Salman Rushdie - The Moors Last Sigh

Salman Rushdie is the author of six novels: Grimus, Midnights Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Shame (winner of the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger), The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel), Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award), and The Moors Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award). He has also published a collection of short stories, East, West; a book of reportage, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey; a volume of essays, Imaginary Homelands; and a work of film criticism, The Wizard of Oz.

Salman Rushdie was awarded Germanys Author of the Year Award for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989. In 1993, Midnights Children was adjudged the Booker of Bookers, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In the same year he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is also an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have been published in more than two dozen languages.

BY SALMAN RUSHDIE

Fiction
Grimus
Midnights Children
Shame
The Satanic Verses
Haroun And The Sea Of Stories
East, West
The Moors Last Sigh

Non-Fiction
The Jaguar Smile:
A Nicaraguan Journey
Imaginary Homelands
The Wizard Of Oz

FIRST VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1996

Copyright 1995 by Salman Rushdie

All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. First published in Canada in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, and simultaneously in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., in 1995. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Rushdie, Salman

The Moors last sigh

eISBN: 978-0-307-36774-7

I. Title

PR9499.3.R8M6 1996 832.914 C96-930457-9

v3.1

For E.J.W.

I HAVE LOST COUNT of the days that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Mirandas mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain-village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. And since then along my hungry, heat-hazed way there have been further bunches of scribbled sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations of two-inch nails. Long ago when I was green my beloved said to me in fondness, Oh, you Moor, you strange black man, always so full of theses, never a church door to nail them to. (She, a self-professedly godly un-Christian Indian, joked about Luthers protest at Wittenberg to tease her determinedly ungodly Indian Christian lover: how stories travel, what mouths they end up in!) Unfortunately, my mother overheard; and darted, quick as snakebite: So full, you mean, of faeces. Yes, mother, you had the last word on that subject, too: as about everything.

Amrika and Moskva, somebody once called them, Aurora my mother and Uma my love, nicknaming them for the two great super-powers; and people said they looked alike but I never saw it, couldnt see it at all. Both of them dead, of unnatural causes, and I in a far-off country with death at my heels and their story in my hand, a story Ive been crucifying upon a gate, a fence, an olive-tree, spreading it across this landscape of my last journey, the story which points to me. On the run, I have turned the world into my pirate map, complete with clues, leading X-marks-the-spottily to the treasure of myself. When my pursuers have followed the trail theyll find me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldntve done it differently.

(Here I sit, is more like it. In this dark wood that is, upon this mount of olives, within this clump of trees, observed by the quizzically tilting stone crosses of a small, overgrown graveyard, and a little down the track from the Ultimo Suspiro gas station without benefit or need of Virgils, in what ought to be the middle pathway of my life, but has become, for complicated reasons, the end of the road, I bloody well collapse with exhaustion.)

And yes, ladies, much is being nailed down. Colours, for example, to the mast. But after a not-so-long (though gaudily colourful) life I am fresh out of theses. Life itself being crucifixion enough.

When youre running out of steam, when the puff that blows you onward is almost gone, its time to make confession. Call it testament or (what you) will; lifes Last Gasp Saloon. Hence this here-I-stand-or-sit with my lifes sentences nailed to the landscape and the keys to a red fort in my pocket, these moments of waiting before a final surrender.