--and then of the increasingly fervent nationalist politics of the Theo-sophical Society of Mrs Annie Besant. Remember: Cochin, Travancore,
Mysore, Hyderabad were technically not part of British India; they were Indian States, with their own princes. Some of them--like Cochin--could boast, for example, of educational and literacy standards far in excess of those prevailing under British direct rule, while in others (Hyderabad) there existed what Mr Nehru called a condition of'perfect feudalism', and in Travancore even the Congress was declared illegal; but let us not confuse (Francisco did not confuse) appearance with reality; the fig-leaf is not the fig. When Nehru raised the national flag in Mysore, the local (Indian) authorities destroyed not only the flag but even the flagpole the moment he had left town, lest the event annoy the true rulers... Soon after the Great War broke out on his thirty-eighth birthday, something snapped inside Francisco. 'The British must go,' he announced solemnly at dinner beneath the oil-paintings of his suited-and-booted ancestors. 'O God, where are they going?' asked Epifania, missing the point. 'In such a bad moment they will abandon us to our fate and that boogyman, Kaiser Bill?' Francisco exploded, and twelve-year-old Aires and eleven-year-old Camoens froze in their seats. 'The Kaiser is one bill we are already paying,' he thundered. 'Taxes doubled! Our youngsters dying in British uniform! The nation's wealth is being shipped off, madam: at home our people starve, but British Tommy is utilising our wheat, rice, jute and coconut products. I personally am required to send out goods below cost-price. Our mines are being emptied: saltpetre, manganese, mica. I swear! Bombay-wallahs getting rich and nation going to pot.' 'Too many crooks and books have filled your ears,' Epifania protested. 'What are we but Empire's children? British have given us everything, isn't it?--Civilisation, law, order, too much. Even your spices that stink up the house they buy out of their generosity, putting clothes on backs and food on children's plates. Then why speakofy such treason and filthy up my children's ears with what-all Godless bunk?' After that day they had little to say to each other. Aires, defying his father, took his mother's side; Epifania and he were for England, God, philistinism, the old ways, a quiet life. Francisco was all bustle and energy, so Aires affected indolence, learned how to infuriate his father by the luxuriant ease of his lounging. (In my youth, for different reasons, I also was apt to lounge. But I was not seeking to annoy; my vain intent was to set my slowness against the accelerated rush of Time itself. This tale, too, will be revisited at its proper location.) It was in the younger boy, Camoens, that Francisco found his ally, inculcating in him the virtues of nationalism, reason, art, innovation, and above all, in those days, I of protest. Francisco shared Nehru's early contempt for the Indian National Congress--just a talk-shop for wogs'--and Camoens gave his grave assent. 'Annie this and Gandhi that,' Epifania scolded him. 'Nehru, Tilak, all these rogue gangsters from the North. Ignore your mother! Keep it up! Then it'll be the jailhouse for you, chop-chop.' In 1916 Francisco da Gama joined the Home Rule campaign of Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, hitching his star to the demand for an independent Indian parliament which would determine the country's future. When Mrs Besant asked him to found a Home Rule League in Cochin and he had the nerve to invite dock-labourers, tea-pickers, bazaar coolies and his own workers to join as well as the local bourgeoisie, Epifania was quite overcome. 'Masses and classes in same club! Shame and scandal! Sense is gone from the man,' she expostulated faintly, fanning herself, and then lapsed into sullen silence. A few days after the League was founded, there was a clash in the streets of the dockside Emakulam district; a few dozen militant Leaguers managed to overpower a small detachment of lightly armed troops and sent them packing without their weapons. The next day the League was formally banned, and a motor-launch arrived at Cabral Island to place Francisco da Gama under arrest. He was in and out of prison during the next six months, earning his elder son's contempt and the younger boy's undying admiration. Yes, a hero, absolutely. In those prison spells, and in his furious political activism between jail terms, when in accord with Tilak's instructions he deliberately courted arrest on many occasions, he acquired the credentials that made him a coming man, worth keeping an eye on, a fellow with a following: a star. Stars can fall; heroes can fail; Francisco da Gama did not fulfil his destiny. In prison he found time for the work that undid him. Nobody ever vorked out where, in what reject-goods discount-store of the mind, Great-Grandfather Francisco got hold of the scientific theory that turned him from emerging hero into national laughing-stock, but in those years