The Moors Last Sigh

ugliness and hate; and was that true, or was I putting Aoi’s words into my father’s thought-bubble? – Just as, at night, I still dreamed of being skinned; so when I set down Oliver D’Aeth’s similar visions, or the masturbatory thoughts of Carmen da Gama long ago, when at my bidding and in the privacy of her own imagination she longed for flaying and annihilation, what was she but a creature of my mind? – As are all these; as they must be, having no means of being other than through my words. And I, too, knew about defeated love. Once I had loved Vasco Miranda. Yes, that was true. The man who wanted to murder me was a person I had loved … but I had suffered an even greater defeat than that.
    Uma, Uma. ‘What if the person you love did not really exist at all,’ I asked Aoi. ‘What if she created herself, out of her perception of your need – what if she falsely enacted the part of the person you could not resist, could never resist, your dream-lover; what if she made you love her so that she could betray you – if betrayal were not the failure of love, but the purpose of the whole exercise from the start?’
    ‘Still, you did love her,’ said Aoi. ‘You were not playing a part.’
    ‘Yes, but–’
    ‘So, even then,’ she said with finality. ‘Even then, you see.’

    Vasco said: ‘Hey, Moor. I read in the paper that some guys in France have developed a wonder drug. It slows down the ageing process, men, what a thing! Skin stays springier, bones stay bonier, organs pull out the stops for longer, and general well-being and mental alertness are promoted in the old. Clinical trials with volunteers beginning shortly. Too bad; too late for you.’
    ‘Sure, sure,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the sympathy.’
    ‘Read for yourself,’ he said, and handed me the clipping. ‘Sounds like the elixir of life. Boy, how frustrated you must feel.’

    And at night there were cockroaches. Our sleeping-place was a straw palliasse covered with sackcloth, and in the darkness the creatures came out of it, they wriggled through hairline cracks in the universe, as cockroaches will, and we felt them moving on our bodies like dirty fingers. At first I would shudder and leap to my feet, I would stamp and flail about blindly, I would weep hot phobic tears. My breaths hee-hawed donkey-fashion as I wept. ‘No, no,’ Aoi comforted me as I shook in her arms. ‘No, no. You must learn to let this go. Let go the fear, the shame.’ She, most fastidious of women, led by example, neither twitching nor complaining, displaying an iron discipline, even when the roaches tried to burrow into her hair. And slowly I learned from her.
    When she was my teacher she reminded me of Dilly Hormuz; at her work, she reincarnated Zeenat Vakil. It was the varnish that made her task possible, she explained: that thin film which separated the earlier picture from the later. Two worlds stood on her easel, separated by an invisibility; which permitted their final separation. But in that separation one would be utterly annihilated, and the other could easily be damaged. ‘Oh, easily,’ said Aoi, ‘and if my hand shakes in fright, that’s it.’ She was good at finding practical reasons not to be afraid.
    My own world had been in flames. I had tried to leap out of it, but I landed in the fire. But her life, Aoi’s, had not deserved this climax. She had been a wanderer, and had had her share of pain, but how comfortable she seemed in her rootlessness, how easy in herself! So it was conceivable that the self was autonomous, after all, and that Popeye the sailor-man – along with Jehovah – had it just about right. I yam what I yam an’ that’s what I yam , and to the devil with roots and schmoots. God’s name turned out to be our own as well. I am, I am, I am. I am. I am. Tell them, I AM hath sent me to you .
    Undeserved as her fate was, she faced it. And, for a long time, did not let Vasco see her fear.
    What did scare Aoi Uë? Reader: I did. It was me. Not by my appearance, or by my deeds. She was frightened by my words, by what I set down on paper, by that daily, silent singing for my life. Reading what I wrote before Vasco spirited it away, learning the full truth about the story in which she was so unfairly trapped, she trembled. Her horror at what we had done to one another down the ages was the greater because it showed her what we were capable of doing still; to ourselves, and to her. At the worst moments of the tale she would