The Moor's Last Sigh (6 page)
long beyond the grave; who stretched into great mountains like exclamations of the soul and along vast rivers full of mercy and disease, and across harsh drought-ridden plateaux on which men hacked with pickaxes at the dry infertile soil; Mother India with her oceans and coco-palms and rice-fields and bullocks at the water-well, her cranes on treetops with necks like coat-hangers, and high circling kites and the mimicry of mynahs and the yellow-beaked brutality of crows, a protean Mother India who could turn monstrous, who could be a worm rising from the sea with Epifania's face at the top of a long and scaly neck; who could turn murderous, dancing cross-eyed and Kali-tongued while thousands died; but above all, in the very centre of the ceiling, at the point where all the horn-of-plenty lines converged, Mother India with Belle's face. Queen Isabella was the only mother-goddess here, and she was dead; at the heart of this first immense outpouring of Aurora's art was the simple tragedy of her loss, the unassuaged pain of becoming a motherless child. The room was her act of mourning. Camoens, understanding, held her, and they wept. Yes, mother; once you were a daughter, too. You were given life, and you took it away... Mine is a tale of much mayhem, many sudden deaths, felos of other fellows as well as de se. Fire, water and disease must play their part alongside--no, around and within--the human beings. On Christmas Eve, 1938, seventeen Christmases after the young Camoens had brought seventeen-year-old Isabella Souza home to meet the family, their daughter, my mother Aurora da Gama, was woken by period pains and couldn't get back to sleep. She went to the bathroom and attended to herself as old Josy had taught her to, with cotton-wool and gauze and a long pyjama-cord to hold -verything in place... thus trussed, she coiled up on the white-tiled floor and fought against the pain. After a time it subsided. She decided to go out into the gardens and bathe her aching body in the shining, the insouciant miracle of the Milky Way. Star light, star bright... we look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it's only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It's true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you'll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That's not a star worth following; it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars. More than a year had passed since the incident of the open windows, and the house on Cabral Island slumbered that night under a kind of truce. Aurora, too old for Father Christmas, put a light shawl around her night-dress, stepped around the sleeping figure of Josy-ayah on her mat by the door, and went barefoot down the hall. (Christmas, that Northern invention, that tale of snow and stockings, of merry fires and reindeer, Latin carols and O Tannenbaum, of evergreen trees and Sante Klaas with his little piccaninny 'helpers', is restored by tropical heat to something like its origins, for whatever else the Infant Jesus may or may not have been, he was a hot-weather babe; however poor his manger, it wasn't cold; and if Wise Men came, following (unwisely, as I've indicated) yonder star, they came, let's not forget it, from the East. Over in Fort Cochin, English families have put up Christmas trees with cotton wool on the branches; in St Francis's Church--Anglican in those days, though no longer- the young Rev. Oliver D'Aeth has already held the annual carol service; and there are mince pies and glasses of milk waiting for Santa, and somehow there will be turkey on the table tomorrow, yes, and two kinds of stuffing, and even brussels sprouts. But there are many Christianities here in Cochin, Catholic and Syriac Orthodox and Nestorian, there are midnight masses where incense chokes the lungs, there are priests with thirteen crosses on their caps to symbolise Jesus and the Apostles, there are wars between the denominations, R. C. v. Syriac, and everyone agrees the Nestorians are no sort of Christians, and all these warring Christmases, too, are being prepared. In the house on Cabral Island it is the Pope who rules. There are no trees here; instead there is a crib. Joseph could be a carpenter from Ernakulam, and Mary a woman from the tea-fields, and the cattle are water-buffalo, and the skin of the Holy Family (gasp!) is rather dark. There are no presents. For Epifania da Gama, Christmas is a day for Jesus. Presents--and even this somewhat unloving family makes an exchange of gifts--are for Twelfth Night, the night of gold frankincense myrrh. Nobody is shinning down a chimney in this house...) Aurora reached the top of the great staircase and saw that the chapel doors were open; the chapel itself was illuminated, and the light emanating from the doorway made a little golden sun in the stairwell dark. Aurora crept forward, peered in. A small figure, head covered by a black lace mantilla, knelt at the altar. Aurora could hear the tiny click of Epifania's ruby rosary beads. The young girl, not wishing the matriarch to become aware of her presence, began to back out of the room. Just then, in complete silence, Epifania Menezes da Gama fell sideways and lay still. ' One day you will killofy my heart.' 