‘It would be dangerous, but perhaps possible, yes,’ she said, after making an initial study. ‘But surely you would not choose to destroy your own work.’
‘This is what I have asked you here to do,’ he said.
She had refused. In spite of her distaste for Vasco’s Moor, a picture she considered to have few merits, the prospect of spending laborious weeks, perhaps months, engaged on the destruction, rather than the preservation, of a work of art had little appeal. Her refusal was polite and delicate, but it threw Miranda into a rage. ‘You want big money, is that it?’ he asked, and offered her a sum so absurd as to confirm her worries about his state of mind. At her second refusal he had produced a pistol and her incarceration had commenced. She would not be freed, he told her, until she had completed her duties; if she declined to carry them out he would shoot her down ‘like a dog’. So her labours had begun.
Arriving in her cell, I wondered at her chains. What a compliant fellow that blacksmith must be, I thought, so incuriously to install such devices in a private home. Then I recalled his cry – Sti’ walki’ free, huh? Som’ day soo’, soo’ – and the notion of a grand conspiracy returned, and gnawed.
‘Company for you,’ Vasco informed the woman, and then, turning to me, announced that on account of our old acquaintance and his own kindly, whimsical nature he would postpone my execution for a time. ‘Let’s re-live the old times together,’ he proposed, gaily. ‘If Zogoibys are to be wiped off the face of the earth – if the wrong-doings of the father, yes, and the mother, too, are to be visited upon the son – then let the last Zogoiby recount their sinful saga.’ Every day, after that, he brought me pencil and paper. He had made a Scheherazade of me. As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live.
My fellow-prisoner gave me good advice. ‘Spin it out,’ she said. ‘That’s what I am doing. Every day we stay alive, we improve our chances of rescue.’ She had a life – work, friends, a home – and her disappearance would be bound to arouse suspicions. Vasco knew this, and forced her to write letters and postcards, taking leave of absence from her work, and explaining to her social circle that the ‘fascination’ of being inside the secret world of the famous V. Miranda had her in thrall. These would delay inquiries, but not for ever, for she had inserted deliberate mistakes into the letters, for example referring to a friend’s lover, or pet, by the wrong name; and sooner or later someone might smell a rat. When I heard this I became inordinately excited, for the despondency that had settled over me in the aftermath of Vasco’s X-ray revelations had caused me to despair of rescue. Now hope was reborn, and I became delirious with anticipation. At once she dragged me down to earth. ‘It is only a long-shot,’ she said. ‘People are inattentive, by and large. They do not read closely, but skim. They are not expecting to be sent messages in code, and so they may not see any.’ To illustrate her point she told me a story. In 1968, during the ‘Prague Spring’, an American colleague of hers had taken a group of art students to visit Czechoslovakia. They had been in Wenceslas Square when the first Russian tanks rolled into town. In the ensuing disturbances the American teacher had been one of those randomly arrested by the unleashed riot squads, and had spent two days in jail before the American consul had secured his release. During these days he had noticed a tapping code scratched into the wall of his cell, and had begun, eagerly, to send messages to whoever might be on the other side of the wall. After an hour or so of tapping, however, the door to his cell burst open, and an amused guard sauntered in to tell him, in filthy, broken English, that his neighbour wanted him to ‘shot the fock op,’ because, alas, ‘nobody give to him the focking code.’
‘Also,’ she continued coolly, ‘even if help arrives – even if policemen begin to batter down the gates of this terrible place – who knows if Miranda will permit us to be taken alive? Right now he is living wholly in the present moment – he has slipped the chains of the future. But if that tomorrow comes, and he is forced to face it, he may choose to die, like one of those cultist leaders one hears about more and more these days, and in all probability he will want to take us all along with him – Miss Renegada, Miss Felicitas, and me, and you as well.’
