The Moors Last Sigh

images of the After Life in movies, paintings and story-books that I got the shivers. Was I travelling to the country of the dead? I half-expected to see a pair of pearly gates standing on the fluffy fields of cumulus outside my window, and a man holding a double-entry account-book of rights and wrongs. Sleep rolled over me, and in my first-ever high-altitude dreams I learned that I had indeed already left the land of the living. Perhaps I had died in the bombings like so many of the people and places I cared about. When I awoke, this sensation of having passed through a veil lingered on. A friendly young woman was offering me food and drink. I accepted both. The little bottle of red Rioja wine was delicious, but too small. I asked for more.
    ‘I feel as if I have slipped in time,’ I told the friendly stewardess some while later. ‘But whether into the future or the past, I cannot say.’
    ‘Many passengers feel that way,’ she reassured me. ‘I tell them, it is neither. The past and future are where we spend most of our lives. In fact, what you are going through in this small micro-cosmos of ours is the disorienting feeling of having slipped for a few hours into the present.’ Her name was Eduvigis Refugio and she was a psychology major from the Complutense University of Madrid. A certain footloose quality of soul had led her to set aside her education and take up this peripatetic life, she confided freely, sitting down for a few minutes in the empty seat beside me, and taking Jawaharlal on to her own lap. ‘Shanghai! Montevideo! Alice Springs! Do you know that places only yield up their secrets, their most profound mysteries, to those who are just passing through? Just as it is possible to confide in a total stranger encountered in a bus station – or aboard an aeroplane – such intimacies as would make you blush if you even hinted at them to those you live amongst. What a sweet stuffed dog, by the way! I myself have a collection of small stuffed birds; and, from the South Seas, a genuine shrunken head. But the real reason why I travel,’ and here she leaned in close, ‘is the pleasure I take from promiscuity, and in a Catholic country like Spain it isn’t easy to have my fill.’ Even then – such was my internal, in-flight turbulence – I did not understand that she was offering me her body. She had to spell it out. ‘On this flight we help each other,’ she said. ‘My colleagues will keep watch and make sure we are not disturbed.’ She led me to a small toilet cubicle and we had sex very briefly: she reached her orgasm with a few swift movements while I was unable to do so at all, especially as she appeared to lose all interest in me the instant her own needs had been satisfied. I accepted the situation passively – for passivity had me in its grip – and we both rearranged our clothing and briskly went our separate ways. Some time later I felt a great urge to talk to her some more, if only to fix her face and voice in my memory, from which they were already fading, but a different woman appeared in response to the little light I illuminated by pushing a button bearing a schematic representation of a human being. ‘I wanted Eduvigis,’ I explained, and the new young woman frowned. ‘I beg your pardon? Did you say “Rioja”?’ Sound is altered in an aeroplane, and perhaps I had slurred my words, so I repeated quite distinctly, ‘Eduvigis Refugio, the psychologist.’
    ‘You must have been dreaming, sir,’ said the young woman with a peculiar smile. ‘There is no stewardess by that name aboard this flight.’ When I insisted that there was, and possibly raised my voice, a man with gold hoops round the cuffs of his blazer came up quickly. ‘Be quiet and sit still,’ he ordered me roughly, pushing at my shoulder. ‘At your age, grand-dad, and with your deformity! You should be ashamed to make such propositions to decent girls. You Indian men all think our European women are whores.’ I was aghast; but now that I looked at the second young woman, I saw that she was dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘I am sorry to have caused such distress,’ I apologised. ‘Let me state here and now that I unequivocally withdraw all my requests.’
    ‘That’s better,’ nodded the man in the hooped blazer. ‘Since you have seen the error of your ways, we’ll say no more about it.’ And he went off with the second woman, who had begun to look quite cheerful; indeed, as