The Moor's Last Sigh (3 page)

the books along with the bookworms. Attar, Khayyam, Tagore, Carlyle, Ruskin, Wells, Poe, Shelley, Raja Rammohun Roy. 'You see?' Belle encouraged him. 'You can do it; you can become a person, too, instead of a doormat in an ugly-bug shirt.' They didn't save Francisco. One night after the rains he dived off the island and swanraway; perhaps he was trying to find some air beyond the island's enchanted rim. The rip-tide took him; they found his bloated body five days later, bumping up against a rusty harbour buoy. He should have been remembered for his part in the revolution, for his good works, for his progressivism, for his mind; but his true legacies were trouble in the business (which had been badly neglected these past years), sudden death, and asthma. Epifania swallowed the news of his death without a tremor. She ate his death as she had eaten his life; and grew.

ON THE LANDING OF the wide, steep staircase leading to Epifania's bedroom was the private family chapel, which Francisco had in the old days permitted one of his 'Frenchies' to redecorate in spite of Epifania's piercing protests. Out had gone the gilded altarpiece with the little inset paintings in which Jesus worked his miracles against a background of coco-palms and tea-plantations, and the china dolls of the apostles, and the golden cherubs posing on teak pedestals and blowing their trumpets, and the candles in their glass bowls the shape of giant brandy glasses, and the imported Portuguese lace on the altar, and even the cmcifix itself, 'all the quality stuff,' Epifania complained, 'and Jesus and Mary lockofied in the box-room along-with,' and not content with these desecrations the blasted fellow had gone and painted the whole place white as if it were a hospital ward, furnished it with the least comfortable wooden pews in Cochin, and then, in that windowless interior room, fixed giant paper cutouts to the walls, imitations of stained-glass windows, 'as if we can not put proper windows if we want,' Epifania moaned, 'see how cheap it makes us look, paper windows in the house of God,' and the windows didn't even have decent pictures on them, just slabs of colour in crazy-paving patterns, 'like a child's party decor,' Epifania sniffed. 'In such a room one should not keep-o blood and body of Our Saviour, but only birthday cake.' Francisco had rejoined, in defence of his protege's work, that in shape and colour not only took the place of content but lemonstrated that, properly handled, they could in fact be content: evoking Epifania's contemptuous reply, 'So maybe we have no ed of Jesus Christ, because just shape of cross will do, why bother ith any crucifixion, isn't it? What a blasphemy your Frenchy type has made: a church that lettofies off the Son of God from dying for our sins.' The day after her husband's funeral Epifania had it all burned, and back came the cherubs, lace and glass, the thickly padded chapel chairs covered in dark red silk and the matching cushions edged in golden braid upon which a woman of her position in the world might decently kneel before her Lord. Antique tapestries from Italy depicting kababed saints and tandooried martyrs were restored to the walls and surrounded by ruched and gathered drapes, and soon the disconcerting memory of the Frenchy's austere novelties had been obliterated by the familiar mustinesses of devotion. 'God's in his heaven,' the brand-new widow announced. 'All is tip-top with the world.' 'From now on,' Epifania determined, 'it is the simple life for us. Salvation is not to be found in Litde Man Loincloth and his ilks.' And indeed the simplicity she sought was anything but Gandhian, it was the simplicity of rising late to a tray of strong, sweet bed-tea, of clapping her hands for the cook and ordering the day's repasts, of having a maid come in to oil and brush her still-long but quickly greying and thinning hair, and of being able to blame the maid for the increasing quantities left each morning in the brush; the simplicity of long mornings scolding the tailor who came over to the house with new dresses, and knelt at her feet with mouthfuls of pins which he removed from time to time to unloose his flatterer's tongue; and then of long afternoons at the fabric stores, as bolts of magnificent silks were flung across a white-sheeted floor for her delight, cloth after cloth flowing thrillingly through the air to settle in soft fold-mountains of brilliant beauty; the simplicity of gossip with her few social equals, and of invitations to the 'functions' of the British in the Fort district, their Sunday cricket, their dancing teas, the seasonal carolh'ng of their plain heat-beaten children, for they were Christian after all, even if it was only the Church of England, never mind, the British had her respect though they would never have her heart, which belonged to Portugal, of course, which dreamed of walking beside the Tagus, the Douro, of sashaying through the streets of Lisbon on the arm of a grandee. It was the simplicity of daughters-in-law who would attend to most of her needs while she made their lives a living hell, and of sons who would keep the money supply flowing as freely as was required; of everything-in-its-place, of being, at long last, at the heart of the web, the top of the heap, of lounging dragonwise upon a pile of gold and letting loose, when it pleased her, a burst of cleansing, terrorising flame. 