She got her materials from school, she spent every penny of her pocket-money on crayons and papers and calligraphy pens and China ink and children’s watercolour sets, she used wood-charcoal from the kitchen, and her ayah Josy, who knew everything, who helped her conceal her sketch-pads, never betrayed her confidence. It was only after her imprisonment by Epifania … but I am getting ahead of my tale. And, anyway, there are minds better equipped than mine to write about my mother’s genius, eyes that see more clearly what she achieved. What absorbs me when I contemplate the after-image of the little, lonely girl who grew up to be my immortal mother, my Nemesis, my foe beyond the grave, is that she never seemed to hold her isolation against the father who was absent throughout her childhood, locked away in jail, or the mother who spent her days running a business and her nights in search of wildlife; rather, she worshipped them both, and refused to hear a word of criticism, for example from me, about their skill as parents.
(But she kept her true nature secret from them. She hugged it to herself; until it burst out of her, as such truth always will: because it must.)
Epifania, at prayer,
and ageing, because when her sons were jailed she was forty-eight, but she was fifty-seven by the time they were released after serving nine years of their sentence, the years drifting by like lost boats, Lord, as if we had time to waste, entered into a kind of ecstasy, an apocalyptic frenzy in which guilt and God and vanity and the end of the world, the destruction of the old shapes by the hated advent of the new, were all jumbled up, it wasn’t meant to be this way, Lord, I wasn’t meant to be banished in my own home behind a pile of sacks, forbidden to cross that madwoman’s white lines, she scratched at the wounds of the present and the past, my own servants, Lord, they keep-o me in my place, for I am in prison too and they are my warders, I cannot dismiss them because I do not pay their wages, she she she, everywhere and evermore she, but I can wait, see, patience is a virtue, I’ll just bide-o my time, Epifania in her orisons called down curses on Lobos, and why do you tormentofy me, sweet Jesus, holy Mary, by making me live with the daughter of that cursed house, that barren thing I tried in my generosity to befriend, see how she repays me, how that household of printers came and smashed my life, but at other times the memory of the dead rose up and accused her, Lord, I have sinned, I should be scalded with hot oils and burned with cold ice, have mercy on me Mother of God for I am the lowest of the low, save me if it be your will from the chasm the bottomless pit, for in my name and by my doing was great and murderous evil unloosed upon the earth, she chose punishments for herself, Lord, today I decided to sleep without mosquito-nets, let them come, Lord, the stings of Thy retribution, let them needle-o me in the night and suckofy my blood, let them infect me, Mother of God, with the fevers of Thy wrath, and this penance was to continue after the release of her sons when she forgave herself her sins and once again draped around herself that protective billow of nocturnal mist, blindly refusing to concede that in their years of disuse the already-perforated mosquito-nets had been eaten full of moth-holes, Lord, my hair is falling out, the world is broken, Lord, and I am old.
And Carmen, in her solitary bed,
her fingers reaching down for solace below her waist, entwined herself in herself, drank her own bitterness and called it sweet, walked in her own desert and called it lush, excited herself with fantasies of seductions by dark sailors in the back of the family’s black-and-gold, wood-panelled Lagonda, of seducing Aires’s lovers in the family Hispano-Suiza, O God think how many new men he will find is finding has found in jail, and lying sleepless night after night she caressed her bony body while her youth slipped away, twenty-one when Aires went to jail, thirty when he came out, and still untouched, untouchable, never to be touched, not by others, but these fingers know, oh they know oh oh; and soap-slippery in the bath and sweat-moistened in the bazaar she sought her daily joy, it wasn’t meant to be like this, Aires-husband, Epifania-mother-in-law, it was meant to be beautiful; and there is beauty all around me, the infinite power of Belle, the whimsicality and possibilities of her beauty. But I, I, I am unbeauty. In this house in thrall to the beautiful I have been shown myself, and lo, sirs, I am beastly, oho-ho, ladies and ladahs, yes indeed, and closing her misfortunate eyes and arching her back she gave in to the pleasure of disgust, flay me flay my skin from my body whole entire and let me start again let me be of no race no name no sex oh let the nuts rot in the shells oh oh the spices wither in the sun oh let it bum oh let it bum let it bum, ohh, and collapsing afterwards in tears she cowered in her sheets while the inflamed dead closed in on her and howled revenge.
