The Moors Last Sigh

family’s long slide, which ended up by dumping me in the pit: Francisco da Gama, Epifania’s defunct spouse.
    Yes, Epifania too had once been a bride. She came from an old, but now much-reduced trader family, the Menezes clan of Mangalore, and there was great jealousy when, after a chance encounter at a Calicut wedding, she landed the fattest catch of all, against all reason, in the opinion of many disappointed mothers, because a man so rich ought to have been decently revolted by the empty bank accounts, costume jewellery and cheap tailoring of the little gold-digger’s down-and-out clan. At the dawn of the century she came on Great-Grandfather Francisco’s arm to Cabral Island, the first of my story’s four sequestered, serpented, Edenic-infernal private universes. (My mother’s Malabar Hill salon was the second; my father’s sky-garden, the third; and Vasco Miranda’s bizarre redoubt, his ‘Little Alhambra’ in Benengeli, Spain, was, is, and will in this telling become, my last.) There she found a grand old mansion in the traditional style, with many delightfully interlinking courtyards of greeny pools and mossed fountains, surrounded by galleries rich in woodcarving, off which lay labyrinths of tall rooms, their high roofs gabled and tiled. It was set in a rich man’s paradise of tropical foliage; just what the doctor ordered, in Epifania’s opinion, for though her early years had been relatively penurious she had always believed she had a talent for magnificence.
    However, a few years after the birth of their two sons, Francisco da Gama came home one day with an impossibly young and suspiciously winsome Frenchman, a certain M. Charles Jeanneret, who put on the airs of an architectural genius even though he was barely twenty years old. Before Epifania could blink, her gullible husband had commissioned the jackanapes to build not one but two new houses in her precious gardens. And what crazy structures they turned out to be! – The one a strange angular slabby affair in which the garden penetrated the interior space so thoroughly that it was often hard to say whether one was in or out of doors, and the furniture looked like something made for a hospital or a geometry class, you couldn’t sit on it without bumping into some pointy corner; the other a wood and paper house of cards – ‘after the style Japanese’, he told an appalled Epifania – a flimsy fire-trap whose walls were sliding parchment screens, and in whose rooms one was not supposed to sit, but kneel, and at night one had to sleep on a mat on the floor with one’s head on a wooden block, as if one were a servant, while the absence of privacy provoked Epifania into the observation that ‘at least knowledge of stomach health of household members is no problem in a house with toilet-paper instead of bathroom walls’.
    Worse still, Epifania soon discovered that once these madhouses were ready her husband frequently tired of their beautiful home, would smack his hand on the breakfast table and announce they were ‘moving East’ or ‘going West’; whereupon the whole household had no choice but to move lock, stock and barrel into one or other of the Frenchman’s follies, and no amount of protests made the slightest jot of difference. And after a few weeks, they moved again.
    Not only was Francisco da Gama incapable of living a settled life like ordinary folks, but, as Epifania discovered despairingly, he was also a patron of the arts. Rum-and-whisky-drinking hemp-chewing persons of low birth and revolting dress-sense were imported for long periods and filled up the Frenchy’s houses with their jangling music, poetry marathons, naked models, reefer-stubs, all-night card-schools and other manifestations of their in-all-ways-incorrect behaviour. Foreign artists came to stay and left behind strange mobiles that looked like giant metal coathangers twirling in the breeze, and pictures of devil-women with both eyes on the same side of their noses, and giant canvases that looked like an accident had befallen with the paint, and all these calamities Epifania was obliged to put on the walls and in the courtyards of her own beloved home, and look at every day, as if they were decent stuff.
    ‘Your art-shart, Francisco,’ she told her husband venomously, ‘it will blindofy me with ugliness.’ But he was immune to her poisons. ‘Old beauty is not enough,’ he told her. ‘Old palaces, old behaviour, old gods. These days the world is full