'It will cost a fortune to keep your Mama in her simplicity,' Belle da Gama, prefiguring a remark often made about M. K. Gandhi, complained to her husband (she married Camoens early in 1923). 'And if she has her way it will cost-o us our youth as well.' What ruined Epifania's dreams: Francisco left her nothing except her clothes, her jewellery and a modest allowance. For the rest, she learned to her fury, she would be dependent upon the goodwill of her sons, to whom everything had been bequeathed on a fifty-fifty basis, with the proviso that the Gama Trading Company should not be broken up 'unless business circumstances dictated otherwise', and that Aires and Camoens 'should seek to work together lovingly, lest the family's assets be damaged by disharmony or discord'. 'Even after death,' Great-Grandmother Epifania wailed at the reading of the will, 'he slaps me on both sides of the face.' This, too, is part of my inheritance: the grave settles no quarrels. The Menezes family lawyers failed to find a loophole, much to the widow's dismay. She wept, tore her hair, pounded her tiny bosom, and ground her teeth, which produced an alarmingly piercing noise; but the lawyers continued doggedly to explain that the matrilinear principle, for which Cochin, Travancore and Quilon were famous, and according to which the disposition of family property would have been a matter for Mme Epifania to decide rather than the late Dr da Gama, could by no stretch of the law be held to apply to the Christian community, being part of Hindu tradition alone. 'Then bring me a Shiva lingam and a watering-can,' Epifania, according to legend, was heard to say, though she afterwards denied it. 'Bring me to River Ganges and I will jump in double-quick. Hai Ram!' (I should comment that in my view Epifania's willingness to perform puja and pilgrimage sounds unconvincing, apocryphal; but wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of hair and beating of bosom there most certainly was.) The sons of the late magnate neglected business affairs, it must be admitted, being too often distracted by worldly matters. Aires da Gama, more distressed than he cared to reveal by his father's suicide, sought solace in promiscuity, provoking a deluge of correspondence--letters on cheap paper, written in a barely legible, semi-literate script. Love-letters, messages of desire and anger, threats of violence if the beloved persisted in his too-hurtful ways. The author of this anguished correspondence was none other than the boy in the wedding-night rowing-boat: Prince Henry the Navigator himself. Do not think I do not hear what all you do. Give me heart or I will cut it from your body. If love is not whole world and sky above then it is nothing, worse than dirt. If love is not all, then it is nothing: this principle, and its opposite (I mean, infidelity), collide down all the years of my breathless tale. Aires, out tom-catting all night, as often as not spent the daylight hours sleeping off the effects of hashish or opium, recovering from his exertions, and, not infrequently, needing attention for various minor wounds; Carmen, without a word, applied medication and drew hot baths to soothe his bruises; and, when he fell into snoring sleep in that bathwater drawn from the deep well of her grief, if she ever thought about pushing his head below the surface, then she did not give in to temptation. Soon there would be another outlet for her rage. As for Camoens, in his timid, soft-spoken way he was his father's son. Through Belle, he fell in with a group of young nationalist radicals who, impatient with talk of non-violence and passive resistance, were intoxicated by the great events in Russia. He began to attend, and later to deliver, talks with titles like Forward! and Terrorism: Does End Justify This Means? 'Camoens, who wouldn't say booski to a mouseski,' Belle laughed. 'What a big bad redski you will make.' It was Grandfather Camoens who found out about the fake Ulyanovs. In late 1923 he informed Belle and their friends that an elite group of Soviet actors had been given exclusive rights to the role of V. I. Lenin: not only in specially prepared touring productions which told the Soviet people about their glorious revolution, but also at the thousands upon thousands of public functions at which the leader was unable to be present owing to the pressures on his time. The Lenin-thesps memorised, and then delivered, the speeches of the great man, and when they appeared in full make-up and costume people shouted, cheered, bowed and quaked as if they were in the presence of the real thing. 'And now,' Camoens excitedly concluded, 'applications from foreign-language actors are being solicited. We can have our personal Lenins right here, properly accredited, speaking Malayalam or Tulu or Kannada or any damn thing we please.' 