The Moors Last Sigh

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 born 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 Dão 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 fiancé. ‘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 it 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 secs 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 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 swam away; 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