The Moors Last Sigh

that cheery stone-hard smile that sought to anaesthetise her victims as she ripped out their innards. (Ask me how it felt! I was her only son. The closer to the bull you work, the likelier you are to be gored.)
    It was Belle all over again, of course; Belle, returning, as foretold, to occupy her daughter’s body. You will see , Aurora had said. From now on I am in her place .
    Imagine: in a cream silk sari edged with a golden geometric design intended to call to mind a Roman senator’s toga – or perhaps, if the title of her ego is running especially high, in an even more resplendent sari of imperial purple – she lounges on a chaise and stinks out her drawing-rooms with dragon-clouds of cheap beedi smoke, presiding over one of her occasional notorious nights loosened by whisky and worse, nights whose socialite licentiousness sharpens the city’s many wagging tongues; although she herself has never been seen acting improperly, neither with men nor with women nor, it should be said, with needles … and in the small hours of the debauch, she strides around like an inebriated prophetess, and launches into a savage parody of what booze unleashed in Vasco Miranda on Independence Night; without troubling to acknowledge his copyright, so that the assembled company has no idea that she is offering up the most ferocious of lampoons, she details the coming destruction of her guests – painters, models, ‘middle cinema’ auteurs, thespians, dancers, sculptors, poets, playboys, sporting heroes, chess masters, journalists, gamblers, antique-smugglers, Americans, Swedes, freaks, demi-mondaines , and the loveliest and wildest of the city’s gilded young – and the parody is so convincing, so convinced, its irony so profoundly concealed, that it is impossible not to believe in her lip-smacking schadenfreude , or – for her moods are swinging rapidly – in her Olympian, immortal unconcern.
    ‘Imitations of life! Historical anomalies! Centaurs!’ she declaims. ‘Will you not be blownofied to bits by the coming storms? Mixtures, mongrels, ghost-dancers, shadows! Fishes out of water! Bad times are coming, darlings, don’t think they won’t, and then all ghosts will go to Hell, the night will blot out shadows, and mongrel blood will run-o, as thin and free as water. I, but, will survive’ – this, at the height of her peroration, delivered with back arched and finger stabbing at the sky like Liberty’s candle – ‘on account, you miserable wretches, of my Art.’ Her guests lie in heaps, too far gone to listen, or to care.
    For her offspring, too, she foretells tragedies. ‘Poor kids are such a bungle, seems like they are doomed to tumble.’
     … And we spent our lives living up, down and sideways to her predictions … did I mention that she was irresistible? Listen: she was the light of our lives, the excitement of our imaginations, the beloved of our dreams. We loved her even as she destroyed us. She called out of us a love that felt too big for our bodies, as if she had made the feeling and then given it to us to feel – as if it were a work. If she trampled over us, it was because we lay down willingly beneath her spurred-and-booted feet; if she excoriated us at night, it was on account of our delight at the sweet lashings of her tongue. It was when I finally realised this that I forgave my father; for we were all her slaves, and she made our servitude feel like Paradise. Which is, they say, what goddesses can do.
    And in the aftermath of her fatal plunge into rocky water, it occurred to me that the fall she had been predicting, with that superb and ice-hard smile, with the irony that everybody missed, had perhaps always been her own.

    I forgave Abraham, too, because I began to see that even though they no longer slept in the same bed each of them was still the one whose good opinion the other needed most; that my mother needed Abraham’s approval as much as he longed for hers.
    He was always the first to see her work (closely followed by Vasco Miranda, who invariably contradicted everything my father had said). In the decade after Independence, Aurora fell into a deep creative confusion, a semi-paralysis born of an uncertainty not merely about realism but about the nature of the real itself. Her small output of paintings from this period is tortured, unresolved, and with hindsight it is easy to see in these canvases the tension between Vasco Miranda’s playful influence, his fondness for