The Moors Last Sigh

more; and each day we awaited the end. Sometimes, while I waited, I interrogated my mother’s portrait, silently, for answers to the great questions of my life. I asked her if she had truly been Miranda’s lover, or Raman Fielding’s, or anyone’s; I asked her for a proof of her love. She smiled, and did not reply.
    Often I stared across at Aoi Uë as she worked. This woman who was both intimate and stranger. I dreamed of meeting her later, when we had escaped this fate, at a gallery opening in a foreign city. Would we fall upon each other, or walk on by without showing recognition? After the trembling, clutching nights, and the cockroaches, would we mean everything to each other, or nothing? Perhaps worse than nothing: each of us would remind the other of the worst time of our lives. So we would hate each other, and turn furiously away.

    O, I am deep in blood. There is blood on my shaking hands, and on my clothes. Blood smudges these words as I set them down. O the vulgarity, the garish unambiguity of blood. How tawdry it is, how thin … I think of newspaper accounts of violence, of mimsy scriveners revealed as murderers, of rotting corpses discovered under bedroom floorboards or garden turf. It is the faces of the survivors I remember: the wives, neighbours, friends. ‘Yesterday our lives were rich and various,’ the faces say to me. ‘Then the atrocity happened; and now we are just its things, we are bit-players in a story in which we don’t belong. In which we never dreamed we might belong. We have been flattened; reduced.’
    Fourteen years is a generation; or, enough time for a regeneration. In fourteen years Vasco could have allowed bitterness to leach out of him, he could have cleansed his soil of poisons and grown new crops. But he had mired himself in what he had left behind, marinaded himself in what had spurned him, and in his bile. He, too, was a prisoner in this house, his greatest folly, which trapped him in his own inadequacy, his failure to approach Aurora’s heights; he was caught in a shrieking feedback loop of remembrances, a screaming of memories, whose note rose higher and higher, until it began to shatter things. Eardrums; glass; lives.
    The thing we feared came to pass. Chained, we waited; and it came. When I had brought my story to the X-ray room and Aurora had burst through the weeping cavalier, at mid-day, he came to us in his Sultan outfit, with a black cap on his head, key-ring jangling on his belt, with his revolver in his hand, humming a talcum-powder shanty. It’s a Bombay remake of a cowboy movie, I thought. A showdown at high noon, except that only one of us is armed. It’s no use, Tonto. We’re surrounded .
    His face was dark, strange. ‘Please don’t,’ said Aoi. ‘You’ll regret it. Please.’
    He turned to me. ‘The lady Chimène is pleading for her life, Moor,’ he said. ‘Will you not ride to her rescue? Will you not defend her to your last breath?’
    Sunlight slashes fell across his face. His eyes were pinkish and his arm, unsteady. I didn’t know what he was talking about.
    ‘There is no defence I can make,’ I said. ‘But unchain me, set down your gun, and sure: I’ll fight you for our lives.’ My breath brayed loudly, making a jackass of me once again.
    ‘A true Moor’, responded Vasco, ‘would attack his lady’s assailant, even if it meant his certain death.’ He raised his gun.
    ‘Please,’ said Aoi, her back to the red stone wall. ‘Moor, please.’
    Once before, a woman had asked me to die for her, and I had chosen life. Now I was being asked again; by a better woman, whom I loved less. How we cling to life! If I flung myself at Vasco, it would prolong her life by no more than a moment; yet how precious that moment seemed, how infinite in duration, how she longed for it, and resented me for denying her that aeon!
    ‘Moor, for God’s sake, please.’
    No, I thought. No, I won’t.
    ‘Too late,’ said Vasco Miranda merrily. ‘O false and cowardly Moor.’
    Aoi screamed and ran uselessly across the room. There was a moment when her upper half was hidden by the painting. Vasco fired, once. A hole appeared in the canvas, over Aurora’s heart; but it was Aoi Uë’s breast that had been pierced. She fell heavily against the easel, clutching at it; and for an instant – picture this – her blood pumped through the wound in my mother’s chest. Then the portrait fell forward, its top right-hand corner hitting the floor, and