We met so near the end of our stories that I cannot do her justice. There is neither time nor space for me to pay her the compliment of setting her down, so to speak, in full; though she, too, had her history, she loved and was loved, she was a human being, not just a captive in that hateful space whose thick-walled cold made us shiver through the nights, even though we huddled together for warmth, wrapped up in my leather greatcoat. I cannot embark on her story – can only pay tribute to the generous strength with which she held me close through those interminable nights, while I felt Death approach, and quailed. I can only record her murmurs in my ears, how she sang to me, and joked. She had known other, kinder walls, had gazed through other windows than these mere razor-slashes in red stone, through which prison bars of light fell daily across our cage, and out of which no cry for help could make its way into a friendly ear. She must have called out, from those happier windows, to family or friends; she could not do so here.
This is what I can say. Her name was a miracle of vowels. Aoi Uë: the five enabling sounds of language, thus grouped (‘ow-ee oo-ay’), constructed her. She was tiny, slender, pale. Her face was a smooth, unlined oval, on which two smudge-like eyebrows, positioned unusually high, gave her a permanent expression of faint surprise. It was an ageless face. She could have been anything from thirty to sixty. Gottfried Helsing had spoken of a ‘pretty little thing’ and Renegada Larios – or whatever her name really was – of a ‘bohemian type’. Both descriptions were feebly off the mark. She was no chit of a girl but a formidably contained woman – indeed her self-possession might, in the outside world, have been a little alarming, but in the confines of our fatal circle it became my mainstay, my nourishment by day and my pillow at night. Nor was she the wanton drop-out type, but, rather, the most orderly of spirits. Her formality, her precision, awakened an old self in me, reminding me of my own adherence to ideas of neatness and tidiness in the childhood days before I surrendered to the imperatives awakening in my brutal, twisted fist. In the hideous circumstances of our chained existence she provided our necessary disciplines, and I unquestioningly followed her lead.
She shaped our days, creating a timetable to which we rigorously adhered. We were awakened early each morning by an hour of that ‘music’ which Miranda insisted on calling ‘Oriental’, even ‘Japanese’, but if the Japanese woman he had imprisoned found such epithets insulting, she never gave Vasco the satisfaction of expressing her annoyance. The noise appalled and bruised, but while it lasted we performed, at Aoi’s suggestion, our daily private functions. Each of us in turn would avert our gaze, lying down to face the wall, while the other did what had to be done in one of the two latrine-buckets that Vasco, most nightmarish of jailers, had provided; and the din needling our ears spared us each other’s sounds. (Each of us was, from time to time, given a few squares of coarse brown paper with which to clean ourselves, and these we treasured and defended as dragons defend their hoards.) After this we washed, using the aluminium bowls and jugs of water that one of the ‘Larios sisters’ brought up once a day. Felicitas and Renegada were stony-faced on these visits, refusing all entreaties, ignoring all expostulation and contumely. ‘How far will you go?’ I shouted at them. ‘How far, for that fat madman? As far as murder? The end of the line? Or will you get off at an earlier station?’ Under such questioning they were implacable, unconcerned, deaf. Aoi Uë taught me that only by remaining silent, in such a situation, could one maintain one’s necessary self-respect. After that I let Miranda’s women come and go without a word.
Once the music had ended we applied ourselves to our work: she to her paint-flakes, I to these pages. But as well as our allotted tasks we made time for conversation-hours during which, by agreement, we would speak of anything except our situation; and brief daily ‘business talks’ during which we considered
our options and spoke tentatively of escape; and exercise periods; and times of solitude, too, when we did not speak, but sat alone and husbanded our private, eroding selves. Thus we clung to humanity, and refused to allow our captivity to define us. ‘We are greater than this prison,’ Aoi said. ‘We must not shrink to fit its little walls. We must not become the ghosts haunting this stupid castle.’ We played games – word-games, memory-games, pat-a-cake. And, often, without any sexual motive, we would hold each other. Sometimes she would let herself shake, and weep, and I would let her, let her. More often she performed this service for me. For I felt old, and spent. My breathing difficulties had returned, worse than ever; I had no medication, nor was any provided for me. Giddy, aching, I understood that my body was sending me a simple, absolute message: the jig was nearly up.