'Patience is a virtue. I'll just bide-o my time.' How did Aurora approach her fallen grandmother? Did she, like a loving child, run forward, raising a stricken hand to her lips? She approached slowly, circling along the walls of the chapel, moving in towards the immobile form in gradual, deliberate steps. Did she cry out, beat a gong (there was a gong in the chapel) or in other ways do her level best to sound the alarm? She did not. Perhaps there was no point in doing so; perhaps it was plain that Epifania was already beyond help: that death had been swift and merciful? When Aurora reached Epifania, she saw that the hand that held the rosary was still twitchingfeebly at the beads; that the old woman's eyes were open, and met hers with recognition; that the old woman's lips moved faintly, though no audible word emerged. And on seeing her grandmother still alive, did she then act to save her life? She paused. And, after pausing? Granted, she was young; a certain paralysis can be attributed to youthful panic, and forgiven, but, after pausing, she quickly summoned the household, so that help could be provided... did she not? After pausing, she took two steps backwards; and sat down, cross-legged, on the floor; and watched. Did she feel no pity, no shame, no fear? She was worried, it's true. If Epifania's seizure proved to be less than fatal, then her own behaviour would count against her; even her father would be angry. She knew that. No more than that? She worried about discovery; and so she went and closed the chapel doors. Why not go the whole hog, in that case; why not blow out the candles and turn out the electric lights? All must be left as Epifania left it. This was cold-blooded murder, then. Calculations were being made. If murder can be committed by inaction, then yes. If Epifania had suffered so great a blow that she could not have survived, then no. The point is moot. Did Epifania die? After an hour, her mouth moved one last time; her eyes turned again to her grandchild. Whose ear, placed against dying lips, heard her grandmother's curse. And the murderess? Or, in fairness: the maybe-murderess? Left the chapel doors wide open, as she found them; and went back to sleep... ... Surely she could not...? ... and slept, as soundly as a child. And woke up on Christmas mom. One hard truth must be spoken: after Epifania died, life increased. Some long-sequestered sprite, of gaiety perhaps, returned to Cabral Island. It was obvious to everyone that the quality of the light had changed, as if some filter had been removed from the air; brightness burst out, like a birth. In the new year the gardeners reported unprecedented levels of growth, along with a marked decline in infestations, and even the least horticultural of eyes could see the great cascades of bougainvillaea, even the least sensitive of noses could smell the newly resplendent growths of jasmine and lily-of-the-valley and orchids and queen-of-the-night. The old house itself seemed to be humming with a new excitement, a new sense of possibility; a certain morbidity had departed from its courts. Even Jawaharlal the bulldog seemed to mellow in this new age. Visitors became as frequent as they had been during Francisco's glory days. Boatloads of young people came over to marvel at Aurora's Room and to spend the evenings in the surviving Corbusier house, which with the zeal of youth they quickly set to rights; once again there was music on the island, and the latest dance crazes. Even Great-Aunt Sahara, Carmen da Gama, got into the mood, and under the pretext of acting as the young folks' chaperone she assisted at these gatherings, until at length she was tempted by a handsome youth to cut a pshawing, tut-tutting but surprisingly limber figure on the dance-floor. It turned out Carmen had rhythm, and in the evenings that followed, as Aurora's young fellows queued up to ask her to dance, it was possible to see the masquerade of antiquity dropping away from Mrs Aires da Gama, to see the stoop straightening and the eyes ceasing to squint and the hangdog expression being replaced by a tentative suggestion of pleasure. She was not yet thirty-five