The Moors Last Sigh

and it has scared the herons away from their nest.’ And the X-ray machine? ‘That I don’t know. Maybe he will make art from those see-through photos.’
    ‘It isn’t healthy,’ said Felicitas. ‘He sees nobody, nobody.’
    Neither Felicitas nor Renegada had seen their employer for more than a year. But sometimes, on a moonlit night, his cloaked figure could be seen from the village, walking the high battlements of his folly, like a slow, fat ghost.
    ‘And what’s this about my “hated name”?’ I asked.
    ‘There was a woman,’ said Renegada finally. ‘Excuse me. Maybe your aunt?’
    ‘My mother,’ I said. ‘A painter. Now deceased.’
    ‘May she rest,’ Felicitas interjected.
    ‘Vasco Miranda is very bitter about this woman,’ Renegada said in a rush, as if that were the only way she could bring herself to speak of it. ‘I think he has loved her very much, no?’
    I said nothing.
    ‘I am sorry. I see it is hard for you. It is a hard thing. A son, a mother. You cannot betray her. But I think he has been, has been her, her, her.’
    ‘Her lover,’ said Felicitas, harshly. Renegada blushed.
    ‘I am sorry if you don’t know it,’ she said, putting her hand on my left arm.
    ‘Please go on,’ I answered.
    ‘Then she was brutal with him, and flung him away. Since then a kind of resentment has grown in him. I have seen it more and more. It is a possession.’
    ‘It isn’t healthy,’ said Felicitas, again. ‘Hatred burns up the soul.’
    ‘And now you,’ said Renegada. ‘I think he will never agree to meet your mother’s son. I believe the name you carry will be too much for him to bear.’
    ‘He painted cartoon animals and super-heroes on my nursery wall,’ I said. ‘He must see me. And he will.’
    Felicitas and Renegada looked at each other again; a knowing, I-give-up look.
    ‘Ladies,’ I said. ‘I also have a story to tell.’

    ‘There was a package some time ago,’ said Renegada when I had finished. ‘Maybe it was one painting. I don’t know. Maybe it was the picture with your mother’s picture underneath. He must have taken it up into the tower. But four big pictures? No, nothing of that sort has come.’
    ‘It is too soon, perhaps,’ I said. ‘The burglary was very recent. You must watch for me. And as things stand, I now perceive, I should not present myself at his door in a hurry. It would scare him into keeping the pictures away from here. So you must watch, please, and I must wait.’
    ‘If you wish to lodge in this house,’ conceded Felicitas, ‘we can come to an arrangement. If you wish.’ At which Renegada turned her face away.
    ‘You have come on a great pilgrimage,’ she said, without turning back. ‘A son in search of his lost mother’s treasures, in search of healing and peace. It is our duty as women to help such a man find what he seeks.’
    I remained under their roof for over a month. During this time I was well cared for, and enjoyed their company; but I learned very little more about their lives. Their parents were apparently dead, but they were disinclined to discuss the matter, so naturally I let it lie. They appeared to have neither siblings nor friends. There were no lovers. Yet they seemed perfectly, inseparably happy. They left for work in the mornings holding hands, and returned together, too. There were days when in my loneliness I entertained a half-formed lust for Renegada Larios, but there was no single occasion on which I was alone in her company, so I was unable to take matters any further. Each night, after supper, the half-sisters would retire upstairs to the bed they shared, and I would hear their murmurings, and the shiftings of their bodies, continuing late into the night; yet they would always be up before I stirred.
    Finally curiosity got the better of me, and I asked them at supper why they had never married. ‘Because all the men in these parts are dead from the neck up,’ Renegada shot back, giving her sister a fierce look. ‘And from the neck down, as well.’
    ‘My half-sister is too fanciful, as usual,’ said Felicitas. ‘But it is true that we are not like the people round here. None of us was, in our family. The others are dead now, and we do not wish to lose each other to mere husbands. Ours is a closer bond. You see, our attitudes are not easily understood by most folk in Benengeli. For example, we are glad about the end of the Franco régime and the return of democracy. Also, to speak more personally,