The Moors Last Sigh

bury her face in her hands and shake her head. I, who needed her composure, who held on to her self-control as if it were my lifebuoy, was dismayed to find myself responsible for these jitters.
    ‘Has it been such a bad life, then?’ I asked her, piteously, like a child appealing to his headmistress. ‘Has it truly been so very, very bad?’
    I could see the episodes passing before her eyes – the burning spice-fields, Epifania dying in the chapel while Aurora watched. Talcum powder, crookery, murder. ‘Of course it has,’ she replied, with a piercing look. ‘All of you … terrible, terrible.’ Then, after a pause: ‘Couldn’t you all have just … calmed down?’
    There was our story in a nutshell, our tragedy enacted by clowns. Write it on our tombstones, whisper it to the wind: those da Gamas! Those Zogoibys! They just didn’t know how to be calm .
    We were consonants without vowels: jagged, lacking shape. Perhaps if we’d had her to orchestrate us, our lady of the vowels. Maybe then. Maybe, in another life, down a fork in the road, she would come to us, and we would all be saved. There is in us, in all of us, some measure of brightness, of possibility. We start with that, but also with its dark counter-force, and the two of them spend our lives slugging it out, and if we’re lucky the fight comes out even.
    Me? I never got the right help. Nor, until now, did I ever find my Chimène.
    Towards the end, she retreated from me, she said she did not want to read any more; but read it, nevertheless, and filled up, each day, with a little more horror, a little more disgust. I begged her for forgiveness, I told her (my nutty cathjew confusions persisting right to the end!) that I needed her absolution. She said, ‘I’m not in that line of work. Get yourself a priest.’ There was a distance between us after that.
    And as our tasks neared completion our fear hung lower over us and dripped into our eyes. I had long coughing spasms, during which, retching and with streaming eyes, I almost hoped for an end to come, like this, to cheat Miranda of his prize. My hand shook over the paper and Aoi, too, often had to stop work, and drag herself off, chains clanking, to huddle against a wall and compose herself again. Now I, too, was horrified, for it was indeed a horror to see that strong woman weaken. But when I sought to comfort her, in those latter days, she brushed my arm away. And of course Miranda saw it all, her weakening and our estrangement; he revelled in our crumbling, taunting us: ‘Maybe I’ll do it today. – Yes, yes! – No, on second thoughts, tomorrow.’ He did not care for my portrayal of him, and on two occasions placed his pistol against my temple and pulled the trigger. The firing chamber was empty both times, and, fortunately, so were my bowels; or else there would certainly have been a humiliation in my pants.
    ‘He won’t do it,’ I found myself repeating. ‘He won’t, he won’t, he won’t.’
    Aoi Uë cracked. ‘Of course he will, you bastard,’ she screamed at me, hiccuping with terror and rage. ‘He’s mad, mad as a s-snake and sticks n-needles in his arms.’
    She was right, of course. This deranged, late-period Vasco had become a heavy user. Vasco Miranda of the lost needle had found many new ones. So when he came for us at the end he would have dutch courage running in his veins. Suddenly, with a great wheezing shudder, I remembered how he had looked the day after he read my piece about Abraham Zogoiby’s venture into the child-care business; I saw again the lop-sided grin on his face as he gloated over us, and heard – with a dreadful new understanding – his voice on the stairs as he descended, singing:
Baby Softo, sing it louder ,
Softo-pofto talcum powder,
Bestest babies are allowed-a
Softer Baby Softo .
    Of course he would kill us. I imagined that he would sit between our corpses, cleansed of hatred by violence, and gaze upon my mother’s unveiled portrait: united with his beloved at last. He would wait with Aurora until they came for him. Then, perhaps, he would use one last silver bullet on himself.

    No help came. Codes were not cracked, Salvador Medina suspected nothing, the ‘Larios sisters’ remained loyal to their master. Was this a talcum-powder loyalty, I wondered; did they go in for this type of needlework as well?
    My story had arrived in Benengeli, and my mother, cradling nothing, looked out at me from the easel. Aoi and I barely spoke any