The Moors Last Sigh

same theme, and each with one of my parents hidden underneath. (I never saw the other stolen ‘Moors’. Vasco claimed to have chopped them up and burned them along with their crates: he had only had them stolen, he said, to disguise the fact that The Moor’s Last Sigh was the one he’d wanted.)
    X-rays accused Abraham Zogoiby in a lower circle of this ascending hell, but for concealed Aurora photographs were not enough. Vasco’s Moor was being destroyed, was being picked away flake by flake; the image of my mother when young, that bare-breasted Madonna-without-child which had so incensed Abraham once-upon-a-time, was emerging from her long imprisonment. But her freedom was being gained at her liberator’s expense. It did not take me long to notice that the woman who stood at the easel, picking paint-flecks off the canvas and placing them on a dish, was chained – by the ankle! – to the red stone wall.
    She was of Japanese origin, but had spent much of her professional life working as a restorer of paintings in the great museums of Europe. Then she married a Spanish diplomat, a certain Benet, and moved with him around the world until the marriage failed. Out of the blue, Vasco Miranda had called her at the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona – saying only that she ‘came highly recommended’ – and invited her to visit him in Benengeli to examine, and advise on, certain palimpsest-paintings he had recently acquired. Although she was not an admirer of his work, she had found it impossible to refuse without insulting him; and was curious, too, to peep behind the high walls of his legendary folly, and perhaps to discover what lay beneath the mask of the notorious recluse. When she arrived at the Little Alhambra, bringing with her the tools of her trade, as he had expressly requested she should, he showed her his own Moor and the X-rays of the portrait below; and asked her if it would be possible to exhume the buried painting by removing the top layer.
    ‘It would be dangerous, but perhaps possible, yes,’ she said, after making an initial study. ‘But surely you would not choose to destroy your own work.’
    ‘This is what I have asked you here to do,’ he said.
    She had refused. In spite of her distaste for Vasco’s Moor , a picture she considered to have few merits, the prospect of spending laborious weeks, perhaps months, engaged on the destruction, rather than the preservation, of a work of art had little appeal. Her refusal was polite and delicate, but it threw Miranda into a rage. ‘You want big money, is that it?’ he asked, and offered her a sum so absurd as to confirm her worries about his state of mind. At her second refusal he had produced a pistol and her incarceration had commenced. She would not be freed, he told her, until she had completed her duties; if she declined to carry them out he would shoot her down ‘like a dog’. So her labours had begun.
    Arriving in her cell, I wondered at her chains. What a compliant fellow that blacksmith must be, I thought, so incuriously to install such devices in a private home. Then I recalled his cry – Sti’ walki’ free, huh? Som’ day soo’, soo’ – and the notion of a grand conspiracy returned, and gnawed.
    ‘Company for you,’ Vasco informed the woman, and then, turning to me, announced that on account of our old acquaintance and his own kindly, whimsical nature he would postpone my execution for a time. ‘Let’s re-live the old times together,’ he proposed, gaily. ‘If Zogoibys are to be wiped off the face of the earth – if the wrong-doings of the father, yes, and the mother, too, are to be visited upon the son – then let the last Zogoiby recount their sinful saga.’ Every day, after that, he brought me pencil and paper. He had made a Scheherazade of me. As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live.
    My fellow-prisoner gave me good advice. ‘Spin it out,’ she said. ‘That’s what I am doing. Every day we stay alive, we improve our chances of rescue.’ She had a life – work, friends, a home – and her disappearance would be bound to arouse suspicions. Vasco knew this, and forced her to write letters and postcards, taking leave of absence from her work, and explaining to her social circle that the ‘fascination’ of being inside the secret world of the famous V. Miranda had her in thrall. These would delay inquiries, but not for ever, for she had inserted deliberate mistakes into the letters, for