One part of the day could not be time-tabled. This was Miranda’s visit, when he inspected Aoi’s progress, removed my daily pages and provided me with new sheets and pencils if required; and in various ways amused himself at our expense. He had his pet-names for us, he announced, for were we not his pets, kept leashed and kennelled, transformed into dog and bitch? ‘Well, Moor is Moor, of course,’ he said. ‘But you, my dear, must henceforth be his Chimène.’
I told Aoi Uë about my mother, whom she was bringing back from the dead – and about the sequence of works in which another Chimène had met, and loved, and betrayed another Moor. She said: ‘I loved a man, you know; my husband, Benet. But he betrayed me, often, in many countries, he could not help himself. He loved me, and betrayed me while continuing to love. In the end it was I who stopped loving him and left: stopped loving him not because he betrayed me – I had gotten used to that – but because certain habits of his, which had always irritated me, just wore away my love. Very little habits. The relish with which he picked his nose. The length of time he took in the bathroom while I was waiting for him in bed. His reluctance to meet my eye with an affectionate smile when we were in company. Trivial things; or perhaps not? What do you think – perhaps my betrayal was greater than his, or as great? Never mind. Just let me say that our love is still the most important event in my life. Defeated love is still a treasure, and those who choose lovelessness have won no victory at all.’
Defeated love … O heartbreaking echoes of the past! On my little table in that death-cell young Abraham Zogoiby wooed his spice-heiress and aligned himself with love and beauty against the forces of ugliness and hate; and was that true, or was I putting Aoi’s words into my father’s thought-bubble? – Just as, at night, I still dreamed of being skinned; so when I set down Oliver D’Aeth’s similar visions, or the masturbatory thoughts of Carmen da Gama long ago, when at my bidding and in the privacy of her own imagination she longed for flaying and annihilation, what was she but a creature of my mind? – As are all these; as they must be, having no means of being other than through my words. And I, too, knew about defeated love. Once I had loved Vasco Miranda. Yes, that was true. The man who wanted to murder me was a person I had loved … but I had suffered an even greater defeat than that.
Uma, Uma. ‘What if the person you love did not really exist at all,’ I asked Aoi. ‘What if she created herself, out of her perception of your need – what if she falsely enacted the part of the person you could not resist, could never resist, your dream-lover; what if she made you love her so that she could betray you – if betrayal were not the failure of love, but the purpose of the whole exercise from the start?’
‘Still, you did love her,’ said Aoi. ‘You were not playing a part.’
‘Yes, but–’
‘So, even then,’ she said with finality. ‘Even then, you see.’
Vasco said: ‘Hey, Moor. I read in the paper that some guys in France have developed a wonder drug. It slows down the ageing process, men, what a thing! Skin stays springier, bones stay bonier, organs pull out the stops for longer, and general well-being and mental alertness are promoted in the old. Clinical trials with volunteers beginning shortly. Too bad; too late for you.’
‘Sure, sure,’ I said. ‘Thanks for the sympathy.’
‘Read for yourself,’ he said, and handed me the clipping. ‘Sounds like the elixir of life. Boy, how frustrated you must feel.’
And at night there were cockroaches. Our sleeping-place was a straw palliasse covered with sackcloth, and in the darkness the creatures came out of it, they wriggled through hairline cracks in the universe, as cockroaches will, and we felt them moving on our bodies like dirty fingers. At first I would shudder and leap to my feet, I would stamp and flail about blindly, I would weep hot phobic tears. My breaths hee-hawed donkey-fashion as I wept. ‘No, no,’ Aoi comforted me as I shook in her arms. ‘No, no. You must learn to let this go. Let go the fear, the shame.’ She, most fastidious of women, led by example, neither twitching nor complaining, displaying an iron discipline, even when the roaches tried to burrow into her hair. And slowly I learned from her.
When she was my teacher she reminded me of Dilly Hormuz; at her work, she reincarnated Zeenat Vakil. It was the varnish that made her task possible, she explained: that thin film which separated the earlier picture from the later. Two worlds stood on her easel, separated by an invisibility; which permitted their final separation. But in that separation one would be utterly annihilated, and the other could easily be damaged. ‘Oh, easily,’ said Aoi, ‘and if my hand shakes in fright, that’s it.’ She was good at finding practical reasons not to be afraid.
