The Moors Last Sigh

feeling that Felicitas disapproved of her half-sister’s indiscretion. She scratched at her mole and pursed her lips, but said nothing. ‘So this Catalan woman got to see Vasco, after all?’ I said, excited by the realisation. ‘We didn’t say that,’ snapped Felicitas. ‘There’s no point in discussing this any further.’ Renegada bowed her head in submission and returned to her needlework.
    On my wanderings I occasionally encountered the heavily perspiring figure of the Guardia chief, Salvador Medina, who invariably frowned at me, and removed his cap to scratch his sweat-soaked locks, as if trying to remember who the dickens I might be. We never spoke, partly because my Spanish was still poor, although it was slowly improving, both through the nocturnal study of books and thanks to the daily lessons I was being given, in return for a supplementary charge added to my weekly bill for board and lodging, by the Larios sisters; and partly because the English language had vanquished all Salvador Medina’s attempts to get hold of it, like a master criminal who remains always two steps ahead of the law.
    I was happy that Medina was so unconcerned about me as to forget me so readily, because it suggested that the Indian authorities had expressed no interest in my whereabouts. I reminded myself that I had recently committed the crime of murder; and reflected that the explosion at my victim’s home had evidently succeeded in obliterating my deed. The greater violence of the bomb had been painted over the scene in which I had participated, and hidden it for ever from the investigators’ eyes. Further confirmation that I was not under suspicion came from my bank accounts. During my years in my father’s Tower I had managed to stash away sizeable sums in overseas banks, including numbered accounts in Switzerland (so you see that I was not the mere thug and ‘stupe’ that ‘Adam Zogoiby’ had taken me for!). As far as I knew there had been no recent attempt to interfere with my arrangements, even though so many aspects of the crashed Siodicorp were under investigation, and so many bank accounts had been placed under the official receiver’s administration, or blocked.
    It was strange, however, that my crime – murder, after all; murder most foul, and the one and only murder for which I was ever responsible – had slipped so quickly to the back of my brain. Perhaps my unconscious mind had also accepted the greater authority, the successfully overwhelming reality of the bombs, and wiped my moral slate clean. Or perhaps this absence of guilt – this suspended moral animation – was Benengeli’s gift to me.
    Physically, too, I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. Even my asthma had improved; how lucky for my chest, I thought, to have fallen in with the only two non-smokers in town – for it was true that everywhere I went people were puffing away like mad. To avoid the stench of cigarettes I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town. The village blacksmith, whose speciality was the manufacture of chains and manacles for the Avellaneda jail, nodded to me as he nodded to all passers-by and called out, in the heavily accented Spanish of the region, ‘Sti’ walki’ free, huh? Som’ day soo’, soo’,’ upon which he would rattle his heavy chains and roar with laughter. As my Spanish improved, I strayed ever further from the Street of Parasites and thus gained a few glimpses into Benengeli’s other self, that village defeated by history in which jealous men in stiff suits stalked their fiancées, sure of those chaste maidens’ infidelity, and where the hoofs of the horses of long-dead philanderers were heard galloping down the cobbled streets at night. I began to understand why Felicitas and Renegada Larios spent their evenings at home, with the shutters closed, talking to each other in low voices while I studied Spanish in the comfort of my tiny room.

    On the Wednesday of my fifth week in Benengeli, I returned to my lodgings after a walk during which an uncouth young one-legged woman thrust into my unwilling hand a cheaply produced pamphlet enumerating the anti-abortionist demands of ‘Suffer