The Moors Last Sigh

example referring to a friend’s lover, or pet, by the wrong name; and sooner or later someone might smell a rat. When I heard this I became inordinately excited, for the despondency that had settled over me in the aftermath of Vasco’s X-ray revelations had caused me to despair of rescue. Now hope was reborn, and I became delirious with anticipation. At once she dragged me down to earth. ‘It is only a long-shot,’ she said. ‘People are inattentive, by and large. They do not read closely, but skim. They are not expecting to be sent messages in code, and so they may not see any.’ To illustrate her point she told me a story. In 1968, during the ‘Prague Spring’, an American colleague of hers had taken a group of art students to visit Czechoslovakia. They had been in Wenceslas Square when the first Russian tanks rolled into town. In the ensuing disturbances the American teacher had been one of those randomly arrested by the unleashed riot squads, and had spent two days in jail before the American consul had secured his release. During these days he had noticed a tapping code scratched into the wall of his cell, and had begun, eagerly, to send messages to whoever might be on the other side of the wall. After an hour or so of tapping, however, the door to his cell burst open, and an amused guard sauntered in to tell him, in filthy, broken English, that his neighbour wanted him to ‘shot the fock op,’ because, alas, ‘nobody give to him the focking code.’
    ‘Also,’ she continued coolly, ‘even if help arrives – even if policemen begin to batter down the gates of this terrible place – who knows if Miranda will permit us to be taken alive? Right now he is living wholly in the present moment – he has slipped the chains of the future. But if that tomorrow comes, and he is forced to face it, he may choose to die, like one of those cultist leaders one hears about more and more these days, and in all probability he will want to take us all along with him – Miss Renegada, Miss Felicitas, and me, and you as well.’
    We met so near the end of our stories that I cannot do her justice. There is neither time nor space for me to pay her the compliment of setting her down, so to speak, in full; though she, too, had her history, she loved and was loved, she was a human being, not just a captive in that hateful space whose thick-walled cold made us shiver through the nights, even though we huddled together for warmth, wrapped up in my leather greatcoat. I cannot embark on her story – can only pay tribute to the generous strength with which she held me close through those interminable nights, while I felt Death approach, and quailed. I can only record her murmurs in my ears, how she sang to me, and joked. She had known other, kinder walls, had gazed through other windows than these mere razor-slashes in red stone, through which prison bars of light fell daily across our cage, and out of which no cry for help could make its way into a friendly ear. She must have called out, from those happier windows, to family or friends; she could not do so here.
    This is what I can say. Her name was a miracle of vowels. Aoi Uë: the five enabling sounds of language, thus grouped (‘ow-ee oo-ay’), constructed her. She was tiny, slender, pale. Her face was a smooth, unlined oval, on which two smudge-like eyebrows, positioned unusually high, gave her a permanent expression of faint surprise. It was an ageless face. She could have been anything from thirty to sixty. Gottfried Helsing had spoken of a ‘pretty little thing’ and Renegada Larios – or whatever her name really was – of a ‘bohemian type’. Both descriptions were feebly off the mark. She was no chit of a girl but a formidably contained woman – indeed her self-possession might, in the outside world, have been a little alarming, but in the confines of our fatal circle it became my mainstay, my nourishment by day and my pillow at night. Nor was she the wanton drop-out type, but, rather, the most orderly of spirits. Her formality, her precision, awakened an old self in me, reminding me of my own adherence to ideas of neatness and tidiness in the childhood days before I surrendered to the imperatives awakening in my brutal, twisted fist. In the hideous circumstances of our chained existence she provided our necessary disciplines, and I unquestioningly followed her lead.
    She shaped our days, creating a timetable to which we rigorously adhered. We were