The Moors Last Sigh

somersaulted to lie face upwards, stained with Aoi’s blood. Aoi Uë, however, lay face downwards, and was still.
    The painting had been damaged. The woman had been killed.
    So it was I who had gained that moment, so eternal in anticipation, so brief in retrospect. I turned my tearful eyes away from Aoi’s fallen form. I would look my assassin in the face.
    ‘ “Well may you weep like a woman ,” ’ he told me, ‘ “for what you could not defend like a man.” ’
    Then he simply burst. There was a gurgling in him, and he was jerked by invisible strings, and the titles of his blood were unleashed, they poured from his nose, his mouth, his ears, his eyes. – I swear it! – Bloodstains spread across the front and rear of his Moorish pantaloons, and he fell to his knees, splashing in his own, and fatal, pools. There was blood and more blood, Vasco’s blood mingling with Aoi’s, blood lapping at my feet and running away under the door to drip downstairs and tell Abraham’s X-rays the news. – An overdose, you say. – One needle too many in the arm, causing the insulted body to spring a dozen leaks. – No, this was something older, an older needle, the needle of retribution that had been planted in him before he had even committed a crime; or, and, it was a needle of fable, it was the splinter of ice left in his veins by his encounter with the Snow Queen, my mother, whom he had loved, and who had made him mad.
    When he died he lay upon his portrait of my mother, and the last of his lifeblood darkened the canvas. She, too, had gone beyond recall, and she never spoke to me, never made confession, never gave me back what I needed, the certainty of her love.
    As for me, I went back to my table, and wrote my story’s end.

    The rough grass in the graveyard has grown high and spiky and as I sit upon this tombstone I seem to be resting upon the grass’s yellow points, weightless, floating free of burdens, borne aloft by a thick brush of miraculously unbending blades. I do not have long. My breaths are numbered, like the years of the ancient world, in reverse, and the countdown to zero is well advanced. I have used the last of my strength to make this pilgrimage; for when I had gathered my wits, when I had freed myself of my shackles by using the keys on Vasco’s ring, when I had finished my writing, to do proper honour and dishonour to the two who lay dead – then my last purpose in life became clear. I put on my greatcoat, and, leaving my cell, found the rest of my text in Vasco’s studio, and stuffed the thick furl of paper into my pockets, along with a hammer and some nails. The housekeepers would find the bodies soon enough, and then Medina would begin his search. Let him find me, I thought, let him not think I do not wish to be found. Let him know everything there is to know and give the knowledge to whomsoever he desires. And so I left my story nailed to the landscape in my wake. I have kept away from roads, in spite of these lungs that no longer do my bidding I have scrambled over rough ground and walked in dry watercourses, because of my determination to reach my goal before I was found. Thorns, branches and stones tore at my skin. I paid no attention to these wounds; if my skin was falling from me at last, I was happy to shed that load. And so I sit here in the last light, upon this stone, among these olive-trees, gazing out across a valley towards a distant hill; and there it stands, the glory of the Moors, their triumphant masterpiece and their last redoubt. The Alhambra, Europe’s red fort, sister to Delhi’s and Agra’s – the palace of interlocking forms and secret wisdom, of pleasure-courts and water-gardens, that monument to a lost possibility that nevertheless has gone on standing, long after its conquerors have fallen; like a testament to lost but sweetest love, to the love that endures beyond defeat, beyond annihilation, beyond despair; to the defeated love that is greater than what defeats it, to that most profound of our needs, to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of the boundaries of the self Yes, I have seen it across an oceanic plain, though it has not been given to me to walk in its noble courts. I watch it vanish in the twilight, and in its fading it brings tears to my eyes .
    At the head of this tombstone are three eroded letters; my fingertip reads them for me. RIP. Very well: I will rest, and hope for peace. The world is full