The Moor's Last Sigh (34 page)

with an upper-class blood-line and a fist. You came here to gratify that hammer. Pervert! Just another psycho in search of a rumble--you cared nothing for our cause. And now your class, your heredity, has come to fetch you back. You won't be here much longer. Why would you stay? You've grown too old to fight.' But Sammy Hazare the Tin-man gave me looks. So many that I knew at once whose hand had slipped papers under my pillow, who was my father's man. Sammy the Christian, seduced by Abraham the Jew. O, Moor, beware, I murmured to myself. The conflict approaches, and the future itself is the prize. Beware, lest in that battle you lose your silly head. Later, in his high-rise garden, Abraham told me how often, in those long years, Aurora had yearned to extend forgiveness's hand, and--undoing her gesture of banishment--beckon me home. But then she would remember my voice, my unspeakable words that could not be rendered unspoken, and harden her maternal heart. When I heard this, the lost years began to prey upon me, to obsess me day and night. In my sleep I invented time machines that would permit me to travel back beyond the frontier of her death; and I would be furious, when I woke, that the journey was just a dream. After some months of such frustrations I remembered Vasco Miranda's portrait of my mother, and realised that in this small way, at least, I might be able to have her back again: in long art, if not short life. Of course her own work was full of self-portraits, but the lost Miranda picture, overpainted and sold off, somehow came to represent my lost mother, Abraham's lost wife. If we could but rediscover it! It would be like her younger self reborn; it would be a victory over death. Excitedly I told my father my idea. He frowned. 'That picture.' But his objections had faded with the years. I could see desire dawning on his face. 'But it was destroyed long ago.' 'Not destroyed,' I corrected him. 'Painted over. The Artist as Boabdil, the Unlucky (el-Zogoybi), Last Sultan of Granada, Seen Departing from the Alhambra. Or, The Moor's Last Sigh. That tearful equestrian chocolate-box picture which Mummyji said was worse than even a bazaar painter's scrawl. To remove it would be no loss. And then we would have her back. ' 'Remove it, you say.' I could tell that the idea of vandalising a Miranda, in particular the Miranda in which Vasco had purloined our own family legends, found favour with old Abraham in his lair. 'This is possible?' 'It must be,' I said. 'There must be experts. If you wish I can enquire.' 'But the picture is Bhabha's,' he said. 'Will that old bastard sell?' 'If the price is right,' I replied. And, to clinch it, added, 'Doesn't matter how big a bastard he is, he isn't as big as you.' Abraham cackled and picked up the telephone. 'Zogoiby,' he told the flunkey at the other end. 'C. P. is?' And a moment later, 'Arre, C. P. Why are you hiding out from your pals?' Then some phrases--almost barked--of negotiations, in which the staccato toughness of his delivery was strikingly at odds with the words he employed, soft, curlicued words of flattery and deference. Then a sudden cessation, as of a car engine that unexpectedly stalls; and Abraham replaced the handset with a puzzle on his brow. 'Stolen,' he said. 'Within last weeks. Stolen from his private home.' News came from Spain that the veteran (and increasingly eccentric) Indian-born painter V. Miranda, presently a resident of the Andalusian village of Benengeli, had injured himself while attempting the enigmatic feat of painting a full-grown elephant from underneath. The elephant, an ill-fed circus performer hired for the day at excessive expense, had been intended to climb a concrete ramp, specially constructed for the purpose by the celebrated (but temperamentally erratic) Senor Miranda himself, and then to stand upon a sheet of improbably reinforced glass, beneath which old Vasco had set up his easel. Journalists and television crews massed in Benengeli to record this curious stunt. However, Isabella the elephant, in spite of being accustomed to all manner of three-ring tomfoolery, had the delicacy of sensibility to refuse to co-operate in what some local commentators had dubbed a 'degraded act' of'underbelly voyeurism', in which the wastrel wantonness, self-indulgent amorality and ultimate inutility of all art seemed to be encapsulated. The artist emerged from his palazzo with his moustachio-tips standing at attention. He had dressed, with an absurdity that might have been a deliberate use of incongruity--or else simply deranged--in Tyrolean short trousers and embroidered shirt, and there was a stick of celery rising from his hat. Isabella had stopped halfway up the ramp and all her attendants' efforts could not budge her. The artist clapped his hands. 