The Moors Last Sigh

Epifania’s sister Blimunda and a smalltime printer named Lobo. Both parents had been carried away by a malaria epidemic, and Carmen’s marriage prospects had been lower than zero, frozen solid until Aires amazed his mother by agreeing to the making of a match. Epifania in a torment of indecision suffered a week of sleepless nights, unable to choose between her dream of finding Aires a fish worth hooking and the increasingly desperate need to palm Carmen off on someone before it was too late. In the end her duty to her dead sister took precedence over her hopes for her son.
    Carmen never looked young, never had children, dreamed of diddling Camoens’s side of the family out of its inheritance by fair means or foul, and never mentioned to a living soul that on her wedding night her husband had entered her bedroom late, ignored his terrified and scrawny young bride who lay virginally quaking in the bed, undressed with slow fastidiousness, and then with equal precision slipped his naked body (so similar in proportions to her own) into the wedding-dress which her maidservant had left upon a tailor’s dummy as a symbol of their union, and left the room through the latrine’s outside door. Carmen heard whistles borne towards her on the water, and rising sheet-shrouded while the heavy knowledge of the future fell upon her shoulders and pushed them down into a stoop, she saw the wedding-dress gleaming in moonlight as a young man rowed it and its occupant away, in search of whatever it was that passed, among such occult beings, for bliss.
    The story of Aires’s gowned adventure, which left Great-Aunt Sahara abandoned in the cold dunes of her unbloodied sheets, has come down to me in spite of her silence. Most ordinary families can’t keep secrets; and in our far-from-ordinary clan, our deepest mysteries usually ended up in oils-on-canvas, hanging on a gallery wall … but then again, perhaps the whole incident was invented, a fable the family made up to shock-but-not-too-much, to make more palatable – because more exotic, more beautiful – the fact of Aires’s homosexuality? For while it’s true that Aurora da Gama grew up to paint the scene – on her canvas the man in the moonlit dress sits primly, facing a bare perspiring oarsman’s torso – it would be possible to argue that for all her bohemian credentials this double portrait was a domesticating fantasy, only conventionally outrageous: that the story, as told and painted, put Aires’s secret wildness into a pretty frock, hiding away the cock and arse and blood and spunk of it, the brave determined fear of the runt-sized dandy soliciting hefty companions among the harbour-rats, the exalted terror of bought embraces, sweet alley-back and toddy-shack fondlings by thick-fisted stevedores, the love of the deep-muscled buttocks of cycle-rickshaw-youths and of the undernourished mouths of bazaar urchins; that it ignored the fretful, argumentative, amour fou reality of his long, but by no means faithful liaison with the fellow in the wedding-night boat, whom Aires baptised ‘Prince Henry the Navigator’ … that it sent the truth offstage titillatingly dressed, and then averted its eyes.
    No, sir. The painting’s authority will not be denied. Whatever else may have happened between these three – the unlikely late-life intimacy between Prince Henry and Carmen da Gama will be recorded in its place – the episode of the shared wedding-dress was where it all began.
    The nakedness beneath the borrowed wedding outfit, the bridegroom’s face beneath the bridal veil, is what connects my heart to this strange man’s memory. There is much about him that I do not care for; but in the image of his queenliness, where many back home (and not only back home) would see degradation, I see his courage, his capacity, yes, for glory.
    ‘But if it wasn’t prick in the bottom,’ my dear mother, inheritor of her own mother’s fearless tongue, used to say of life with her unloved Aires-uncle, ‘then, darling, it was strictly pain in the neck.’

    And while we’re getting down to it, to the root of the whole matter of family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art, let’s not forget who started the whole thing, who was the first one to go out of his element and drown, whose watery death removed the linchpin, the foundation-stone, and began the