The Moors Last Sigh

Ye Little Children, the revolutionary crusade for unborn Christians’, and invited me to a meeting. I turned her down flat, but was at once beset by memories of Sister Floreas, who took the pro-life war into the most overpopulated regions of Bombay, and who had gone to a place in which unwanted pregnancies were presumably no longer a problem; sweet, fanatical Minnie, I thought, I hope you’re happy now … and I thought, too, about my erstwhile boxing coach, the similarly peg-legged Lambajan Chandiwala Borkar, and of Totah – that parrot which I had always loathed, and which had disappeared after the Bombay bombings, never to be seen again. As I contemplated the vanished bird I was overcome by nostalgia and grief, and began to weep in the street, to the consternation and embarrassment of the young militant, who quickly hurried away to join her SYLC colleagues in their den.
    The Moor who returned to the Larios women’s little house on the Calle de Miradores was therefore a changed man, one restored by coincidence to the world of feelings and pain. Emotions, so long anaesthetised, were flowing around me like flood-waters. Before I could explain this development to my landladies, however, they launched into eager speech, interrupting each other in their haste to inform me that the stolen paintings had indeed arrived, as expected, at the ‘Little Alhambra’.
    ‘There was a van …’ began Renegada.
    ‘– in the dead of night; it went right past our door –’ added Felicitas.
    ‘– so I wrapped myself in my rebozo and ran out –’
    ‘– and I ran out, too –’
    ‘– and we saw the gate to the big house open, and the van –’
    ‘– passed through –’
    ‘– and today in the fireplaces there was lots of cheap wood –’
    ‘– like packing-case wood – you know –’
    ‘– he must have been up all night chopping it up! –’
    ‘– and in the garbage there were piles of that plastic stuff–’
    ‘– that children like to make go pop –’
    ‘– bubble-wrap, that’s it –’
    ‘– yes, bubble-wrap, and corrugated cardboard, and metal hoops, too –’
    ‘– so there were big parcels in that van, and what else could they be?’
    It was not proof, but I knew it was the closest I would get, in this village of uncertainty, to a sure thing. I began for the first time to imagine my meeting with Vasco Miranda. Once I had been a child who loved to sit at his feet; now we were both old men, fighting over the same woman, you could say, and the fight would be no less strenuous because the lady in question was dead.
    It was time for the next step to be planned. ‘If he will not see me, you will have to smuggle me in,’ I said to the Larios sisters. ‘I can see no other way.’
    Very early next morning, while the sun was still a rumour running along the crests of distant mountains, I accompanied Renegada Larios to work. Felicitas, the larger-boned and bulkier of the two women, had given me her loosest black skirt and blouse. On my feet I wore anonymous rubber sandals bought in the Spanish part of town. In the crook of my right arm I carried a basket containing my own clothes, concealed beneath an array of dusters, sponges and sprays; my right hand, like my head, was concealed under a rebozo, which my left hand clutched tightly to keep it in place. ‘You make a poor counterfeit of a woman,’ Felicitas Larios said, surveying me with her ever-critical eye. ‘But luckily it’s still dark and there’s not so far to go. Stoop a little and take short steps. Be off with you! We are endangering our livelihoods for your sake, I hope you know that.’
    ‘For the sake of a dead mother,’ Renegada corrected her half-sister. ‘We have a dead mother also. That is why we understand.’
    ‘I leave my dog in your care,’ I told Felicitas. ‘He won’t be any trouble.’
    ‘You’re quite right he won’t,’ she said, grumpily. ‘He’s going straight in that cupboard the moment you’re out of the door, and you needn’t imagine he’ll be coming out before you return. We’ve got better sense in this house than to take a stuffed dog for a walk.’
    I said my farewells to Jawaharlal. His had been a long journey, too, and it deserved a better end than a broom-cupboard in a foreign land. But a broom-cupboard it had to be. I was off for my showdown with Vasco Miranda, and Jawaharlal had, after all, become just another abandoned Andalusian dog.

    My first experience of being in women’s