The Moors Last Sigh

mournful weight of Boabdil’s coming-to-an-end, felt it as his own. Breath left his body with a whine, and the next breath was a gasp. The onset of asthma (more asthma! It’s a wonder I can breathe at all!) was like an omen, a joining of lives across the centuries, or so Abraham fancied as he grew into his manhood and the illness gained in strength. These wheezing sighs not only mine, but his. These eyes hot with his ancient grief. Boabdil, I too am thy mother’s son .
    Was weeping such a weakness? he wondered. Was defending-to-the-death such a strength?
    After Boabdil handed over the keys to the Alhambra, he diminished into the south. The Catholic Kings had allowed him an estate, but even this was sold out from under his feet by his most trusted courtier. Boabdil, the prince turned fool. He eventually died in battle, fighting under some other kingling’s flag.
    Jews, too, moved south in 1492. Ships bearing banished Jews into exile clogged the harbour at Cádiz, obliging the year’s other voyager, Columbus, to sail from Palos de Moguer. Jews gave up the forging of Toledo steel; Castiles set sail for India. But not all Jews left at once. The Zogoibys, remember, were twenty-two years behind those old Castiles. What happened? Where did they hide?
    ‘All will be told in good time, my son; all in own good time.’
    Abraham in his twenties learned secrecy from his mother, and to the annoyance of the small band of eligible women of his generation kept himself to himself, burrowing into the heart of the city and avoiding the Jewish quarter as much as possible, the synagogue most of all. He worked first for Moshe Cohen and then as a junior clerk for the da Gamas, and although he was a diligent worker and gained promotion early he wore the air of a man in waiting for something, and on account of his abstraction and beauty it became commonplace to say of him that he was a genius in the making, perhaps even the great poet that the Jews of Cochin had always yearned for but never managed to produce. Moshe Cohen’s slightly too hairy niece Sara, a large-bodied girl waiting like an undiscovered sub-continent for Abraham’s vessel to sail into her harbour, was the source of much of this speculative adulation. But the truth was that Abraham utterly lacked the artistic spark; his was a world of numbers, especially of numbers in action – his literature a balance-sheet, his music the fragile harmonies of manufacture and sale, his temple a scented warehouse. Of the crown and dagger in the wooden box he never spoke, so nobody knew that that was why he wore the look of a king in exile, and privily, in those years, he learned the secrets of his lineage, by teaching himself Spanish from books, and so deciphering what a twine-bound notebook had to say; until at last he stood crown-on-head in an orange evening and confronted his mother with his family’s hidden shame.

    Outside in the Mattancherri alley the enlarging crowd grew murmurous. Moshe Cohen, as community leader, took it upon himself to enter the synagogue, to mediate between the warring mother and son, for a synagogue was no place for such a quarrel; his niece Sara followed him in, her heart slowly cracking beneath the weight of the knowledge that the great country of her love must remain virgin soil, that Abraham’s treacherous infatuation with Aurora the infidel had condemned her for ever to the dreadful inferno of spinsterhood, the knitting of useless bootees and frockies, blue and pink, for the children who would never fill her womb.
    ‘Going to run off with a Christian child, Abie,’ she said, her voice loud and harsh in the blue-tiled air, ‘and already you’re dressing up like a Christmas tree.’
    But Abraham was tormenting his mother with old papers bound up ’twixt twine and hide. ‘Who is the author?’ he asked, and, as she remained silent, answered himself: ‘A woman.’ And, continuing with this catechism: ‘What was her name? – Not given. – What was she? – A Jew; who took shelter beneath the roof of the exiled Sultan; beneath his roof, and then between his sheets. Miscegenation,’ Abraham baldly stated, ‘occurred.’ And though it would have been easy enough to feel compassion for this pair, the dispossessed Spanish Arab and the ejected Spanish Jew – two powerless lovers making common cause against the power of the Catholic Kings – still it was the Moor alone for whom Abraham demanded pity. ‘His courtiers sold his lands, and his lover