The Moors Last Sigh

clothing reminded me of the story of Aires de Gama climbing into his wife’s wedding-dress and setting off for a wild night in the company of Prince Henry the Navigator; but what a falling-off was here, how much lowlier these dark threads were than Aires’s fabulous frock, and how much less suited I was to such attire! As we set off, Renegada Larios told me that the ex-mayor of the village – that same fellow who now sat, nameless and friendless, sipping coffee in the Street of Parasites – had once been obliged to walk these streets dressed as his own grandmother, because near the end of his captivity his house had been scheduled for demolition and the family had had to move. So I had local as well as familial precedents for my disguise.
    It was the first time Renegada and I had been by ourselves without Felicitas to chaperone us, but although she flashed me a series of explicitly meaningful looks I was too inhibited (both by my female dress and on account of the nervousness engendered by the unpredictability of what lay ahead) to respond. We reached the servants’ entrance to the Little Alhambra unobserved, as far as I could tell, though it was impossible to be sure if there were curious eyes watching from the darkened windows of Miradores Street as we ascended it towards Vasco’s detestable and incongruous elephant fountain. I caught a glimpse of a bright scrap of green flying over the folly’s walls. ‘Are there parrots in Spain?’ I whispered to Renegada, but obtained no reply. Perhaps she was sulking at my refusal to take this rare opportunity for flirtation.
    There was a small electronic key-pad next to the door, set into the terracotta-red wall, and Renegada quickly punched in a series of four numbers. The door clicked open, and we entered Miranda’s lair.
    At once I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu , and my head whirled. When I had recovered myself a little I marvelled at the skill with which Vasco Miranda had modelled the interior of his folly upon Aurora Zogoiby’s Moor paintings. I was standing in an open courtyard with a chequerboard-tiled central piazza and arched cloisters round the sides, and through the windows on the far side I could see a spreading plain, shimmering in dawn light, like an ocean. A palace set by a mirage of the sea; part-Arab, part-Mughal, owing something to Chirico, it was that very place which Aurora once described to me as one ‘where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. Place where an air-man can drown in water, or else grow gills; where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air.’ Even in its present state of slight dilapidation and horticultural decay, I had truly found Mooristan.
    In room after empty room I found the settings of Aurora’s pictures brought to life, and I half-expected her characters to walk in and enact their sad narratives before my disbelieving eyes, half-expected my own body to grow into that lozenged, particoloured Moor whose tragedy – the tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One – had been the sequence’s uniting principle. And perhaps my crumpled hand might burst, at any moment, into flower, or light, or flame! Vasco, who had always believed that Aurora had pinched the idea for the Moor pictures from his kitsch portrayal of a lachrymose rider, had spent fortunes, and the kind of energy born of the most profound obsession, to appropriate her vision for himself. Was this a house built of love or hate? If the stories I’d heard were to be believed, it was a true Palimpstine, in which his present bitter wrath lay curdling over the memory of an old, lost sweetness and romance. For there was something sour here, some envy in the brilliance of the emulation; and as the first shock of recognition wore off, and the day rose up, I began to see the flaws in the grand design. Vasco Miranda was still the same vulgarian he had always been, and what Aurora had imagined so vividly and finely had been rendered by Vasco in colours that could be seen, as the daylight brightened, to have missed lightness by the small but vital distance that distinguishes the pleasingly apt from the crudely inappropriate. The building’s sense of proportion was also poor, and its lines were misconceived. No, it was not a miracle, after all; my first impressions had been illusory, and the illusion had already faded. The ‘Little Alhambra’, for all its size and flamboyance, was no New