On her tenth birthday Aurora da Gama was asked by the Northern fellow with the charrakh-choo, the accordion, the U.P. accent and the magic tricks, ‘What do you want most in the world?’ – and before she answered he had granted her wish. A motor-launch sounded its siren in the harbour and came in towards the jetty on Cabral Island, and there on the deck, paroled six years before the end of their sentences, were Aires and Camoens, all-thin-and-bone, as their mother cried out in delight. Home they came, weakly waving, identically smiling: the just-freed prisoner’s tentative, greedy smile.
Grandfather Camoens and Grandmother Belle embraced on the jetty. ‘I have for you your most hideous bush-shirt ironed and ready,’ she said. ‘Go get gift-wrapped and then give yourself to that birthday girl with the big grin twisting all over her face. See her, already tall as a tree, and trying to recognise her dad.’
I feel their love washing down towards me across the years; how great it was, how little time they had together. (Yes, in spite of all her screwing around, I insist; what existed between Belle and Camoens was the real McCoy.) I hear Belle coughing even as she brought Camoens to Aurora, I feel the deep raw coughs tear at me, as if they were my own. ‘Too many cigarettes,’ she choked. ‘Bad habit.’ And, lying, so as not to cast a shadow over the homecoming: ‘I’ll give it up.’
At Camoens’s soft request – ‘this family has been through too much, now we must start to heal’ – she agreed to the dismantling of the barriers that had kept Epifania and Carmen out of sight. For Camoens, she gave up, overnight and for ever, her dissolute, philandering ways. Because Camoens requested it, she allowed Aires to join them on the board of the family business, though the question of his buying back a share did not, in his impecunious circumstances, arise. I think, I hope, that they were wonderful lovers, Belle and Camoens, that his shy gentleness and her voluptuary hunger made a perfect pairing; that, for those so-brief-too-brief three years after Camoens was freed, they satisfied one another, and lay happily in each other’s arms.
But for three years she coughed, and though the aftershock of everything that had happened made the reunited house a cautious place in those years, her growing daughter was not fooled. ‘And even before I heard death in Belle’s lungs, they knew, those witches,’ my mother told me. ‘I knew those bastards were just waiting on. Once divided, always divided; in that household it was a fight to the bloody finish.’
When, one evening not long after the brothers’ return, the family gathered at Camoens’s request in the long-disused grand dining hall, beneath the portraits of the ancestors, to eat a meal of reconciliation, it was Belle’s chest that ruined it all, it was Belle hawking bloody sputum into a chrome spittoon that roused Epifania, who presided at the head of the table in a black lace mantilla, to remark, ‘I suppose so now you’ve hookoed the money you don’t need the manners,’ and there were recriminations and stormings-out and then the uneasy truce settled down again, but there were no more gatherings at mealtimes.
She awoke coughing, and coughed frighteningly before going to sleep. Coughs would wake her up in the night and she would wander the old house, throwing open the windows … but two months after his return it was Camoens who awoke to find her coughing in a feverish sleep and dribbling blood from her mouth. Tuberculosis was diagnosed, it had settled on both lungs, it was much more dangerous then than it is now, and she was told by the doctors
that the battle would be hard and she must cut back drastically on her professional activities. ‘Damn it, Camoens,’ she growled. ‘If you fuck up what I unfucked for you once, you better hope on I’m around to unfuck it for you twice.’ At which that gentle soul, beside himself with anxiety, burst into tears boiling with his love.
