The Moors Last Sigh Read Online Free PDF Page B

him her project. In those days he had begun to sleep badly and, asthmatically, to wheeze. ‘It’s all that bad air,’ she told him. ‘So, so. I must save one da Gama at least.’
    She ordered changes. Under her instructions – and to Epifania’s rage: ‘Don’t think-o for two secs I will cut out chicken in this house because your little chickie, that little floozy-fantoozy, wants you to eat beggar-people’s food’ – he became a vegetarian, and learned to stand on his head. Secretly, too, he broke a window-frame and climbed into the spider-webbed West house where his father’s library languished, and began to devour the books along with the bookworms. Attar, Khayyam, Tagore, Carlyle, Ruskin, Wells, Poe, Shelley, Raja Rammohun Roy. ‘You see?’ Belle encouraged him. ‘You can do it; you can become a person, too, instead of a doormat in an ugly-bug shirt.’
    They didn’t save Francisco. One night after the rains he dived off the island and swam away; perhaps he was trying to find some air beyond the island’s enchanted rim. The rip-tide took him; they found his bloated body five days later, bumping up against a rusty harbour buoy. He should have been remembered for his part in the revolution, for his good works, for his progressivism, for his mind; but his true legacies were trouble in the business (which had been badly neglected these past years), sudden death, and asthma.
    Epifania swallowed the news of his death without a tremor. She ate his death as she had eaten his life; and grew.

3
    O N THE LANDING OF the wide, steep staircase leading to Epifania’s bedroom was the private family chapel, which Francisco had in the old days permitted one of his ‘Frenchies’ to redecorate in spite of Epifania’s piercing protests. Out had gone the gilded altarpiece with the little inset paintings in which Jesus worked his miracles against a background of coco-palms and tea-plantations, and the china dolls of the apostles, and the golden cherubs posing on teak pedestals and blowing their trumpets, and the candles in their glass bowls the shape of giant brandy glasses, and the imported Portuguese lace on the altar, and even the crucifix itself, ‘all the quality stuff,’ Epifania complained, ‘and Jesus and Mary lockofied in the box-room along-with,’ and not content with these desecrations the blasted fellow had gone and painted the whole place white as if it were a hospital ward, furnished it with the least comfortable wooden pews in Cochin, and then, in that windowless interior room, fixed giant paper cutouts to the walls, imitations of stained-glass windows, ‘as if we can not put proper windows if we want,’ Epifania moaned, ‘see how cheap it makes us look, paper windows in the house of God,’ and the windows didn’t even have decent pictures on them, just slabs of colour in crazy-paving patterns, ‘like a child’s party décor,’ Epifania sniffed. ‘In such a room one should not keep-o blood and body of Our Saviour, but only birthday cake.’
    Francisco had rejoined, in defence of his protégé’s work, that in it shape and colour not only took the place of content but demonstrated that, properly handled, they could in fact be content: provoking Epifania’s contemptuous reply, ‘So maybe we have no need of Jesus Christ, because just shape of cross will do, why bother with any crucifixion, isn’t it? What a blasphemy your Frenchy type has made: a church that lettofies off the Son of God from dying for our sins.’
    The day after her husband’s funeral Epifania had it all burned, and back came the cherubs, lace and glass, the thickly padded chapel chairs covered in dark red silk and the matching cushions edged in golden braid upon which a woman of her position in the world might decently kneel before her Lord. Antique tapestries from Italy depicting kababed saints and tandooried martyrs were restored to the walls and surrounded by ruched and gathered drapes, and soon the disconcerting memory of