'Elephant! Obey!' At which command, backing contemptuously off the ramp, Isabella stepped on Vasco Miranda's left foot. The more conservative locals among the crowd that had gathered to witness the spectacle had the bad manners to applaud. After that Vasco had a limp to match Abraham's, but in all other ways their paths remained divergent, or so, to outsiders, it would surely have appeared. The failure of his elephant venture did not in the least diminish the madcap enthusiasms of his old age, and soon, thanks to the payment of a substantial charitable donation to the municipality's schools, he was permitted to erect, in Isabella's honour, an enormous and hideous fountain in which cubist elephants spouted water from their trunks while posing, like ballerinas, on their left hind legs. The fountain was placed in the centre of the square outside Vasco's so-called 'Little Alhambra', and the square was renamed the 'Place of the Elephants', to the fury of the older residents. Assembling in a nearby bar, called La Carmencita in tribute to the late dictator's daughter, the old-timers recalled, in liquid bursts of nostalgic outrage, that the vandalised square had until then been the Plaza de Carmen Polo, named after the Caudillo's wife herself--named in her honour and honoured by her name, which was now besmirched by this pachydermous connection; or so these disapproving dotards unanimously averred. In the old days, they reminded one another, Benengeli had been the generalissimo's favourite Andalusian village, but the old days had been swept away by this amnesiac, democratic present, which thought of all yesterdays as garbage, to be disposed of as soon as possible. And that such a monstrosity as the elephant fountain should be visited upon them by a non-Spaniard, an Indian, who should in any case have gone to make his mischief in Portugal, not Spain, on account of the traditional Lusophilia of persons of Goan extraction--well!--it was downright intolerable. But what was one to do about artists, who brought shame on the good name of Benengeli by importing their women and licentious ways and foreign gods--for although this Miranda claimed to be a Catholic, was it not well known that all Orientals were pagans under the skin? Vasco Miranda was blamed by the old guard for most of the changes in Benengeli, and if you had asked these locals to pinpoint the moment of their ruination they would have chosen the ludicrous day of the elephant on the ramp, because that inelegant but -widely reported burlesque episode brought Benengeli to the attention of the whole world's human detritus, and within a few years that once-quiet village which had been the fallen Leader's preferred Southern retreat became a nesting-place for itinerant layabouts, expatriate vermin, and all the flotsam-jetsam scum of the earth. Benengeli's Guardia Civil chief, Sargento Salvador Medina, a vociferous opponent of the new residents, would give his opinion to anyone who wanted it and many who did not. 'The Mediterranean, the ancients' Mare Nostrum, is dying of filth,' he opined. 'And now the land--Terra Nostra--is perishing too.' Vasco Miranda, in an attempt to win over the Guardia chief, sent him twice the expected Christmas gift of money and alcohol, but Medina was not appeased. He personally brought the excess cash and booze back to Vasco's door and told him to his face: 'Men and women who leave their natural places are less than human. Either something is lacking in their souls or else something surplus has gotten inside--some manner of devil seed.' After that insult Vasco Miranda retired behind the high walls of his fortress-folly and lived the life of a recluse. He was never seen in the streets of Benengeli again. The servants he employed (in those days many young men and women were descending on southern Spain -already plagued by unemployment problems--from the jobless zones of La Mancha and Extremadura, eager for work in restaurants, hotels or domestic service; so household servants were as readily available in Benengeli as in Bombay) spoke of the frightening patterns of his behaviour, in which periods of utterly withdrawn stillness would characteristically be punctuated by gabbled harangues on abstruse, even incomprehensible themes, and embarrassing revelations of the most intimate details of his past, and chequered, career. There were colossal drinking jags, and descents into wild depressions during which he railed manically against the savage mischances of his life, notably his love of one 'Aurora Zogoiby' and his fear of a 'lost needle' that he believed to be making its inexorable way towards his heart. But he paid well, and punctually, and so he kept his staff. Perhaps Vasco's life and Abraham's were not so different after all. In the aftermath of Aurora Zogoiby's death they both became recluses, Abraham in his high tower and Vasco in his; they both sought to bury the pain of her loss beneath new activity, new enterprises, no matter how ill-conceived. And they both, as I would learn, claimed to have seen her ghost. 