years old, and for the first time in an eternity she looked younger than her years. As Carmen began to shimmy, so Aires began to look on her with something like interest, and said, 'It's time we adults had some people over so we can show you off a little bitsy bit.' It was the kindest thing he had ever said to her, and Carmen spent the next weeks in a frenzy of invitation-cards and Chinese lanterns for the gardens and menus and tresde tables and the sweet, sweet agony of ieciding what to wear. On the night of the party there was an orchestra on the main lawn and phonograph records in the -orbusier gazebo, and women in jewels and men in white-tie finery came over by the launch-load, and if some of them gazed too deeply into her husband's eyes then Carmen on her night of nights was disposed not to notice. One member of the family had remained unaffected by the general lightening of spirits: in the midst of the ball on Cabral Island, Camoens could only think of Belle, whose beauty on such a great night would have dimmed the stars. He no longer awoke with love-scratches on his body, and now that he could no longer cling to the forlorn hope that she might come back to him from beyond the grave, something holding him to life had come loose; there were days and nights when he could not bear to look at his daughter, because her mother's presence in her was so strong. He even felt, at times, a kind of anger towards her, for possessing more of Belle than he would ever have again. He stood alone on the jetty with a glass of pomegranate juice in his hand. A young woman, more than slightly drunk, with her hair in black ringlets and too much scarlet lipstick on her mouth, came leaning towards him in a billowing puff-sleeved frock. 'Snow White!' she declared tipsily. Camoens, his thoughts far away, failed to reply. 'You didn't see that picture?' the young woman angrily slurred. 'It finally came out in town, I saw it eleven-twelve times.' Then, indicating her dress, 'Just like in the fillum! I made my tailor make her outfit, same to same. I can name the seven dwarfs,' she went on without stopping for a response. 'Sneezysleepyhappydopeygrum-pybashfuldoc. You are which one, please?' Miserable Camoens could find no answer; simply shook his head. Boozy Snow White was undaunted by his silence.'Not Sneeizy, not Happy, not Doc,' she said. 'So Sleepydopeygrumpybashful which?--You don't admit so I am guessing. Sleepy no, Dopey don't think so, Grumpy maybe, but Bashful yes. Hi-ho, Bashful! Whistle while you work!' 'Miss,' Camoens attempted, 'perhaps it would be better if you rejoined the party. I, sorry to say, am not in party mood.' Snow White stiffened, disappointed. 'Mr Big Shot Jailbird Camoens da Gama,' she snapped. 'Can't keep a civil tongue for any lady, still pining for your late wife, isn't it, and never mind that she fooled with half the town, rich man poor man beggar man thief. O God listen to me I am not supposed to say.' She turned to go; Camoens caught her by the upper arm. 'God, men, let off, you are leaving a bruise!' Snow White exclaimed. But the demand in Camoens's face could not be denied. 'You are scaring,' Snow White said, wrenching her arm away. 'You look raving mad or what. Are you drunk? Maybe you are too much drunk. So. I am sorry I said but everybody knows, and some time it had to come out, isn't it? Now enough, tata-bata, you are not Bashful but Grumpy and I think so there must be some other dwarf for me.' The next morning Snow White with a murderous headache was visited by two police officers and asked to reconstruct the above scene. 'What are you talking, men, I left him on the jetty and that's it, finish, nothing more to add.' She was the last person ever to see my grandfather alive. Water claims us. It claimed Francisco and Camoens, father and son. They dove into the black night-harbour and swam out to the mother-ocean. Her rip-tide bore them away.
IN AUGUST 1939 AURORA da Gama saw the cargo vessel Marco Polo still at anchor in Cochin harbour and flew into a rage at this sign that, in the interregnum between the deaths of her parents and her own arrival at full adulthood, her unbusinesslike uncle Aires was letting the reins of commerce slip through his indolent fingers. She directed her driver to 'go like clappers' to C-5O (Pvt) Ltd Godown No.i at Ernakulam dock, and stormed into that cavernous storehouse; where she momentarily stalled, unnerved by the cool serenity of its light-shafted darkness, and by its blasphemous atmosphere of a gunny-sack cathedral, in which the scents of patchouli oil and cloves, of turmeric and fenugreek, of cumin and cardamom hung like the memory of music, while the narrow passages vanishing into the gloom