Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction:Historical
ISBN: 9780517195482
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1995-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

13

THE SO-CALLED ‘MOOR paintings’ of Aurora Zogoiby can be divided into three distinct periods: the ‘early’ pictures, made between 1957 and 1977, that is to say between the year of my birth and that of the election that swept Mrs G. from power, and of Ina’s death; the ‘great’ or ‘high’ years, 1977–81, during which she created the glowing, profound works with which her name is most often associated; and the so-called ‘dark Moors’, those pictures of exile and terror which she painted after my departure, and which include her last, unfinished, unsigned masterpiece, The Moor’s Last Sigh (170 × 247 cms., oil on canvas, 1987), in which she turned, at last, to the one subject she had never directly addressed – facing up, in that stark depiction of the moment of Boabdil’s expulsion from Granada, to her own treatment of her only son. It was a picture which, for all its great size, had been stripped to the harsh essentials, all its elements converging on the face at its heart, the Sultan’s face, from which horror, weakness, loss and pain poured like darkness itself, a face in a condition of existential torment reminiscent of Edvard Munch. It was as different a picture from Vasco Miranda’s sentimental treatment of the same theme as could possibly be imagined. But it was also a mystery picture, that ‘lost painting’ – and how striking that both Vasco’s and Aurora’s treatments of this theme should disappear within a few years of my mother’s death, the one stolen from the private collection of C. J. Bhabha, the other from the Zogoiby Bequest itself! Gents, gentesses: permit me to titillate your interest by revealing that it was a picture within which Aurora Zogoiby, in her fretful last days, had concealed a prophecy of her death. (And Vasco’s fate, too, was bound up with the story of these canvases.)

As I set down my memories of my part in those paintings, I am naturally conscious that those who submit themselves as the models upon whom a work of art is made can offer, at best, a subjective, often wounded, sometimes spiteful, wrong-side-of-the-canvas version of the finished work. What then can the humble clay usefully say about the hands that moulded it? Perhaps simply this: that I was there. And that during the years of sittings I made a kind of portrait of her, too. She was looking at me, and I was looking right back.

This is what I saw: a tall woman in a paint-spattered, mid-calf-length homespun kurta worn over dark blue sailcloth slacks, barefoot, her white hair piled up on her head with brushes sticking out of it, giving her an eccentric Madame Butterfly look, Butterfly as Katharine Hepburn or–yes! – Nargis in some zany Indian cover version, Titli Begum, might have played her: no longer young, no longer prinked and painted, and certainly no longer bothered about any pathetic Pinkerton’s return. She stood before me in the least luxurious of studios, a room lacking so much as a comfortable chair, and ‘non-A.

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