The Moor's Last Sigh (42 page)

bitter about this woman,' Renegada said in a rush, as if that were the only way she could bring herself to speak of it. 'I think he has loved her very much, no?' I said nothing. 'I am sorry. I see it is hard for you. It is a hard thing. A son, a mother. You cannot betray her. But I think he has been, has been her, her, her.' 'Her lover,' said Felicitas, harshly. Renegada blushed. 'I am sorry if you don't know it,' she said, putting her hand on my left arm. 'Please go on,' I answered. 'Then she was brutal with him, and flung him away. Since then a kind of resentment has grown in him. I have seen it more and more. It is a possession.' 'It isn't healthy,' said Felicitas, again, 'Hatred burns up the soul.' 'And now you,' said Renegada. 'I think he will never agree to meet your mother's son. I believe the name you carry will be too much for him to bear.' 'He painted cartoon animals and super-heroes on my nursery wall,' I said. 'He must see me. And he will.' Felicitas and Renegada looked at each other again; a knowing, I-gjve-up look. 'Ladies,' I said. 'I also have a story to tell.' 'There was a package some time ago,' said Renegada when I had finished. 'Maybe it was one painting. I don't know. Maybe it was the picture with your mother's picture underneath. He must have taken it up into the tower. But four big pictures? No, nothing of that sort has come.' 'It is too soon, perhaps,' I said. 'The burglary was very recent. You must watch for me. And as things stand, I now perceive, I should not present myself at his door in a hurry. It would scare him into keeping the pictures away from here. So you must watch, please, and I must wait.' 'If you wish to lodge in this house,' conceded Felicitas, 'we can come to an arrangement. If you wish.' At which Renegada turned her face away. 'You have come on a great pilgrimage,' she said, without turning back. 'A son in search of his lost mother's treasures, in search of healing and peace. It is our duty as women to help such a man find what he seeks.' I remained under their roof for over a month. During this time I was well cared for, and enjoyed their company; but I learned very little more about their lives. Their parents were apparently dead, but they were disinclined to discuss the matter, so naturally I let it lie. They appeared to have neither siblings nor friends. There were no lovers. Yet they seemed perfectly, inseparably happy. They left for work in the mornings holding hands, and returned together, too. There were days when in my loneliness I entertained a half- formed lust for Renegada Larios, but there was no single occasion on which I was alone in her company, so I was unable to take matters any further. Each night, after supper, the half-sisters would retire upstairs to the bed they shared, and I would hear their murmurings, and the shiftings of their bodies, continuing late into the night; yet they would always be up before I stirred. Finally curiosity got the better of me, and I asked them at supper why they had never married. 'Because all the men in these parts are dead from the neck up,' Renegada shot back, giving her sister a fierce look. 'And from the neck down, as well.' 'My half-sister is too fanciful, as usual,' said Felicitas. 'But it is true that we are not like the people round here. None of us was, in our family. The others are dead now, and we do not wish to lose each other to mere husbands. Ours is a closer bond. You see, our attitudes are not easily understood by most folk in Benengeli. For example, we are glad about the end of the Franco regime and the return of democracy. Also, to speak more personally, we do not like tobacco or babies, and around here everyone is crazy about both. Smokers are always going on about the social joys to be had from their packets of Fortuna or Ducados, about the intimate sensuality of lighting a friend's cigarette; but we detest waking up with that cloying smell on our clothes, or going to sleep with stale smoke clouding our hair. As to children, you're supposed to think you can never have too many of them, but we have no desire to be trapped by a brood of bouncing, squealing little jailers. And, if I may say so, we like your pet precisely because he is stuffed and therefore needs no attention from us.' 'Yet you have looked after me royally,' I argued. 'That is business,' Felicitas rejoined. 'You are a paying guest.' 'Surely there must be men who would love you for yourselves, without wanting to raise families,' I persevered. 'And if the men in Benengeli have the wrong politics, why not go across to Erasmo, for example? I hear they are different there.' 