The Moors Last Sigh

Moorusalem, but an ugly, pretentious house.
    I had seen no sign of the purloined paintings, nor of the machinery of which Renegada and Felicitas had spoken. The door leading to the high tower was firmly locked. Vasco must be up there, with his contraptions and stolen secrets.
    ‘I want to change my clothes,’ I said to Renegada. ‘I can’t confront the old bastard looking like this.’
    ‘Go ahead and change,’ she answered, bold as brass. ‘There’s nothing you’ve got I haven’t seen already.’ In fact it was Renegada who had changed; ever since we entered the ‘Little Alhambra’ her manner had become proprietorial, assertive. No doubt she had detected the growing distaste with which – after a few initial exclamations of delight – I had been inspecting the property for which, after all, she had cared over many years. It would not be unnatural for her to be annoyed by my lack of enthusiasm for the place. Nevertheless, this was a flagrant, shameless remark, and I would not stand for it.
    ‘Be careful what you say,’ I warned her, and went into an adjoining chamber to have some privacy, ignoring her angry glare. While I was changing I became aware of a noise, coming from some distance away. It was the vilest of dins – a mixture of female shrieks and feedback screeches, ululations of indeterminate gender, computer-generated whines and bangs, and a background clattering and clanking that put me in mind of a kitchen in an earthquake. This must be the ‘avant-garde music’ that had been mentioned. Vasco Miranda was awake.
    Renegada and Felicitas had told me quite clearly that they had not seen their reclusive boss for over a year, so I was extremely surprised, on emerging from my changing-room, to find the voluminous figure of old Vasco himself awaiting me in the chequerboard piazza, with his housekeeper by his side; and not only by his side, but tickling him playfully with a feather duster while he giggled and squealed with delight. He was indeed wearing Moorish fancy dress, as the half-sisters had said he was prone to do, and in his baggy pantaloons and embroidered waistcoat, worn open over a ballooning collarless shirt, he looked like a wobbling mound of Turkish rahat lacoum . His moustache had dwindled – its stalagmites of wax-stiffened hair had vanished completely – and his head was as bald and pocked as the surface of the Moon.
    ‘Hee, hee,’ he chortled, slapping Renegada’s duster away. ‘Hola, namaskar, salaam, Moor, my boy. You look awful: ready to drop down dying-shying at a moment’s notice. Haven’t my two ladies been feeding you properly? Hasn’t this little holiday been to your liking? How long has it been now? My, my – fourteen years. Well! They haven’t been kind to you .’
    ‘If I had known you were so … approachable,’ I said, looking crossly at the housekeeper, ‘I would have dispensed with this stupid charade. But it seems that these reports about your reclusiveness have been much exaggerated.’
    ‘Whese reports?’ he demanded, disingenuously. Then, ‘Well, perhaps, but only as regards a few small details,’ he said in a placatory voice, waving Renegada away. She put the duster down without a word and backed away to a corner of the courtyard. ‘It is true that we in Benengeli value our privacy – as do you, by the way, considering what a fuss you’ve just made about changing your clothes in private! Renegada there was highly amused. – But what was my point? Ah, yes. Have you not noticed that Benengeli is defined by what it lacks – that unlike much of the region, certainly unlike the whole Costa, it is devoid of such excrescences as Coco-Loco nightclubs, coach parties on guided tours, burro-taxis, currency cambios, and vendors of straw sombreros. Our excellent Sargento, Salvador Medina, drives all such horrors away by administering nocturnal beatings, in the village’s many dark alleys, to any entrepreneur who seeks to introduce them. Salvador Medina dislikes me intensely, by the way, as he dislikes all the town’s newcomers, but like all well-settled immigrants – like the great majority of the Parasites – I applaud his policy of repulsing the new wave of invaders. Now that we’re in, it’s only right that somebody should slam the door shut behind us.
    ‘Don’t you find it admirable, my Benengeli?’ he went on, sweeping an arm vaguely in the direction of the mirage-ocean visible through his windows. ‘Goodbye to dirt, disease,