The Moors Last Sigh

God think how many new men he will find is finding has found in jail , and lying sleepless night after night she caressed her bony body while her youth slipped away, twenty-one when Aires went to jail, thirty when he came out, and still untouched, untouchable, never to be touched, not by others, but these fingers know, oh they know oh oh; and soap-slippery in the bath and sweat-moistened in the bazaar she sought her daily joy, it wasn’t meant to be like this, Aires-husband, Epifania-mother-in-law, it was meant to be beautiful; and there is beauty all around me, the infinite power of Belle, the whimsicality and possibilities of her beauty. But I, I, I am unbeauty. In this house in thrall to the beautiful I have been shown myself, and lo, sirs, I am beastly, oho-ho, ladies and ladahs, yes indeed , and closing her misfortunate eyes and arching her back she gave in to the pleasure of disgust, flay me flay my skin from my body whole entire and let me start again let me be of no race no name no sex oh let the nuts rot in the shells oh oh the spices wither in the sun oh let it bum oh let it bum let it bum, ohh , and collapsing afterwards in tears she cowered in her sheets while the inflamed dead closed in on her and howled revenge .

    On her tenth birthday Aurora da Gama was asked by the Northern fellow with the charrakh-choo , the accordion, the U.P. accent and the magic tricks, ‘What do you want most in the world?’ – and before she answered he had granted her wish. A motor-launch sounded its siren in the harbour and came in towards the jetty on Cabral Island, and there on the deck, paroled six years before the end of their sentences, were Aires and Camoens, all-thin-and-bone , as their mother cried out in delight. Home they came, weakly waving, identically smiling: the just-freed prisoner’s tentative, greedy smile.
    Grandfather Camoens and Grandmother Belle embraced on the jetty. ‘I have for you your most hideous bush-shirt ironed and ready,’ she said. ‘Go get gift-wrapped and then give yourself to that birthday girl with the big grin twisting all over her face. See her, already tall as a tree, and trying to recognise her dad.’
    I feel their love washing down towards me across the years; how great it was, how little time they had together. (Yes, in spite of all her screwing around, I insist; what existed between Belle and Camoens was the real McCoy.) I hear Belle coughing even as she brought Camoens to Aurora, I feel the deep raw coughs tear at me, as if they were my own. ‘Too many cigarettes,’ she choked. ‘Bad habit.’ And, lying, so as not to cast a shadow over the homecoming: ‘I’ll give it up.’
    At Camoens’s soft request – ‘this family has been through too much, now we must start to heal’ – she agreed to the dismantling of the barriers that had kept Epifania and Carmen out of sight. For Camoens, she gave up, overnight and for ever, her dissolute, philandering ways. Because Camoens requested it, she allowed Aires to join them on the board of the family business, though the question of his buying back a share did not, in his impecunious circumstances, arise. I think, I hope, that they were wonderful lovers, Belle and Camoens, that his shy gentleness and her voluptuary hunger made a perfect pairing; that, for those so-brief-too-brief three years after Camoens was freed, they satisfied one another, and lay happily in each other’s arms.
    But for three years she coughed, and though the aftershock of everything that had happened made the reunited house a cautious place in those years, her growing daughter was not fooled. ‘And even before I heard death in Belle’s lungs, they knew, those witches,’ my mother told me. ‘I knew those bastards were just waiting on. Once divided, always divided; in that household it was a fight to the bloody finish.’
    When, one evening not long after the brothers’ return, the family gathered at Camoens’s request in the long-disused grand dining hall, beneath the portraits of the ancestors, to eat a meal of reconciliation, it was Belle’s chest that ruined it all, it was Belle hawking bloody sputum into a chrome spittoon that roused Epifania, who presided at the head of the table in a black lace mantilla, to remark, ‘I suppose so now you’ve hookoed the money you don’t need the manners,’ and there were recriminations and stormings-out and then the uneasy truce settled down again, but there were no more gatherings at mealtimes.
    She awoke