it came to preoccupy him more and more, eventually rivalling even the nationalist movement in his affections. Perhaps his old interest in theoretical physics had become confused with his newer passions, Mrs Besant's Theoso-phy, the Mahatma's insistence on the oneness of all India's widely differing millions, the search among modernising Indian intellectuals of the period for some secularist definition of the spiritual life, of that worn-out word, the soul; anyhow, towards the end of 1916 Francisco had privately printed a paper, which he then sent to all the leading journals of the time for their kind attention, entitled Towards a Provisional Theory of the Transformational Fields of Conscience, in which he proposed the existence, all around us, of invisible 'dynamic networks of spiritual energy similar to electromagnetic fields', arguing that these 'fields of conscience' were nothing less than the repositories of the memory--both practical and moral--of the human species, that they were in fact what Joyce's Stephen had recently spoken (in the Egoist magazine) of wishing to forge in his soul's smithy: viz., the uncreated conscience of our race. At their lowest level of operation, the so-called TFCs apparently facilitated education, so that what was learned anywhere on earth, by anyone, at once became more easily learnable by anyone else, anywhere else; but it was also suggested that on their most exalted plane, the plane that was admittedly hardest to observe, the fields acted ethically, both defining and being defined by our moral alternatives, being strengthened by each moral choice taken on the planet, and, conversely, weakened by base deeds, so that, in theory, too many evil acts would damage the Fields of Conscience beyond repair and 'humanity would then face the unspeakable reality of a universe made amoral, and therefore meaningless, by the destruction of the ethical nexus, the safety-net, one might even say, within which we have always lived'. In fact, Francisco's paper propounded no more than the lower, educative functions of the fields with any degree of conviction, extrapolating the moral dimensions in one relatively short, and self-confessedly speculative passage. However, the derision it inspired was on the grand scale. A newspaper editorial in the Madras-based paper The Hindu, headed Thunderbolts of Good and Evil, lampooned him cruelly: 'Dr da Gama's fears for our ethical future are like those of a crackpot weatherman who believes our deeds control the weather, so that unless we act "clemently", so to speak, there will be nothing overhead but storms.' The satirical columnist 'Waspyjee' in the Bombay Chronicle--whose editor Horniman, a friend of Mrs Besant and the nationalist movement, had earnestly implored Francisco not to publish--enquired maliciously whether the famous Fields of Conscience were for human use alone, or if other living creatures--cockroaches, for example, or poisonous snakes--might learn to benefit from them; or whether, alternatively, each species had its own such vortices swirling around the planet. 'Should we fear contamination of our values--call it Gama Radiation--by accidental field collisions? Might not praying-mantis sexual mores, baboon or gorilla aesthetics, scorpion politics fatally infect our own poor psyches? Or, Heaven forfend--perhaps they already have!!' It was these 'Gama rays' that finished Francisco off; he became a joke, light relief from the murderous war, economic hardship and the struggle for independence. At first he kept his nerve, and bloody-mindedly concentrated on thinking up experiments that could prove the first, lesser hypothesis. He wrote a second paper proposing that 'bols', the long strings of nonsense words used by Kathak dance instructors to indicate movements of feet arms neck, might be suitable bases for tests. One such sequence (tat-tat-taa dreegay-thun-thunjee-jee-kathay to, talang, taka-thun-thun, tail Tat tail &c.) could be used alongside four other strings of purposeless nonsense devised to be spoken in the same rhythmic pattern as the 'control'. Students in a country other than India, having no knowledge of Indian dance instructions, would be asked to learn all five; and, if Francisco's field theory held, the dance-class gobbledygook should prove much the easiest to memorise. The test was never performed. And soon his resignation from the banned Home Rule League was requested and its leaders, who now included Motilal Nehru himself, stopped answering the increasingly plaintive letters with which my great-grandfather bombarded them. Arty types no longer arrived by the boadoad to carouse in either of Cabral Island's follies, to smoke opium in papery East or drink whisky in pointy West, though from time to time, as the Frenchy's reputation grew, Francisco was asked if he had indeed been the first Indian patron of the young man who was now calling himself 'Le Corbusier'. When he received such an enquiry, the shattered hero would fire off a terse note in reply: 'Never heard of the fellow.' After a time these enquiries also stopped. Epifania was exultant. As Francisco sank into introversion and despondency, his face acquiring the puckered look common in men convinced that the world has inexplicably done them a great and unjustified wrong, she moved in swiftly for the kill. (Literally, as it turned out.) I have come to the conclusion that the years of her suppressed discontents had bred in her a vindictive rage--rage, my true inheritance!