The Moors Last Sigh

heart of the web, the top of the heap, oflounging 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 élite group of Soviet actors had been given exclusive rights to the rôle of V. I. Lenin: not only in specially prepared touring productions which told the Soviet people about their glorious revolution, but also at the