The Moors Last Sigh

saw her ghost walking in his garden in the sky – and was that his guilt at work, or a part of his grand, cold-blooded design? Abraham, who told me that Sammy Hazaré had sworn a deposition to Dom Minto, said deposition never in fact materialising, but on the evidence of which I went forth to bludgeon a man to death. – And Gottfried Helsing? Could it be that he did not know the truth about the self-styled ‘Larios sisters’ – or was his indifference so great that he felt no need to volunteer information to me; had the sense of human community so decayed among the Parasites of Benengeli that a man no longer felt a scrap of responsibility for his fellows’ fate? – Yes, bludgeon, I say, bludgeon. Pounding his face until there was no face there. And Chhaggan, too, was found in a gutter; Sammy Hazaré was suspected of the crime, but maybe there had been an unseen hand at work. – Now, what the devil were the names of the actors who played the masked man and the Indian? A-B-C-D-E-F-Jay, that’s it, Jay, and not Silverbullets but Silverheels. Chief Jay Silverheels and Clayton Moore. – O Abraham! How readily you sacrificed your son on the altar of your wrath! Whom did you hire to blow the poisoned dart? Was there such a dart, or were slipperier means employed – a little patch of Vaseline would have turned your murderous trick, just a drop in the right place, so easily spilled, so easily removed; why should I believe a word of that Minto story, after all? O, I was lost in fictions, and murder was all around. – My world was mad, and I was mad in it; how to accuse Vasco when Zogoibys perpetrated such lunacy upon one another, and upon their wretched times? – And Mynah, my sister Mynah, killed in an earlier blast; Mynah, who sent a crooked politico to jail and obliged her father to incur some considerable expense! Could the daughter, too, have died by the father’s hand – might that have been our Daddyji’s rehearsal for the subsequent termination of his wife? – And Aurora: was she innocent or guilty? She believed me guilty, and I was not; should I not avoid the selfsame trap? Did she, having been unfaithful, truly give Abraham cause for jealous rage – so that, after a lifetime of standing in her shadow, deferring to her whim (while in the rest of his life he grew monstrous, omnipotent, diabolical), he slew her, and then used her death’s mystery to twist my mind, so that I’d slay his enemy, too? – Or was she chaste, was she pure and whole as Indian mothers should be, and did he, mistaking virtue for vice, play the unreasoning jealous loon? – How, when the past is gone, when all’s exploded and in rags, may one apportion blame? How to find meanings in the ruins of a life? – One thing was certain; I was fortune’s, and my parents’, fool. – This floor’s a cold floor. I should get up off this floor. There’s still a fat fellow over there, and he’s pointing a pistol at my heart.

20
    I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I began my prison sentence in the topmost tower-room of Vasco Miranda’s mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli, but now that it is over I must record my memories of that awful incarceration, if only to honour the heroic rôle played by my fellow-captive, without whose courage, inventiveness and serenity I am sure I would not have lived to tell my tale. For, as I discovered on that day when I discovered so many things, I was not the only victim of Vasco Miranda’s deranged obsession with my late mother. There was a second hostage.
    Still shaken to the foundations of my being by the revelations in the X-ray chamber, I was ordered by Vasco to resume my climb. Thus I came to the circular cell in which I would be left to rot for so long, deafened by the vile noises emanating from high wall-mounted speakers, certain of my own death’s imminence, and consoled only by that amazing woman who glowed through my time of darkness like a beacon. I clung to her, and therefore did not sink.
    There was a painting on an easel in the centre of this room, too: Vasco’s own Boabdil, the weepy horseman, had galloped tearfully to Spain as well, leaving its purchaser C. P. Bhabha’s home and returning to its maker. What had been made in Elephanta was coming to roost in Benengeli – murder, vengefulness, and art. Vasco’s first work on canvas and Aurora’s last, his new beginning and her sad conclusion: two stolen paintings, both treatments of the