The Moors Last Sigh

‘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