My own world had been in flames. I had tried to leap out of it, but I landed in the fire. But her life, Aoi’s, had not deserved this climax. She had been a wanderer, and had had her share of pain, but how comfortable she seemed in her rootlessness, how easy in herself! So it was conceivable that the self was autonomous, after all, and that Popeye the sailor-man – along with Jehovah – had it just about right. I yam what I yam an’ that’s what I yam, and to the devil with roots and schmoots. God’s name turned out to be our own as well. I am, I am, I am. I am. I am. Tell them, I AM hath sent me to you.
Undeserved as her fate was, she faced it. And, for a long time, did not let Vasco see her fear.
What did scare Aoi Uë? Reader: I did. It was me. Not by my appearance, or by my deeds. She was frightened by my words, by what I set down on paper, by that daily, silent singing for my life. Reading what I wrote before Vasco spirited it away, learning the full truth about the story in which she was so unfairly trapped, she trembled. Her horror at what we had done to one another down the ages was the greater because it showed her what we were capable of doing still; to ourselves, and to her. At the worst moments of the tale she would bury her face in her hands and shake her head. I, who needed her composure, who held on to her self-control as if it were my lifebuoy, was dismayed to find myself responsible for these jitters.
‘Has it been such a bad life, then?’ I asked her, piteously, like a child appealing to his headmistress. ‘Has it truly been so very, very bad?’
I could see the episodes passing before her eyes – the burning spice-fields, Epifania dying in the chapel while Aurora watched. Talcum powder, crookery, murder. ‘Of course it has,’ she replied, with a piercing look. ‘All of you … terrible, terrible.’ Then, after a pause: ‘Couldn’t you all have just … calmed down?’
There was our story in a nutshell, our tragedy enacted by clowns. Write it on our tombstones, whisper it to the wind: those da Gamas! Those Zogoibys! They just didn’t know how to be calm.
We were consonants without vowels: jagged, lacking shape. Perhaps if we’d had her to orchestrate us, our lady of the vowels. Maybe then. Maybe, in another life, down a fork in the road, she would come to us, and we would all be saved. There is in us, in all of us, some measure of brightness, of possibility. We start with that, but also with its dark counter-force, and the two of them spend our lives slugging it out, and if we’re lucky the fight comes out even.
Me? I never got the right help. Nor, until now, did I ever find my Chimène.
Towards the end, she
retreated from me, she said she did not want to read any more; but read it, nevertheless, and filled up, each day, with a little more horror, a little more disgust. I begged her for forgiveness, I told her (my nutty cathjew confusions persisting right to the end!) that I needed her absolution. She said, ‘I’m not in that line of work. Get yourself a priest.’ There was a distance between us after that.
And as our tasks neared completion our fear hung lower over us and dripped into our eyes. I had long coughing spasms, during which, retching and with streaming eyes, I almost hoped for an end to come, like this, to cheat Miranda of his prize. My hand shook over the paper and Aoi, too, often had to stop work, and drag herself off, chains clanking, to huddle against a wall and compose herself again. Now I, too, was horrified, for it was indeed a horror to see that strong woman weaken. But when I sought to comfort her, in those latter days, she brushed my arm away. And of course Miranda saw it all, her weakening and our estrangement; he revelled in our crumbling, taunting us: ‘Maybe I’ll do it today. – Yes, yes! – No, on second thoughts, tomorrow.’ He did not care for my portrayal of him, and on two occasions placed his pistol against my temple and pulled the trigger. The firing chamber was empty both times, and, fortunately, so were my bowels; or else there would certainly have been a humiliation in my pants.
‘He won’t do it,’ I found myself repeating. ‘He won’t, he won’t, he won’t.’
Aoi Uë cracked. ‘Of course he will, you bastard,’ she screamed at me, hiccuping with terror and rage. ‘He’s mad, mad as a s-snake and sticks n-needles in his arms.’