between the high stacks of export-ready produce could have been roads to hell and back, or even to salvation. (Great family trees from little 'corns: it is appropriate, is it not, that my personal story, the story of the creation of Moraes Zogoiby, should have its origins in a delayed pepper shipment?) There were clergy in this temple too: shipping clerks bent over clipboards who went worrying and scurrying between the coolies loading their carts and the fearsomely emaciated trinity of comptrollers--Mr Elaichipillai Kalonjee, Mr V. S. Mirchandal-chini and Mr Karipattam Tejpattam--perching like an inquisition on high stools in pools of ominous lamplight and scratching with feathered nibs in gigantic ledgers which tilted towards them on desks with long, stork-stilty legs. Below these grand personages, at an everyday sort of desk with its own little lamp, sat the godown's duty manager, and it was upon him that Aurora descended, upon recovering her composure, to demand an explanation of the pepper shipment's delay. 'But what is Uncle thinking?' she cried, unreasonably, for how could so lowly a worm know the mind of the great Mr Aires himself? 'He wants family fortunes to drownofy or what?' The sight at close quarters of the most beautiful of the da Gamas and the sole inheritrix of the family crores--it was common knowledge that while Mr Aires and Mrs Carmen were the in-charges for the time being, the late Mr Camoens had left them no more than an allowance, albeit a generous one--struck the duty manager like a spear in the heart, rendering him temporarily dumb. The young heiress leaned closer towards him, grabbed his chin between her thumb and forefinger, transfixed him with her fiercest glare, and fell head over heels in love. By the time the man had conquered his lightning-struck shyness and stammered out the news of the declaration of war between England and Germany, and of the skipper of the Marco Polo's refusal to sail for England--'Possibility of attacks on merchant fleet, see' -Aurora had realised, with some anger at the treachery of her emotions, that on account of the ridiculous and inappropriate advent of passion she would have to defy class and convention by marrying this inarticulately handsome family employee at once. 'It's like marrying the dratted driver,' she scolded herself in blissful misery, and for a moment was so preoccupied by the sweet horror of her condition that she did not take in the name painted on the little block of wood on his desk. 'My God,' she burst out when at last the white capitals insisted on being seen, 'it isn't disgraceful enough that you haven't got a bean in your pocket or a tongue in your head, you had to be a Jew as well.' And then, aside: 'Face facts, Aurora. Thinkofy. You've fallen for a bloody godown Moses.' Pedantic white capitals corrected her (the object of her affections, thunderstruck, moon-struck, dry of mouth, thumping f heart, incipiently fiery of loin, was unable to do so, having been ieprived anew of the power of speech by the burgeoning of elings not usually encouraged in members of staff): Duty Manager Zogoiby's given name was not Moses but Abraham. If it is true that our names contain our fates, then seven capital letters confirmed that he was not to be a vanquisher of pharaohs, receiver of commandments or divider of waters; he would lead no people towards a promised land. Rather, he would offer up his son as a living sacrifice on the altar of a terrible love. And 'Zogoiby'? 'Unlucky.' In Arabic, at least according to Cohen the chandler and Abraham's maternal family's lore. Not that anyone had even the most rudimentary knowledge of that faraway language. The very idea was alarming. 'Just look at their writing,' Abraham's mother Flory once remarked. 'Even that is so violent, like knife-slashes and stab-wounds. Still and all: we also have come down from martial Jews. Maybe that's why we kept on this wrong-tongue Andalusian name.' (You ask: But if the name was his mother's, then how come the son...? I answer: Control, please, your horses.) 