The Moors Last Sigh

head was beginning to throb.
    ‘So, the Lone Ranger and Tonto are making camp for the night,’ he shouted. ‘ “Make the fire, Tonto,” says the Lone Ranger. “Yes, kemo sabay.” “Fetch water from the stream, Tonto.” “Yes, kemo sabay.” “Make the coffee, Tonto.” So on so forth. But suddenly Tonto exclaims in disgust. The Lone Ranger asks, “What’s the matter?” “Yecch,” answers Tonto, looking at the soles of his moccasins. “I think I just stepped in a big pile of kemo sabay.” ’
    I half-remembered the taxi-driver Vivar, the Western-movie buff who bore the name of a mediaeval, armour-plated cowboy, Spain’s second-greatest knight-errant – El Cid, I mean, Rodrigo de Vivar, not Don Quixote – warning me about Benengeli in a drawl that was half John Wayne in anything, half Eli Wallach in The Magnificent Seven . ‘Go careful, pardner – up there ees Indian contry.’
    But had he really said that? Was it a false memory, or a half-forgotten dream? I was no longer sure of anything. Except, perhaps, that this was indeed Indian country, I was surrounded, and the kemo sabay was getting pretty deep.
    In a way I had been in Indian country all my life, learning to read its signs, to follow its trails, rejoicing in its immensity, in its inexhaustible beauty, struggling for territory, sending up smoke-signals, beating its drums, pushing out its frontiers, making my way through its dangers, hoping to find friends, fearing its cruelty, longing for its love. Not even an Indian was safe in Indian country; not if he was the wrong sort of Indian, anyway – wearing the wrong sort of head-dress, speaking the wrong language, dancing the wrong dances, worshipping the wrong gods, travelling in the wrong company. I wondered how considerate those warriors encircling the masked man with the silver bullets would have been towards his feather-headed pal. In Indian country, there was no room for a man who didn’t want to belong to a tribe, who dreamed of moving beyond; of peeling off his skin and revealing his secret identity – the secret, that is, of the identity of all men – of standing before the war-painted braves to unveil the flayed and naked unity of the flesh.

    Renegada had not accompanied us into the tower. The little traitress had probably scampered back to the arms of her mole-faced lover to gloat over my entrapment. A ghostly light filtered into the spiral stairwell through narrow, slit-like windows. The walls were at least a metre thick, ensuring that the temperature in the tower was cool, even chilly. Perspiration was drying on my spine and I gave a little shiver. Vasco floated up behind me, puffing and blowing, a bulbous spectre with a gun. Here in Castle Miranda these two displaced spirits, the last of the Zogoibys and his maddened foe, would enact the final steps of their ghost-dance. Everyone was dead, everything was lost, and in the twilight there was time for no more than this last phantom tale. Were there silver bullets in Vasco Miranda’s gun? They say that silver bullets are what you need to kill a supernatural being. So if I, too, had become spectral, then they would do for me.
    We passed what must have been Vasco’s studio, and I caught a glimpse of an unfinished work: a crucified man had been taken down from the cross and was lying across a weeping woman’s lap, with pieces of silver – no doubt there were thirty of them – spilling from his stigmatised hands. This anti- pietà must be one of the ‘Judas Christ’ pictures I’d been told about. I had had only the briefest of looks, but the lurid, imitation-El-Greco feeling of the painting inspired queasiness, and made me hope that Vasco’s abandonment of the project was final.
    On the next floor he motioned me into a room in which I saw, with a leap of the heart, an unfinished picture of quite a different calibre: Aurora Zogoiby’s last piece, her anguished declaration of a mother-love that could transcend and forgive the supposed crimes of her beloved child, The Moor’s Last Sigh . Also in the room was a large piece of what I understood to be X-ray equipment; and, clipped to a great bank of light-boxes on one wall, a number of X-ray photographs. Apparently Vasco was examining the stolen picture segment by segment, as if by looking beneath its surface he might belatedly discover, and steal for himself, the secret of Aurora’s genius. As if he were looking for a magic lamp.
    Vasco shut the door, and I could no longer