--that was often indistinguishable from true, murderous hatred; although if you had ever asked her if she loved her husband, the very question would have shocked her. 'Ours was a love-match,' she told her dejected spouse during an interminable island evening with only the radio for company. 'For love or what else I gave in to your fancies? But see where they have brought you. Now for love you must give in to mine.' The detested jfo Uies in the garden were locked up. Nor was politics to be mentioned in her presence again: when the Russian Revolution shook the world, when the Great War ended, when news of the Amritsar Massacre filtered down from the north and destroyed the Anglophilia of almost every Indian (the Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, returned his knighthood to the King), Epifania da Gama on Cabral Island stopped up her ears and continued to believe, to a degree that was almost blasphemous, in the omnipotent beneficence of the British; and her elder son Aires believed it along with her. At Christmas, 1921, Camoens, eighteen, shyly brought the seventeen-year-old orphan Isabella Ximena Souza home to meet his parents (Epifania asked where they had met, was told with many blushes of a brief encounter at St Francis's Church, and with a disdain bom of her great ability to forget everything inconvenient about her own background, snorted, 'Hussy from somewhere!' But Francisco gave the girl his blessing, stretching out a tired hand at the to-tell-the-truth not-very-festive table and placing it on Isabella Souza's lovely head). Camoens's future bride was characteristically outspoken. Her eyes shining with excitement, she broke Epifania's five-year-old taboo and expressed delight at Calcutta's virtual boycott of, and Bombay's large demonstrations against, the visit of the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), praising the Nehrus, father and son, for the non-collaboration in court that had sent them both to jail. 'Now the Viceroy will know what's what,' she said. 'Motilal loves England, but even he has preferred to go to lock-up.' Francisco stirred, an old light dawning in those long-dulled eyes. But Epifania spoke first. 'In this God-fearing Christian house, British still is best, madder-moyselle,' she snapped. 'If you have ambitions in our boy's direction, then please to mindofy your mouth. You want dark or white meat? Speak up. Glass of imported Dao wine, nice cold? You can have. Pudding-shudding? Why not. These are Christmas topics, frawline. You want stuffing?' Later, on the jetty, Belle was equally blunt about her findings, complaining bitterly to Camoens that he had not stood up for her. 'Your family home is like a place lost in a fog,' she told her fiance. 'Where is the air to breathe? Somebody there is casting a spell and sucking life out of you and your poor Dad. As for your brother, who cares, poor type is a hopeless case. Hate me don't hate me but; t is plain as the colours on your by-the-way-excuse-me too-horrible bush-shirt that a bad thing is growing quickly here.' 'Then you won't come again?' Camoens wretchedly asked. Belle got into the waiting boat. 'Silly boy,' she said. 'You are a sweet and touching boy. And you have no idea at all of what I will and will not do for love: to where I will come or not come, with whom I will or will not fight, whose magic I will un-magic with my own.' In the following months it was Belle who kept Camoens informed about the world, who recited to him Nehru's speech at his re-sentencing to further imprisonment in May 1922. Intimidation and terrorism have become the chief instruments of government. Do they imagine that they will thus instil affection for themselves? Affection and loyalty are of the heart. They cannot be extorted at the point of a bayonet. 'Sounds like your parents' marriage to me,' Isabella cheerily said; and Camoens, his nationalist zeal rekindled by his adoration of his beautiful, loudmouthed girl, had the grace-to blush. Belle had made him her project. In those days he had begun to sleep badly and, asthmatically, to wheeze. 'It's all that bad air,' she told him. 'So, so. I must save one da Gama at least.' She ordered changes. Under her instructions--and to Epifania's rage: 'Don't think-o for two sees I will cut out chicken in this house because your little chickie, that little floozy-fantoozy, wants you to eat beggar-people's food'--he became a vegetarian, and learned to stand on his head. Secretly, too, he broke a window-frame and climbed into the spider-webbed West house where his father's library languished, and began to devour