And Aires, returning, had also encountered an altered wife. She came into his bedroom on the night of his release and said, ‘If you do not give up your shame and scandal then, Aires, I will kill you while you sleep.’ He bowed to her deeply in acknowledgment, the bow of a Restoration dandy, the right hand spiralling foppishly outwards, the right foot extended, its toe deliciously cocked, and she left. He did not give up his adventures; but became more circumspect, snatching afternoon hours in a rented Ernakulam apartment with a slow ceiling fan, powder-blue walls, unadorned and peeling, an attached bathroom with a pump-handle shower and a squatting toilet, and a large low charpoy bed whose puttees he had renewed, for hygiene, and for strength. Through the chick-blinds thin blades of daylight fell across his body and another’s, and the cries of the market rose up to him and mingled with his lover’s moans.
In the evenings he played bridge at the Malabar Club, where his presence could be vouched for, or else stayed modestly at home. He bought padlocks for the bolts on his door and acquired a British bulldog which, to provoke Camoens, he named Jawaharlal. He had emerged from prison as opposed as ever to the Congress and its demands for independence, and now he became an ardent letter-writer, filling newspaper columns with his advocacy of the so-called Liberal alternative. ‘This misguided policy of ejection of our rulers,’ he thundered. ‘Suppose it succeeds; then what will become? Where in this India are the democratic institutions to replace the British Hand, which is, I can personally avow, benevolent even when it chastises us for our infantile misdeeds.’ When the Liberal editor of the Leader paper, Mr Chintamani, suggested that India had ‘better submit to the present unconstitutional government rather than to the more reactionary and furthermore unconstitutional government of the future’, Great-Uncle Aires wrote to say ‘Bravo!’ and when another Liberal, Sir P. S. Sivaswamy Iyer, argued that ‘in advocating the convention of a constituent assembly, Congress places too much faith in the wisdom of the multitude, and does too little justice to the sincerity and ability of men who have taken part in various Round Table Conferences. I very much doubt whether the constituent assembly would have done better,’ then Aires da Gama penned his congratulations: ‘I heartily concur! Common man in India has always bowed his knee to the counsels of his betters – of persons of education and breeding!’
Belle confronted him on the jetty the next morning. Pale of face and red of eye, she was wrapped in shawls, but insisted on seeing Camoens off to work. As the brothers stepped into the family launch she waved the morning paper in Aires’s face. ‘In this house there is education and breeding,’ Belle said loudly, ‘and we have behaved like dogs.’
‘Not we,’ said Aires da Gama. ‘Our pig-ignorant poor relations, for whom I have suffered enough, dash it, and on whose behalf I accept no further blame. Oh, do stop barking now, Jawaharlal; down, boy, down.’
Camoens reddened, but held his tongue, thinking of Mr Nehru in Alipore prison, of so many good men and women in far-off lock-ups. At night he sat with Belle and her cough, wiping her eyes and lips, putting cold compresses on her brow, and he would whisper to her about the dawning of a new world, Belle, a free country, Belle, above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above hatred because loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above tribe because unifying, above language because many-tongued, above colour because multi-coloured, above poverty because victorious over it, above ignorance because literate, above stupidity because brilliant, freedom, Belle, the freedom express, soon soon we will stand upon that platform and cheer the coming of the train, and while he told her his dreams she would fall asleep and be visited by spectres of desolation and war.
When she fell asleep he would recite poetry to her sleeping form,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And for a season draw thy breath in pain,
and he was whispering to the imprisoned as well as to his wife, to the whole captured land, he bent in terror over her sickened, sleeping body and sent his anguished hope and love upon the wind,
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevails or not.
It wasn’t tuberculosis, or not only tuberculosis. In 1937 Isabella Ximena da Gama, née Souza, aged only thirty-three, was found to be suffering from a cancer of the lung, which had reached an advanced – a terminal – stage. She went quickly, in great pain, railing against the enemy in her body, savagely angry with death for arriving too soon and behaving so badly. One Sunday morning when there was a sound of church bells across the water and woodsmoke on the air and when Aurora and Camoens were at her side she said, turning her face to the streaming sunlight, remember the story of El Cid Campeador in Spain, he also loved a woman called Ximena.