'Since you are so forward as to demand an answer,' replied Felicitas, 'I have never met a man who could see a woman as herself. And as to Erasmo: there is no road to Erasmo from here.' I caught an odd expression in Renegada's eye. Perhaps she did not agree with everything her sister had said. After that conversation I would allow myself to imagine, during my solitary nights, that at any moment the door might open and Renegada Larios might slip in beside me in my cot, naked below her long white nightdress... but it never happened. I lay by myself, listening to the shifts and murmurs just above my unsleeping head. During my month of waiting I wandered the streets of Benengeli -sometimes trundling Jawaharlal behind me, but more often by myself--in the grip of a numbing tedium that somehow made it impossible for me to dwell on the past. I wondered if I had acquired the same empty-eyed look that characterised so many of the so-called Parasites, who seemed to spend all their days crowding and jostling up and down 'their' Street, buying clothes, eating in restaurants and drinking in bars, talking furiously all the time, with a curious absentness of manner that suggested their utter indifference to the topics of their conversations. However, Benengeli was apparently capable of weaving its spell even on those who were not dull of eye, because whenever I chanced to pass that old slobberer Gottfried Helsing he twinkled at me brightly, gave me a cheery wave and cried, with a knowing wink, 'We really must have another of our excellent conversations some time soon!' as if we were the best of friends. I surmised that I had arrived at a place to which people came to forget themselves--or, more accurately, to lose themselves in themselves, to live in a kind of dream of what they might have been, or preferred to be--or, having mislaid what once they were, to absent themselves quietly from what they had become. Thus they could either be liars, like Helsing, or near-catatonics, like the 'honorary Parasite', the ex-mayor, who sat motionless on an outdoor bar stool from morning to night, and never spoke a word; as if he were still lingering in the shaded solitude of an alcove concealed behind a large wooden almirah in the house of his dead wife. And the air of mystery surrounding the place was in fact an atmosphere of unknowing; what seemed like an enigma was in fact a void. These uprooted drifters had become, by their own choice, human automata. They could simulate human life, but were no longer able to live it. The locals--or so I guessed--were less befuddled by the town's narcotic quality than the Parasites; but the prevalent mood of vacuous alienation and apathy did affect them to some degree. Felicitas and Renegada needed to be asked three times about the visit to Benengeli of the young woman, mentioned by Gottfried Helsing, who had been asking after Vasco Miranda not long ago. On the first two occasions they shrugged and reminded me that Helsing was not to be trusted; but when I returned to the subject one evening, Renegada looked up from her sewing and burst out, 'Oh, yes, my goodness, now that I think of it, a woman did come -a bohemian type, some sort of art specialist from Barcelona, a picture restorer, or something similar. She got nowhere with her coquettish ways; and by now she must be safely back in Catalonia where she belongs.' Once again I had the strong feeling that Felicitas disapproved of her half-sister's indiscretion. She scratched at her mole and pursed her lips, but said nothing. 'So this Catalan woman got to see Vasco, after all?' I said, excited by the realisation. 'We didn't say that,' snapped Felicitas. 'There's no point in discussing this any further.' Renegada bowed her head in submission and returned to her needlework. On my wanderings I occasionally encountered the heavily perspiring figure of the Guardia chief, Salvador Medina, who invariably frowned at me, and removed his cap to scratch his sweat-soaked locks, as if trying to remember who the dickens I might be. We never spoke, partly because my Spanish was still poor, although it was slowly improving, both through the nocturnal study of books and thanks to the daily lessons I was being given, in return for a supplementary charge added to my weekly bill for board and lodging, by the Larios sisters; and partly because the English language had vanquished all Salvador Medina's attempts to get hold of it, like a master criminal who remains always two steps ahead of the law. I was happy that Medina was so unconcerned about me as to forget me so readily, because it suggested that the Indian authorities had expressed no interest in my whereabouts. I reminded myself that I had recently committed the crime of murder; and reflected that the explosion at my victim's home had evidently succeeded in obliterating my deed. The greater violence of the bomb had been painted over the scene in which I had participated, and hidden it for ever from the investigators' eyes. Further confirmation that I was not under suspicion came from my bank accounts. During my years in my father's Tower I had managed to stash away sizeable sums