The Moors Last Sigh

multi-coloured, above poverty because victorious over it, above ignorance because literate, above stupidity because brilliant, freedom, Belle, the freedom express, soon soon we will stand upon that platform and cheer the coming of the train , and while he told her his dreams she would fall asleep and be visited by spectres of desolation and war.
    When she fell asleep he would recite poetry to her sleeping form,
Absent thee from felicity awhile ,
And for a season draw thy breath in pain ,
    and he was whispering to the imprisoned as well as to his wife, to the whole captured land, he bent in terror over her sickened, sleeping body and sent his anguished hope and love upon the wind,
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great and shall prevail ,
When none cares whether it prevails or not .
    It wasn’t tuberculosis, or not only tuberculosis. In 1937 Isabella Ximena da Gama, née Souza, aged only thirty-three, was found to be suffering from a cancer of the lung, which had reached an advanced – a terminal – stage. She went quickly, in great pain, railing against the enemy in her body, savagely angry with death for arriving too soon and behaving so badly. One Sunday morning when there was a sound of church bells across the water and woodsmoke on the air and when Aurora and Camoens were at her side she said, turning her face to the streaming sunlight, remember the story of El Cid Campeador in Spain, he also loved a woman called Ximena .
    Yes we remember.
    And when he was mortally wounded he told her to tie his dead body to his horse and send him back into battle, so the enemy would see he was still alive .
    Yes mother. My love yes.
    Then tie my body to a bloody rickshaw or whatever damn mode of transport you can find, camel-cart donkey-cart bullock-cart bike, but for godsake not a bloody elephant; okay? Because the enemy is close and in this sad story Ximena is the Cid .
    Mother, I will.
    [ Dies .]

4
    I N MY FAMILY WE’VE always found the world’s air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.
    Speaking for myself, at this late hour? Just about managing, thanks for asking; though old, old, old before my time. You could say I lived too fast, and like a marathon runner collapsing because he failed to pace himself, like a suffocating astronaut who danced too merrily on the Moon, in my overheated years I used up a full lifespan’s air-supply. O wastrel Moor! To spend, in just thirty-six years, your allotment of threescore-and-twelve. (But let me say, in mitigation, that I didn’t have much choice.)
    So: there is difficulty, but I surmount it. Most nights there are noises, the croaks and honks of fantastic beasts, issuing from the jungles of my lungs. I awake gasping and, sleep-heavy, grab fistfuls of air and stuff them uselessly into my mouth. Still, it is easier to breathe in than out. As it is easier to absorb what life offers than to give out the results of such absorption. As it is easier to take a blow than to hit back. Nevertheless, wheezing and ratchety, I eventually exhale, I overcome. There is pride to be taken in this; I do not deny myself a pat on my aching back.
    At such times I become my breathing. Such force of self as I retain focuses upon the faulty operations of my chest: the coughing, the fishy gulps. I am what breathes. I am what began long ago with an exhaled cry, what will conclude when a glass held to my lips remains clear. It is not thinking makes us so, but air. Suspiro ergo sum . I sigh, therefore I am. The Latin as usual tells the truth: suspirare = sub , below, + spirare , verb, to breathe.
    Suspiro : I under-breathe.
    In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby’s first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover’s groan, unhappy lover’s lament, miser’s whine, crone’s croak, illness’s stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless, silent void.
    A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
    – We breathe light – the trees pipe up. Here at journey’s end in this place of olive-trees and tombstones the vegetation has decided to strike up a conversation. We breathe light , indeed; most informative. They are ‘El Greco’ cultivars, these chatty oliviers; well-named, one might remark, after that light-breathing God-ridden Greek.
    Henceforth I’ll turn a deaf ear to prattling foliage with its arboreal