The Moors Last Sigh

die instantly, speared from within. This was the secret of his hyperactive personality – he slept no more than three hours a night, and when awake, was incapable of sitting still even for three minutes. ‘Until the day of the needle I have much to do,’ he confided. ‘Live until you die, that is my creed.’
    I’m like you . That was his kind, fraternal message. I also am short of time . And maybe he was just trying to reduce my feeling of being alone in the universe, because as I grew I found his story harder to believe, I could not understand how a man so outrageous and unconventional as the famous V. Miranda could accept such a dreadful fate so passively, why he did not seek to have the needle traced and then removed; so I came to think of the needle as a metaphor – as, perhaps, the prick of his ambitions. But that childhood night, when Vasco tapped at his chest and made wincing faces, when he rolled his eyes and fell to the floor with his feet in the air, playing dead for my entertainment – then, then I believed him utterly; and, recalling this absolute belief in later years (recalling it even now, after finding him again in Benengeli, in thrall to other needles, his youthful slenderness swollen into old-aged obesity, his lightness grown dark, his openness slammed shut, the wine of love spoiled in him long ago, and turned into the vinegar of hate), I was able – I am able – to find a different meaning in his secret. Perhaps the needle, if indeed it really was in there, lost in the haystack of his body, was in truth the source of his whole self – perhaps it was his soul. To lose it would be to lose his life at once, or at least its meaning. He preferred to work, and wait. ‘A man’s weakness is his strength, and vercy visa,’ he told me once. ‘Would Achilles have been a great warrior without his heel?’ and remembering that I can almost envy him his sharp, wandering, enabling angel of death.
    In the well-known Hans Andersen story the young Kay, escaping the Snow Queen, is left with a splinter of ice in his veins, a splinter that pains him for the rest of his life. My whitehair mother had been Vasco’s Snow Queen, whom he loved, and from whom, in the grip of an enraging humiliation, he finally fled, with the cold splinter of bitterness in his blood; which continued to ache, to lower his body temperature, and to chill that once-warm heart.

    Vasco with his silly clothes and verbal inventions, with his frivolous disrespect of all shibboleths, conventions, sacred cows, pomposities and gods, and with, above all, his legendary inexhaustibility, as effective in the pursuit of commissions, bed-mates and squash-balls as of love, became my first hero. When I was four years old, the Indian Army entered Goa, ending 451 years of Portuguese colonial rule, and Vasco was plunged for weeks into one of his black-dog depressions. Aurora encouraged him to see the event as a liberation, as many Goans did, but he was inconsolable. ‘Up to now I had only three Gods and the Virgin Mary to disbelieve in,’ he complained. ‘Now I have three hundred million. And what Gods! For my taste, they have too many heads and hands.’ He bounced back soon enough, and spent days in the kitchens of Elephanta , winning over our at-first-outraged old cook Ezekiel by teaching him the secrets of Goan cuisine and entering them in a new green copybook of recipes which he hung by the kitchen door on a length of wire; and for weeks after that it was all pork, we were obliged to eat Goan chourisso sausage and pig’s liver sarpotel and pork curries with coconut milk until Aurora complained that we were all starting to turn into pigs; whereupon Vasco returned grinning from market bearing immense claw-clacking baskets of shellfish and finny-toothy packets of shark, and when our sweeper-woman caught sight of him she threw down her stick-broom and ran out of the gates, informing Lambajan that she would not return to her sweeping job so long as those ‘unclean’ monsters were in residence.
    Nor was his counter-revolution confined to the dining table. Our days grew full of tales of the heroism of Alfonso de Albuquerque who conquered Goa from the Sultan of Bijapur, one Yusuf Adilshah, on St Catherine’s Day, 1510; and of Vasco da Gama, too. ‘A pepper-spice family like yours should understand how I feel,’ he told Aurora, plaintively. ‘Ours is a common history; what do these Indian soldiers know about it?’ He sang us mando love songs