Yes we remember.
And when he was mortally wounded he told her to tie his dead body to his horse and send him back into battle, so the enemy would see he was still alive.
Yes mother. My love yes.
Then tie my body to a bloody rickshaw or whatever damn mode of transport you can find, camel-cart donkey-cart bullock-cart bike, but for godsake not a bloody elephant; okay? Because the enemy is close and in this sad story Ximena is the Cid.
Mother, I will.
[Dies.]
4
IN MY FAMILY WE’VE always found the world’s air hard to breathe; we arrive hoping for somewhere better.
Speaking for myself, at this late hour? Just about managing, thanks for asking; though old, old, old before my time. You could say I lived too fast, and like a marathon runner collapsing because he failed to pace himself, like a suffocating astronaut who danced too merrily on the Moon, in my overheated years I used up a full lifespan’s air-supply. O wastrel Moor! To spend, in just thirty-six years, your allotment of threescore-and-twelve. (But let me say, in mitigation, that I didn’t have much choice.)
So: there is difficulty, but I surmount it. Most nights there are noises, the croaks and honks of fantastic beasts, issuing from the jungles of my lungs. I awake gasping and, sleep-heavy, grab fistfuls of air and stuff them uselessly into my mouth. Still, it is easier to breathe in than out. As it is easier to absorb what life offers than to give out the results of such absorption. As it is easier to take a blow than to hit back. Nevertheless, wheezing and ratchety, I eventually exhale, I overcome. There is pride to be taken in this; I do not deny myself a pat on my aching back.
At such times I become my breathing. Such force of self as I retain focuses upon the faulty operations of my chest: the coughing, the fishy gulps. I am what breathes. I am what began long ago with an exhaled cry, what will conclude when a glass held to my lips remains clear. It is not thinking makes us so, but air. Suspiro ergo sum. I sigh, therefore I am. The Latin as usual tells the truth: suspirare = sub, below, + spirare, verb, to breathe.
Suspiro: I under-breathe.
In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby’s first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover’s groan, unhappy lover’s lament, miser’s whine, crone’s croak, illness’s stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless, silent void.
A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.
– We breathe light – the trees pipe up. Here at journey’s end in this place of olive-trees and tombstones the vegetation has decided to strike up a conversation. We breathe light, indeed; most informative. They are ‘El Greco’ cultivars, these chatty oliviers; well-named, one might remark, after that light-breathing God-ridden Greek.
Henceforth I’
ll turn a deaf ear to prattling foliage with its arboreal metaphysics, its chlorophyllosophy. My family tree says all I need to hear.
I have been living in a folly: Vasco Miranda’s towered fortress in Benengeli village, which looks down from a brown hill to a plain dreaming, in glistening mirages, of being a medi-terranean sea. I, too, have been dreaming, and through a narrow slit-window of my habitation I have seen not Spain’s, but India’s South; seeking, in spite of distances in space and time, to re-enter that Dark Age between Belle’s death and my father’s arrival on the scene. Here, filtering through this slender portal, this narrow crack in time, was Epifania Menezes da Gama, kneeling, at prayer, her chapel like a golden pool in the dark of the great stairwell. I blinked, and there came a memory of Belle. One day soon after his release from jail Camoens arrived at breakfast in simple khaddar clothes; Aires, a dandy once again, laughed into his kedgeree. After breakfast Belle took Camoens aside. ‘Darling, get out of fancy-dress,’ she said. ‘Our national effort is to run a good business and look after our workers, not to dress like errand boys.’ But this time Camoens was unshakable. Like her, he was for Nehru, not Gandhi – for business and technology and progress and modernity, for the city, and against all that sentimental clap-trap of spinning your own cotton and travelling third-class on the train. But wearing homespun pleased him. To change your masters, change your clothes. ‘Okay, Bapuji,’ she teased him. ‘But don’t think you’ll get me out of trousers, unless into a sexy dancing dress.’