'She walks around here. I've seen her.' Abraham in sky-orchard with stuffed dog confessed to a vision--driven, for the first time in his life, and after a lifetime of utter scepticism on the subject, to allow the possibility of life after death to stumble off his irreligious tongue. 'She won't wait for me; eludes me in the trees.' Ghosts like children like to play hide-and-seek. 'She is not at rest. I know she is not at rest. What can I do to give her peace?' To my eye it was Abraham who seemed agitated, unable to accustom himself to her loss. 'Maybe if her work finds its resting-place,' he hypothesised, and there followed the huge Zogoiby Bequest, under the terms of which all of Aurora's own collection of her work--many hundreds of pieces!--was donated to the nation on condition that a gallery was built in Bombay to store and display it properly. But in the aftermath of the Meerut massacres, the Hindu-Muslim riots in Old Delhi and elsewhere, art was not a government priority, and the collection--apart from a few masterpieces which were put on show at the National Gallery in Delhi -languished. Bombay's civic authorities, being Mainduck-controlled, were not prepared to make good the funding which the central government's exchequer had denied. 'Then damn and blast all politicos,' cried Abraham. 'Self-help is best policy of all. ' He found other backers to join him in the project; there was money from the rapidly expanding Khazana Bank and also from the super-stockbroker V. V. Nandy, whose George Soros-sized raids on the world's currency markets were acquiring legendary status, the more so because they came from a Third World source. 'The Crocodile is becoming a post-colonial hero to our young,' Abraham told me, hee-hee'ing at the vagaries of fate. 'He fits their empire-strikes-back plus get-rich-quick double bill. ' A prime site was found--one of the few surviving old-time Parsi mansions on Cumballa Hill ('How old?' -'Old, men. From old time')--and a brilliant young art theorist and devotee of Aurora's oeuvre, Zeenat Vakil, already the author of an influential study of the Mughal Hamza-natna cloths, was appointed curator. Dr Vakil at once set about compiling an exhaustive catalogue, and began work, too, on an accompanying critical appreciation, Imperso-Nation and Dis/Semi/Nation: Dialogic* of Eclecticism and Interrogations of Authenticity in A. Z., which gave the Moor sequence--including the previously unseen late pictures--its rightful, central place in the corpus, and would do much to fix Aurora's place in the ranks of the immortals. The Zogoiby Bequest opened to the public just three years after Aurora's sad demise; there followed a certain amount of inevitable if short-lived controversy, for example over the early, and to some eyes incestuous, Moor pictures--those 'panto-paintings' that she had made so lightly long ago. But high in Cashondeliveri Tower her ghost still walked. Now Abraham began to express the conviction that her death had not been the straightforward accident that everyone had supposed. Dabbing at a rheumy eye he said in an unsteady voice that those who perish by foul play require a settlement before they find repose. He seemed to be falling further and further into the traps of superstition, apparently unable to accept the fact of Aurora's death. In ordinary circumstances this slippage into what he had always called mumbo-jumbo would have shocked me deeply; but I, too, was caught in obsession's strengthening grip. My mother was dead and yet I needed to repair a rift. If she was dead beyond recall then there could never be a reconciliation, only this gnawing, imperative need, this wound-that-could-not-heal. So I did not contradict Abraham when he spoke of phantoms in his hanging gardens. I may even have hoped--yes!--for a sudden tinkle of jhunjhunna ankle-bracelets, a flurry of fabric behind a bush. Or, better still, for the return of the mother of my favourite times, paint-spattered, and with brushes sticking out of her high-piled, chaotic hair. Even when Abraham announced that he had asked Dom Minto to re-open, on a private basis, the enquiry into her fall--Minto of all people, blind, toothless, wheelchair-ridden, deaf, and kept alive, as he approached his century, by dialysis machines, regular blood transfusions, and that insatiable and undiminished inquisitiveness which had taken him to the top of his professional tree! -1 made no demurral. Let the old man have what he needed to soothe his troubled spirit, I thought. Also, I must say, it was not easy to contradict Abraham Zogoiby, that ruthless skeleton. The more he took me into his confidence, opening his bank-books, his secret ledgers and his heart, the more profoundly I began to feel afraid. 'Fielding, must be,' he shouted his suspicion at Minto in the Pei orchard. 'As to Mo Ay, fellow doesn't have what it takes. Investigate Fielding. Moor here will lend any assistance you may require.' My fear increased. If Raman Fielding--guilty or innocent--ever suspected I was spying on him with a view to incriminating him in a putative murder, it would not