The Moors Last Sigh

came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, until … phew! Boy! Over and done with! – No. There’s more. The whole thing must be told.
    This I will say: what they had was certainly hot & hungry. Mad love! It drove Abraham back to confront Flory Zogoiby, and then it made him walk away from his race, looking back only once. That for this favour, He presently become a Christian , the Merchant of Venice insisted in his moment of victory over Shylock, showing only a limited understanding of the quality of mercy; and the Duke agreed, He shall do this, or else I do recant The pardon that I late pronounced here  … What was forced upon Shylock would have been freely chosen by Abraham, who preferred my mother’s love to God’s. He was prepared to marry her according to the laws of Rome – and O, what a storm that statement conceals! But their love was strong enough to withstand all the buffetings, to survive the full force of the scandal; and it was my knowledge of their strength that would give me the strength, when I, in my turn, – when my beloved and I, – but on that occasion she, my mother, – instead of, – when I fully expected, – she turned on me, and, just when I needed her most, she, – against her own flesh and blood … you see that I am not able, as yet, to tell this story either. Once again, the words have let me down.
    Pepper love: that’s how I think of it. Abraham and Aurora fell in pepper love, up there on the Malabar Gold. They came down from those high stacks with more than their clothes smelling of spice. So passionately had they fed upon one another, so profoundly had sweat and blood and the secretions of their bodies mingled, in that foetid atmosphere heavy with the odours of cardamom and cumin, so intimately had they conjoined, not only with each other but with what-hung-on-the-air, yes, and with the spice-sacks themselves – some of which, it must be said, were torn, so that peppercorns and elaichees poured out and were crushed between legs and bellies and thighs – that, for ever after, they sweated pepper’n’spices sweat, and their bodily fluids, too, smelled and even tasted of what had been crushed into their skins, what had mingled with their love-waters, what had been breathed in from the air during that transcendent fuck.
    There; keep worrying at a subject for long enough, and in the end some words do come. But Aurora on the same topic was never one to be shy. ‘Ever since then, let me tell you, I have had to keep-o old Abie here away from the kitchen, because that stink of grinding spices, my dears , it makes him paw the ground. Speaking for myself, however, I tubbofy, I scrubbofy, I brush, I groom, I fill-o the room with fine perfume, and that is why, as all can see, I’m just as sweet as I can be.’ O, father, father, why did you let her do it to you, why were you her daily-nightly butt? Why were we all? Did you really still love her so much? Did we really love her at all in those days, or was it just her long dominance over us, and our passive acceptance of our enslavement, that we mistook for love?

    ‘From now on I will always look after you,’ my father told my mother after the first time they made love. But she was beginning to be an artist, she answered, and so ‘the most important part of me, I can take care of by myself’.
    ‘Then,’ said Abraham, humbly, ‘I will look after the less important part, the part that needs to eat, enjoy, and rest.’

    Men in conical Chinese hats punted slowly across the darkening lagoon. Red-and-yellow ferryboats made the day’s last journeys, moving stolidly between the islands. A dredger stopped work, and with the halting of its boom-yacka-yacka-yacka-boom a silence fell over the harbour. There were yachts at anchor and little boats with patchwork leather sails making their way home to Vypeen village for the night; there were rowboats and motor-boats and tugs. Abraham Zogoiby, leaving behind the phantom of his mother capering on a Jewtown roof, was on his way to meet his darling at St Francis’s Church. The Chinese