'So they are reproducing the big boss in the See See See Pee,' Belle told him, placing his hand on her belly, 'but, husband, see see see please, you have already begun a little reproduction of your own. It is a demonstration of the ludicrous--yes! I dare to use that word--the ridiculous and ludicrous perversity of my family that--in a period when the country and indeed the planet was engaged in such momentous affairs--and when the family business needed the most scrupulous attention, because in the aftermath of Francisco's death the lack of leadership was becoming alarming, there was discontent in the plantations and slackness at the two Ernakulam godowns, and even the Gama Company's long-term customers had begun to listen to the siren voices of its competitors--and when, to crown it all, his own wife had announced her pregnancy, and was bearing what turned out to be not only their firstborn but also their only child, the only child, what is more, of her generation, my mother Aurora, the last of the da Gamas--my grandfather became increasingly obsessed with this question of counterfeit Lenins. With what zeal he scoured the locality to discover men with the necessary acting skill, memory capacity and interest in his plan! With what dedication he worked, getting copies of the latest statements of the illustrious leader, finding translators, acquiring the services of make-up artists and costumiers, and rehearsing his little troupe of seven whom Belle, with her customary brutality, had dubbed the Too-Tall Lenin, the Too- ,-. Short Lenin, the Too-Fat Lenin, the Too-Skinny Lenin, the Too-Lame Lenin, the Too-Bald Lenin, and (this was a misfortunate fellow with gravely defective orthodonture) Lenin the Too-Thless... Camoens corresponded feverishly with contacts in Moscow, cajoling and persuading; certain Cochinian authorities, both pale- and dark-skinned, were likewise persuaded and cajoled; and finally, in the hot season of 1924, he had his reward. When Belle was bursting with child, there arrived in Cochin a genuine, card-carrying member of the Special Lenin Troupe, a Lenin First Class, with the power to approve and further instruct the members of the Troupe's new Cochin Branch. He came by ship from Bombay and when he walked down the gangway in character there were little gasps and shrieks from the dockside, to which he responded with a series of magnanimous bows and waves. Camoens noticed that he was perspiring freely in the heat; little rivulets of dark hair-dye ran down his forehead and neck and had constantly to be mopped. 'How may I address you?' asked Camoens, blushing politely as he met his guest, who was travelling with an interpreter. 'No formality, Comrade,' said the interpreter. 'No honorifics! A simple Vladimir Ilyich will suffice.' A crowd had gathered at the dockside to watch the arrival of the World Leader and now Camoens, in a little theatrical gesture of his own, clapped his hands, and out of the arrivals shed came the seven local Lenins in their beards. They stood shuffling their feet on the dockside, grinning sweetly at their Soviet colleague; who burst, however, into long fusillades of Russian. 'Vladimir Ilyich asks what is the meaning of this outrage,' the interpreter told Camoens as the crowd around them enlarged. 'These persons have blackness of skin and their features are not his. Too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, too lame, too bald, and that one has no teeth.' 'I was informed', said Camoens, unhappily, 'that we were permitted to adapt the Leader's image to local needs.' More barrages of Russian. 'Vladimir Ilyich opines that this is not adaptation but satirical caricature,' the interpreter said. 'It is insult and offence. See, two beards at least are improperly affixed in spite of the admonishing presence of the proletariat. A report will be made at the highest level. Under no circumstances do you have authority to proceed.' Camoens's face fell; and seeing him on the point of tears, his dreams in ruins, his actors--his cadres--leapt forward; eager to demonstrate the care with which they had learned their roles, they began to strike attitudes and declaim. In Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Tamil, Telugu and English they proclaimed the revolution, they demanded the immediate departure of the revanchist poodles of colonialism, the blood-sucking cockroaches of imperialism, to be followed by the common ownership of assets and annual over-fulfilment of rice quotas; their right-hand index fingers stabbing towards the future while their left fists rested magisterially against their hips. Babeling Lenins, their beards coming loose in the heat, addressed the now-enormous crowd; which began, little by little at first, and then in a great swelling tide, to guffaw. Vladimir Ilyich turned purple. Leninist vituperations issued from his mouth and hung in the air above his head in Cyrillic script. Then, spinning on his heel, he stalked back up the gangway and disappeared below decks. 'What did he say?' Camoens disconsolately asked the Russian interpreter. 'This country of yours,' the interpreter replied, "Vladimir Ilyich tells frankly that it gives to him the shits.' A small woman pushed her way through the triumphant hilarity of the People, and through the moist curtain of his misery Grandfather Camoens recognised his wife's maid Maria. 'Better you come, sir,' she shouted over the People's mirth. 'Your good madam has given you a girl.' After his dockside humiliation, Camoens turned away from : ommunism, and became fond of saying that he had learned the way that it was not 'the Indian style'.