The Moors Last Sigh

even as a child she never drew childishly; that her figures and landscapes were adult from the first. This was a myth she did nothing to discourage; indeed, she may even have fostered it, by backdating certain drawings and destroying other pieces of juvenilia. What is probably true is that Aurora began her life in art during those long motherless hours; that she had a talent for drawing and as a colourist, perhaps even one that an expert eye could have recognised; and that she pursued her new interest in deadly secret, hiding her tools and her work, so that Belle never knew about it all the days of her life.
    She got her materials from school, she spent every penny of her pocket-money on crayons and papers and calligraphy pens and China ink and children’s watercolour sets, she used wood-charcoal from the kitchen, and her ayah Josy, who knew everything, who helped her conceal her sketch-pads, never betrayed her confidence. It was only after her imprisonment by Epifania … but I am getting ahead of my tale. And, anyway, there are minds better equipped than mine to write about my mother’s genius, eyes that see more clearly what she achieved. What absorbs me when I contemplate the after-image of the little, lonely girl who grew up to be my immortal mother, my Nemesis, my foe beyond the grave, is that she never seemed to hold her isolation against the father who was absent throughout her childhood, locked away in jail, or the mother who spent her days running a business and her nights in search of wildlife; rather, she worshipped them both, and refused to hear a word of criticism, for example from me, about their skill as parents.
    (But she kept her true nature secret from them. She hugged it to herself; until it burst out of her, as such truth always will: because it must.)

    Epifania, at prayer,
          and ageing, because when her sons were jailed she was forty-eight, but she was fifty-seven by the time they were released after serving nine years of their sentence, the years drifting by like lost boats, Lord, as if we had time to waste , entered into a kind of ecstasy, an apocalyptic frenzy in which guilt and God and vanity and the end of the world, the destruction of the old shapes by the hated advent of the new, were all jumbled up, it wasn’t meant to be this way, Lord, I wasn’t meant to be banished in my own home behind a pile of sacks, forbidden to cross that madwoman’s white lines , she scratched at the wounds of the present and the past, my own servants, Lord, they keep-o me in my place, for I am in prison too and they are my warders, I cannot dismiss them because I do not pay their wages, she she she, everywhere and evermore she, but I can wait, see, patience is a virtue, I’ll just bide-o my time , Epifania in her orisons called down curses on Lobos, and why do you tormentofy me, sweet Jesus, holy Mary, by making me live with the daughter of that cursed house, that barren thing I tried in my generosity to befriend, see how she repays me, how that household of printers came and smashed my life , but at other times the memory of the dead rose up and accused her, Lord, I have sinned, I should be scalded with hot oils and burned with cold ice, have mercy on me Mother of God for I am the lowest of the low, save me if it be your will from the chasm the bottomless pit, for in my name and by my doing was great and murderous evil unloosed upon the earth , she chose punishments for herself, Lord, today I decided to sleep without mosquito-nets, let them come, Lord, the stings of Thy retribution, let them needle-o me in the night and suckofy my blood, let them infect me, Mother of God, with the fevers of Thy wrath , and this penance was to continue after the release of her sons when she forgave herself her sins and once again draped around herself that protective billow of nocturnal mist, blindly refusing to concede that in their years of disuse the already-perforated mosquito-nets had been eaten full of moth-holes, Lord, my hair is falling out, the world is broken, Lord, and I am old .

    And Carmen, in her solitary bed,
          her fingers reaching down for solace below her waist, entwined herself in herself, drank her own bitterness and called it sweet, walked in her own desert and called it lush, excited herself with fantasies of seductions by dark sailors in the back of the family’s black-and-gold, wood-panelled Lagonda, of seducing Aires’s lovers in the family Hispano-Suiza, O