'You are old enough to be her father.' Abraham Zogoiby, bom in the same year as deceased Mr Camoens, stood stiffly outside the blue-tiled Cochin synagogue--Tiles from Canton & No Two Are Identical, said the little sampler on the ante-room wall--and, smelling strongly of spices and something else, faced his mother's wrath. Old Flory Zogoiby in a faded green calico frock sucked her gums and heard her son's stumbling confession of forbidden love. With her walking-stick she drew a line in the dust. On one side, the synagogue, Flory and history; on the other, Abraham, his rich girl, the universe, the future--all things unclean. Closing her eyes, shutting out Abrahamic odour and stammerings, she summoned up the past, using memories to forestall the moment at which she would have to disown her only child, because it was unheard-of for a Cochin Jew to marry outside the community; yes, her memory and behind and beneath it the longer memory of the tribe.. the White Jews of India, Sephardim from Palestine, arrived in numbers (ten thousand approx.) in Year 72 of the Christian Era, fleeing from Roman persecution. Settling in Cranganore, they hired themselves out as soldiers to local princes. Once upon a time a battle between Cochin's ruler and his enemy the Zamorin of Calicut, the Lord of the Sea, had to be postponed because the Jewish soldiers would not fight on the Sabbath day. O prosperous community! Verily, it flourished. And, in the year 379 CE, King Bhaskara Ravi Varman I granted to Joseph Rabban the little kingdom of the village of Anjuvannam near Cranganore. The copper plates upon which the gift was inscribed ended up at the tiled synagogue, in Flory's charge; because for many years, and in defiance of gender prejudices, she had held the honoured position of caretaker. They lay concealed in a chest under the altar, and she polished them from time to time with much enthusiasm and elbow-grease. 'A Christy wasn't bad enough, you had to pick the very worst of the bunch,' Flory was muttering. But her gaze was still far away in the past, fixed upon Jewish cashews and areca-nuts and jack-fruit trees, upon the ancient waving fields of Jewish oilseed rape, the gathering of Jewish cardamoms, for had these not been the basis of the community's prosperity? 'Now these come-latelies steal our business,' she mumbled. 'And proud of being bastards and all. Fitz-Vasco-da-Gamas! No better than a bunch of Moors.' If Abraham had not been knocked sideways by love, if the thunderbolt had been less recent, he would in all probability have held his tongue out of filial affection and the knowledge that Flory's prejudices could not be argued away. 'I gave you a too-modern brought-up,' she went on. 'Christies and Moors, boy. Just hope on they never come for you.' But Abraham was in love, and hearing his beloved under attack he burst out with the observation that 'in the first place if you look at things without cock-eyes you'd see that you also are a come-lately Johnny', meaning that Black Jews had arrived in India long fore the White, fleeing Jerusalem from Nebuchadnezzar's rmies five hundred and eighty-seven years before the Christian ra, and even if you didn't care about them because they had -married with the locals and vanished long ago, there were, for "rnple, the Jews who came from Babylon and Persia in 490-518 CE; and many centuries had passed since Jews started setting up shop in Cranganore and then in Cochin Town (a certain Joseph Azaar and his family moved there in 1344 as everybody knew), and even from Spain the Jews started arriving after their expulsion in 1492, including, in the first batch, the family of Solomon Castile... Flory Zogoiby screamed at the mention of the name; screamed and shook her head from side to side. 'Solomon Solomon Castile Castile,' thirty-six-year-old Abraham taunted his mother with childish vengefulness. 'From whom descends at least this one infant of Castile. You want I should begat? All the way from Senor Leon Castile the swordsmith of Toledo who lost his head over some Spaini Princess Elephant-and-Castle, to my Daddyji who also must have been crazy, but the point is the Castiles got to Cochin twenty-two years before any Zogoiby, so quod erat demonstrandum... And in the second place Jews with Arab names and hidden secrets ought to watch who they're calling Moors.' Elderly men with rolled trouser-legs and women with greying buns emerged into the shady Jewish alley outside the Mattancherri synagogue and gave solemn witness to the quarrel. Above angry mother and retaliating son blue shutters flew open and there were heads at windows. In the adjoining cemetery Hebrew inscriptions waved on tombstones like half-mast flags at twilight. Fish and spices on the evening air. And Flory Zogoiby, at the mention of secrets of which she had never spoken, dissolved abruptly into stutters and jerks. 'A curse on all Moors,' she rallied. 'Who destroyed the Cranganore synagogue? Moors, who else. Local-manufacture made-in-India Othello-fellows. A plague on their houses and spouses.' In 1524, ten years after Zogoibys arrived from Spain, there had been a Muslim-Jewish war in these parts. It was an old quarrel to revive, and Flory did so in the hope of turning her son's thoughts away from hidden matters. But oaths should not be lightly uttered, especially before witnesses. Flory's curse flew into the air like a startled chicken and hovered there a long while, as if uncertain of its intended destination. Her grandson Moraes Zogoiby would not be born for eighteen years; at which time the chicken came home to roost. (And what did Muslims and Jews fight over in the cinquecento? -What else? The pepper trade.) 