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Authors: Salman Rushdie
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Isabella’s reconquista but the rift in the family remained unbridged; the sack-barricades remained in place. And would remain for many long years.
She wasn’t perfect; perhaps it’s time that was said. She was tall, beautiful, brilliant, brave, hard-working, powerful, victorious, but, ladies and gents, Queen Isabella was no angel, no wings or halo in her wardrobe, no sir. In those years of Camoens’s jail sentence she smoked like a volcano, grew increasingly foul-mouthed and failed to restrain her language in front of her growing child, went in for occasional drinking sprees that would leave her unconscious, sprawled like a tart on a mat in some backwoods shebeen; she became the toughest of nuts, and there were hints that her business methods extended at times to a little intimidation, a little strong-arming of suppliers, contractors, rivals; and she was frequently, casually, shamelessly unfaithful, unfaithful without discrimination or restraint. She would step out of her working attire into a beaded flapper dress and cloche hat, practise the Charleston, wide-eyed and pout-lipped, in front of her dressing-room mirror, and then, leaving Aurora with her ayah, head off for the Malabar Club. ‘See you later, chickadee,’ she’d say in her deep, smoke-shattered voice. ‘Mummy’s hunting tigers tonight.’ Or, again, kicking up her heels and coughing profoundly: ‘Sweet dreams, honeybunch; Mummy needs lion meat to munch.’
In later years my mother Aurora da Gama told this story to her circle of bohemian chums. ‘You know, I was five-six-seven-eight years old, a proper little madam. If the phone rang, I would pick it up and say, “I’m so sorry, but Daddy and Aires-uncle are both in prison, Carmen-aunty and Granny are on the other side of the smelly sacks and aren’t allowed to come over, and Mummy will be out tiger-shooting all night; may I take a message?”
While Belle was on the razzle, little Aurora, this solitary child, left to her own devices in her surreally cloven home, turned upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude; and, according to legend, found her gift. When she had grown up and was enclosed within the cult of herself, her admirers liked to linger upon the image of the little girl alone in the big house, throwing open the windows and allowing the torrential reality of India to awaken her soul. (You will notice that two episodes from Aurora’s early life have been conflated to form this image.) It was said of her, in awe, that even as a child she never drew childishly; that her figures and landscapes were adult from the first. This was a myth she did nothing to discourage; indeed, she may even have fostered it, by backdating certain drawings and destroying other pieces of juvenilia. What is probably true is that Aurora began her life in art during those long motherless hours; that she had a talent for drawing and as a colourist, perhaps even one that an expert eye could have recognised; and that she pursued her new interest in deadly secret, hiding her tools and her work, so that Belle never knew about it all the days of her life.
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
She wasn’t perfect; perhaps it’s time that was said. She was tall, beautiful, brilliant, brave, hard-working, powerful, victorious, but, ladies and gents, Queen Isabella was no angel, no wings or halo in her wardrobe, no sir. In those years of Camoens’s jail sentence she smoked like a volcano, grew increasingly foul-mouthed and failed to restrain her language in front of her growing child, went in for occasional drinking sprees that would leave her unconscious, sprawled like a tart on a mat in some backwoods shebeen; she became the toughest of nuts, and there were hints that her business methods extended at times to a little intimidation, a little strong-arming of suppliers, contractors, rivals; and she was frequently, casually, shamelessly unfaithful, unfaithful without discrimination or restraint. She would step out of her working attire into a beaded flapper dress and cloche hat, practise the Charleston, wide-eyed and pout-lipped, in front of her dressing-room mirror, and then, leaving Aurora with her ayah, head off for the Malabar Club. ‘See you later, chickadee,’ she’d say in her deep, smoke-shattered voice. ‘Mummy’s hunting tigers tonight.’ Or, again, kicking up her heels and coughing profoundly: ‘Sweet dreams, honeybunch; Mummy needs lion meat to munch.’
In later years my mother Aurora da Gama told this story to her circle of bohemian chums. ‘You know, I was five-six-seven-eight years old, a proper little madam. If the phone rang, I would pick it up and say, “I’m so sorry, but Daddy and Aires-uncle are both in prison, Carmen-aunty and Granny are on the other side of the smelly sacks and aren’t allowed to come over, and Mummy will be out tiger-shooting all night; may I take a message?”
While Belle was on the razzle, little Aurora, this solitary child, left to her own devices in her surreally cloven home, turned upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude; and, according to legend, found her gift. When she had grown up and was enclosed within the cult of herself, her admirers liked to linger upon the image of the little girl alone in the big house, throwing open the windows and allowing the torrential reality of India to awaken her soul. (You will notice that two episodes from Aurora’s early life have been conflated to form this image.) It was said of her, in awe, that even as a child she never drew childishly; that her figures and landscapes were adult from the first. This was a myth she did nothing to discourage; indeed, she may even have fostered it, by backdating certain drawings and destroying other pieces of juvenilia. What is probably true is that Aurora began her life in art during those long motherless hours; that she had a talent for drawing and as a colourist, perhaps even one that an expert eye could have recognised; and that she pursued her new interest in deadly secret, hiding her tools and her work, so that Belle never knew about it all the days of her life.
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
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