The Moors Last Sigh

in her pieces it was the people themselves who were made of rubbish, who were collages composed of what the metropolis did not value: lost buttons, broken windscreen wipers, torn cloth, burned books, exposed camera film. They even went scavenging for their own limbs: discovering great heaps of severed body parts, they pounced on what they lacked, and they weren’t too particular, couldn’t afford to be choosers, so that many of them ended up with two left feet or gave up the search for buttocks and fixed a pair of plump, amputated breasts where their missing behinds should be. The Moor had entered the invisible world, the world of ghosts, of people who did not exist, and Aurora followed him into it, forcing it into visibility by the strength of her artistic will.
    And the Moor-figure: alone now, motherless, he sank into immorality, and was shown as a creature of shadows, degraded in tableaux of debauchery and crime. He appeared to lose, in these last pictures, his previous metaphorical rôle as a unifier of opposites, a standard-bearer of pluralism, ceasing to stand as a symbol – however approximate – of the new nation, and being transformed, instead, into a semi-allegorical figure of decay. Aurora had apparently decided that the ideas of impurity, cultural admixture and mélange which had been, for most of her creative life, the closest things she had found to a notion of the Good, were in fact capable of distortion, and contained a potential for darkness as well as for light. This ‘black Moor’ was a new imagining of the idea of the hybrid – a Baudelairean flower, it would not be too far-fetched to suggest, of evil:
 … Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;
Chaque jour vers l’Enfer nous descendons d’un pas ,
Sans horreur, à travers des ténèbres qui puent .
    And of weakness: for he became a haunted figure, fluttered about by phantoms of his past which tormented him though he cowered and bid them begone. Then slowly he grew phantomlike himself, became a Ghost That Walked, and sank into abstraction, was robbed of his lozenges and jewels and the last vestiges of his glory; obliged to become a soldier in some petty warlord’s army (here Aurora – interestingly enough – for once stayed close to the historically established facts about Sultan Boabdil), reduced to mercenary status where once he had been a king, he rapidly became a composite being as pitiful and anonymous as those amongst whom he moved. Garbage piled up, and buried him.
    Repeated use was made of the diptych format, and in the second panels of these works Aurora gave us that anguished, magisterial, appallingly unguarded series of late self-portraits in which there is something of Goya and something of Rembrandt, but much more of a wild erotic despair of which there are few examples in the whole history of art. Aurora/Ayxa sat alone in these panels, beside the infernal chronicle of the degradation of her son, and never shed a tear. Her face grew hard, even stony, but in her eyes there shone a horror that was never named – as if she were looking at a thing that struck at the very depths of her soul, a thing standing before her, where anyone looking at the pictures would naturally stand – as if the human race itself had shown her its most secret and terrorising face, and by doing so had petrified her, turning her old flesh to stone. These ‘Portraits of Ayxa’ are ominous, lowering works.
    In the Ayxa panels, too, there recurred the twin themes of doubles, and of ghosts. A phantom-Ayxa haunted the garbaged Moor; and behind Ayxa/Aurora, at times, hovered the faint translucent images of a woman and a man. Their faces were left blank. Was the woman Uma (Chimène), or was it Aurora herself? And was I – or rather ‘the Moor’ – the phantom male? And if not I, then who? In these ‘ghost’ or ‘double’ portraits, the Ayxa/Aurora figure looks – or am I imagining this? – hunted, the way Uma looked when I went to see her after the news of Jimmy Cash’s accident. I’m not imagining it. I know that look. She looks as if she might be coming to pieces. She looks pursued.

    As, in those pictures, she pursued me. As if she were a witch upon a crag, watching me in her crystal ball with a winged monkey by her side. For it was true: I was moving through those dark places, across the moon, behind the sun, which she created in her work. I inhabited her fictions and the eye of her imagination saw me plain. Or almost: because