'Jews and Moors were the ones who went to war,' old Flory grunted, goaded by misery into speaking a sentence too many, 'and now your Christian Fitz-Vascos have gone and pinched the market from us both.' 'You're a fine one to talk about bastards,' cried Abraham Zogoiby who bore his mother's name. 'Fitz she says,' he addressed the gathering crowd. Til show her Fitz.' Whereupon with furious intent he strode into the synagogue with his mother scrambling after him, bursting into dry and shrieky tears. About my grandmother Flory Zogoiby, Epifania da Gama's opposite number, her equal in years although closer to me by a generation: a decade before the century's turn Fearless Flory would haunt the boys' school playground, teasing adolescent males with swishings of skirts and sing-song sneers, and with a twig would scratch challenges into the earth--step across this line. (Line-drawing comes down to me from both sides of the family.) She would taunt them with nonsensical, terrifying incantations, 'making like a witch': Obeah, jadoo, fo, fum, chicken entrails, kingdom come. Ju-ju, voodoo, fee, fi, piddle cocktails, time to die. When the boys came at her she attacked them with a ferocity that easily overcame their theoretical advantages of strength and size. Her gifts of war came down to her from some unknown ancestor; and though her adversaries grabbed her hair and called her Jewess they never vanquished her. Sometimes she literally rubbed their noses in the dirt. On other occasions she stood back, scrawny arms folded in triumph across her chest, and allowed her stunned victims to back unsteadily away. 'Next time, pick on someone your own size,' Flory added insult to injury by inverting the meaning of the phrase: 'Us pint-size jewinas are too hot for you to handle.' Yes, she was rubbing it in, but even this attempt to make metaphors of her victories, to represent herself as the champion of the small, of the Minority, of girls, failed to make her popular. Fast Flory, Flory-the-Roary: she acquired a Reputation. The time came when nobody would cross the lines she went on drawing, with fearsome precision, across the gullies and open spaces of her childhood years. She grew moody and inward and sat on behind her dust-lines, besieged within her own fortifications. By her eighteenth birthday she had stopped fighting, having learned something about winning battles and losing wars. The point I'm leading up to is that Christians had in Flory's view stolen more from her than ancestral spice fields. What they took was even then getting to be in short supply, and for a girl with a Reputation the supply was even shorter... in her twenty-fourth year Solomon Castile the synagogue caretaker had stepped across Miss Flory's lines to ask for her hand in marriage. The act was generally thought to be one of great charity, or stupidity, or both. Even in those days the numbers of the community were decreasing. Maybe four thousand persons living in the Mattancherri Jewtown, and by the time you excluded family members and the very young and the very old and the crazy and infirm, the youngsters of marriageable age were not spoiled for choice of partners. Old bachelors fanned themselves by the clocktower and walked by the harbour's edge hand in hand; toothless spinsters sat in doorways sewing clothes for non-existent babies. Matrimony inspired as much spiteful envy as celebration, and Flory's marriage to the caretaker was attributed by gossip to the ugliness of both parties. 'As sin,' the sharp tongues said. 'Pity the kids, my God.' (Old enough to be her father, Flory scolded Abraham; but Solomon Castile, born in the year of the Indian Uprising, had been twenty years her senior, poor man probably wanted to get married while he was still capable, the wagging tongues surmised... and there is one more fact about their wedding. It took place on the same day in 1900 as a much grander affair; no newspapers recorded the Castile-Zogoiby nuptials in their social-register columns, but there were many photographs of Mr Francisco da Gama and his smiling Mangalorean bride.) The vengefulness of the spouseless was finally satisfied: because after seven years and seven days of explosive wedlock, during which Flory gave birth to one child, a boy who would perversely grow up to be the most handsome young man of his dwindling generation, caretaker Castile at nightfall on his fiftieth birthday walked over to the