in overseas banks, including numbered accounts in Switzerland (so you see that I was not the mere thug and 'stupe' that 'Adam Zogoiby' had taken me for!). As far as I knew there had been no recent attempt to interfere with my arrangements, even though so many aspects of the crashed Siodicorp were under investigation, and so many bank accounts had been placed under the official receiver's administration, or blocked. It was strange, however, that my crime--murder, after all; murder most foul, and the one and only murder for which I was ever responsible--had slipped so quickly to the back of my brain. Perhaps my unconscious mind had also accepted the greater authority, the successfully overwhelming reality of the bombs, and wiped my moral slate clean. Or perhaps this absence of guilt--this suspended moral animation--was Benengeli's gift to me. Physically, too, I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. Even my asthma had improved; how lucky for my chest, I thought, to have fallen in with the only two non-smokers in town--for it was true that everywhere I went people were puffing away like mad. To avoid the stench of cigarettes I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town. The village blacksmith, whose speciality was the manufacture of chains and manacles for the Avellaneda jail, nodded to me as he nodded to all passers-by and called out, in the heavily accented Spanish of the region, 'Sti' walki' free, huh? Som' day soo', soo',' upon which he would rattle his heavy chains and roar with laughter. As my Spanish improved, I strayed ever further from the Street of Parasites and thus gained a few glimpses into Benengeli's other self, that village defeated by history in which jealous men in stiff suits stalked their fiancees, sure of those chaste maidens' infidelity, and where the hoofs of the horses of long-dead philanderers were heard galloping down the cobbled streets at night. I began to understand why Felicitas and Renegada Larios spent their evenings at home, with the shutters closed, talking to each other in low voices while I studied Spanish in the comfort of my tiny room. On the Wednesday of my fifth week in Benengeli, I returned to my lodgings after a walk during which an uncouth young one-legged woman thrust into my unwilling hand a cheaply produced pamphlet enumerating the anti-abortionist demands of'Suffer Ye Little Children, the revolutionary crusade for unborn Christians', and invited me to a meeting. I turned her down flat, but was at once beset by memories of Sister Floreas, who took the pro-life war into the most overpopulated regions of Bombay, and who had gone to a place in which unwanted pregnancies were presumably no longer a problem; sweet, fanatical Minnie, I thought, I hope you're happy now... and I thought, too, about my erstwhile boxing coach, the similarly peg-legged Lambajan Chandiwala Borkar, and of Totah--that parrot which I had always loathed, and which had disappeared after the Bombay bombings, never to be seen again. As I contemplated the vanished bird I was overcome by nostalgia and grief, and began to weep in the street, to the consternation and embarrassment of the young militant, who quickly hurried away to join her SYLC colleagues in their den. The Moor who returned to the Larios women's little house on the Calle de Miradores was therefore a changed man, one restored by coincidence to the world of feelings and pain. Emotions, so long anaesthetised, were flowing around me like flood-waters. Before I could explain this development to my landladies, however, they launched into eager speech, interrupting each other in their haste to inform me that the stolen paintings had indeed arrived, as expected, at the 'Little Alhambra'. 'There was a van... ' began Renegada. '--in the dead of night; it went right past our door--' added Felicitas. '--so I wrapped myself in my rebozo and ran out--' '--and I ran out, too--' '--and we saw the gate to the big house open, and the van--' '--passed through--' '--and today in the fireplaces there was lots of cheap wood--' '--like packing-case wood--you know--' '--he must have been up all night chopping it up!--' '--and in the garbage there were piles of that plastic stuff- ' '--that children like to make go pop--' '--bubble-wrap, that's it--' '--yes, bubble-wrap, and corrugated cardboard, and metal hoops, too--' '--so there were big parcels in that van, and what else could they be?' It was not proof, but I knew it was the closest I would get, in this village of uncertainty, to a sure thing. I began for the first time to imagine my meeting with Vasco Miranda. Once I had been a child who loved to sit at his feet; now we were both old men, fighting over the same woman, you could say, and the fight would be no less strenuous because the lady in question was dead. It was time for the next step to be planned. 'If he will not see me, you will have to