The Moors Last Sigh

week later, just as whimsically, they released them again. During those seven days, with Camoens’s written authorisation – as a Grade A prisoner, he was allowed to receive daily meals from home, as well as writing materials, books, newspapers, soap, towels, fresh clothes, and could send out dirty laundry and letters – Belle went to see the lawyers of the Gama Trading Company, the appointed trustees of Francisco da Gama’s last testament, and persuaded them of the immediate necessity of dividing the business in two. ‘The conditions of the will are clearly met,’ she said. ‘Disharmony and discord have been introduce-o’ed everywhere by appointees of Aires, whether direct or indirect does not signify; business circumstances plainly dictate that company integrity is impossible to maintain. If the Gama Company remains a single cell, then the shame of these atrocities will finish it off. Divide, and maybe the sickness can be contained in one half only. If we do not live separately then we will die together.’
    While lawyers were busying themselves with a proposal for the halving of the family business, Belle went back to Cabral Island and divided the grand old house itself, from deepest-bottom to highest-top; the old family sets of linen, cutlery, crockery were all summarily divorced, down to the last tea spoon, pillow-slip and quarter-plate. With the one-year-old Aurora on her hip she directed the household staff; almirahs, tallboys, poufs, long-armed cane chairs, bamboo poles for mosquito-nets, summer charpoys for those who preferred to sleep in the open air during the hot season, spittoons, thunderbox pots, hammocks, wine-glasses were all moved around; even the lizards on the walls were captured, and evenly distributed on both sides of the great divide. Studying the house’s crumbling old ground plans, and paying scrupulous attention to exact allocation of floor-space windows balconies, she split the mansion, its contents, courtyards and gardens, right down the middle. She had sackfuls of spices piled high along her newly established frontiers and where such barriers were inappropriate – for example on the main staircase – she drew white lines down the centre and demanded that these demarcations be respected. In the kitchen she parted the pots and pans, and put up a chart of hours on the wall that bisected the week, day by day. The domestic servants were divided too, and even though almost all of them pleaded to be allowed to remain under her command she insisted on scrupulous fairness, one maid here, another there, one kitchen boy on this side, another across the cease-fire line. ‘As for the chapel,’ she told a stunned Epifania and Carmen when they returned to the fait accompli of a newly segregated universe, ‘along with ivory teeth and Ganesha gods, you are welcome to it. On our side we have no plans to collect elephants, or to pray.’

    Neither Epifania nor Carmen had the strength, after recent events, to stand against the fury of Belle’s unleashed will. ‘Two of you have brought Hell-fire down on this family,’ she told them. ‘Now I do not want to see your ugly mugs again. Keep to your fifty per cent! Employ your own in-charges, or let the whole she-bang go to pot, or sell up, I don’t care! I just will see to it that my Camoens’s fifty will survive’n’thrive.’
    ‘You came from nowhere,’ said Epifania, sneezing, across a wall of cardamom-sacks, ‘and, madam, nowhere is your fate,’ but it didn’t sound convincing, and neither she nor Carmen argued when Belle told them that the destroyed fields were part of their allocated fifty, and Aires da Gama sent a defeated note from prison: ‘Chop it up, blast it! Slice up the whole demnition affair, why not.’
    So it was that Belle da Gama, at the age of twenty-one, took charge of her jailed husband’s fortunes; and, though there were many vicissitudes in the following years, husbanded them well. After the jailing of Camoens and Aires, the Gama Company’s lands and godowns had been placed under public administration: while lawyers drew up the deeds of separation, the reality was that armed sepoys patrolled the Spice Mountains, and public officers sat in the company’s high chairs. It took Belle months of haranguing, wheedling, bribing and flirtation to get the business back. By this time many clients, shocked by the scandal, had taken their business elsewhere, or else, when they learned that a chit of a girl was now in