"The Moor's Sigh" by Salman Rushdie. The Moor's farewell sigh Salman Rushdi The Moor's farewell sigh

For Europeans, India has been and remains a wonderland. But what does it look like from the inside? Salman Rushdie is not only the most scandalous, but also the most respected Indian writer today. The reader can trust him and his book "The Moor's Farewell Sigh".

The setting for this strange novel is incredible, quirky, spicy Bombay. In its ghostly space, the story of the life of the protagonist, lost in time, Moraisha Zogoibi, nicknamed the Moor, unfolds full of adventures and hardships. "Portrait of the human soul in hell" - these words of the poor Moor, perhaps, could well serve as an epigraph to the entire book.

“A portrait of the human soul in hell” - these words from the woeful monologue of the protagonist of “The Moor's Farewell Sigh” could be prefaced by Salman Rushdie's entire book. They are a kind of key to reading the novel - the story of the life, love, adventures and sufferings of the Moor - an intelligent, talented and deeply unhappy wanderer, lost in a strange, bizarre world, the paradise-hell of the ghostly Bombay ...

Moor's farewell sigh Salman Rushdie

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Title: Moor's Farewell Sigh

About Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Sigh

Moraish Zogoibi, nicknamed the Moor, tells a family story, weaving into it stories about modern India, in which fiction is intertwined with truth, but the unbridled imagination of the author rules everything. The saga about the da Gama family - Zogoibi, about curses and hatred, about insane passion, about criminal inclinations and craving for beauty, is interspersed with monologues of the protagonist dedicated to art, religious fanaticism, national traditions and, of course, love.

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Salman Rushdie

Moor's farewell sigh

Part one. SEPARATED HOUSE

I have lost count of the days since I fled from the horrors of Vasco Miranda's crazy mountain fortress in the Andalusian town of Benenheli - fled from death under cover of darkness, nailing my message to the door. Then, on my hungry, sultry path, there were other tufts of written pages, the swing of a hammer, the sharp screams of two-inch nails driven into wood. Long ago, when I was still green, my beloved said to me tenderly: “You are my Moor, a strange dark person, you always have a lot of theses, like Luther, only there is no church door to beat them.” (A woman who considers herself a devout Hindu remembers Luther's proclamation at Wittenberg to tease her utterly ungodly lover, a descendant of Indian Christians - in every way stories go, from what mouths they speak!) Unfortunately, my mother overheard the conversation and fired , like a hidden snake: “I don’t know about Lutherism, but he doesn’t have to be ferocious.” Yes, mom, the last word on this topic is yours (however, on all others, too).

"America" and "Moscow" - as someone called them, my mother Aurora and my beloved Uma, alluding to the warring superpowers; they said that two women resemble one another, but I did not see it, I was not able to see it. Both died not of natural causes, but I ended up in a foreign country, where death breathes down my back, and in my hands lies their history, which I crucify on gates, fences, olive trunks, with which I mark the landscape along my last path - a story that indicates on me. My escape turned the area into a kind of pirate map, replete with clues, a string of slanting crosses leading to the treasure that is myself. When the pursuers get to me by the signs I left, they will find me meekly waiting, breathing hard, ready. Here I stand. And he couldn't do anything else.

(Rather, here I sit. In this gloomy forest - that is, on this mountain of olives, in this grove, under the gaze of the stone crosses tilted this way and that of a small overgrown cemetery, a little down the road from the Ultimo Suspiro gas station, - without Virgil and without the need for him, on the half of the earthly path, which for intricate reasons became its end, I, like a dog, die from exhaustion.)

You never know what, dear ladies, you can nail down. Let's say the flag to the mast. But after a not so long (albeit colored with many flags) life, I was left without theses at all. Life itself - why not a crucifixion?

When you run out of steam, when the air that drove you forward is almost running out, it's time to confess. Let it be a testament, a dying (not too free) will; farce "Last gasp". Here is the explanation of this "here-I-stand-or-sit" with self-denunciations nailed to the landscape and the keys to the red fortress in my pocket, here is the explanation of this brief pause before the final surrender.

It is fitting, therefore, to sing the song of the end; about what existed and could not exist further; about what was good and what was bad. Let out a farewell sigh for the lost world, shed a tear after it. Also, however, to shout a farewell “Hurrah”, pickle the last poisoned scandalous tale (for lack of a video, you will have to be content with words), play a few dissonant funeral melodies. Listen to the story of the Moor, full of noise and fury. Would you like? However, even if you don't want to. And for starters, pass the pepper here.

- What did you say?

Trees are also capable of speaking out of surprise. (And you - you never in despair and darkness turned to the wall, empty air, stuffed dog?)

I repeat: pepper, please; for, were it not for these grains, what is now being completed in the West and in the East would not have begun at all. Pepper made the slender ships of Vasco da Gama pass through two oceans from the Belen lighthouse in Lisbon to the Malabar coast - first to Calicut, and from there to Cochin with its convenient harbor-lagoon. Following the Portuguese pioneer, the British and French followed, so that in the era of the so-called discovery of India - although how could we be opened if no one had closed us before? we were, as my illustrious mother put it, not a set pearl, but a condiment for dinner. “From the very beginning it was clear what the world wanted from the notorious mother India,” she said. - All sorts of piquancy, for which men go to a brothel.

x x x

Listen to my story, the story of the disgrace to which a high-born half-breed was subjected - I, Moraish Zogoibi, nicknamed the Moor, for most of my life the only male heir to the untold wealth of the da Gama-Zogoibi family from Cochin obtained through the trade in spices and other goods, excommunicated from everything for which , as he believed, had the full and inalienable right, by the will of his own mother Aurora, née da Gama, an outstanding artist, the brightest of our masters of this century and, at the same time, the sharpest-tongued woman in her generation, from whom anyone who approached her, received a fair share of pepper. Her own children were no exception. “We are Catholic girls, bohemian brats, we have red chili peppers in our veins,” she said. - And no indulgence of native flesh and blood! My dear ones, flesh is our food, blood is our favorite drink.

“To be the offspring of our infernal Aurora,” I heard in my youth from Vasco Miranda, an artist from Goa, “truly means to be the Lucifer of our days. Well, you understand - the son of the dawn.” By that time my family had already moved to Bombay, and in the semblance of paradise that was the legendary salon of Aurora Zogoibi, these words could pass for a compliment; but I remember them as a prophecy, for the day came when I was expelled from this fabulous garden and cast down into Pandemonium. (Deprived of my natural environment, how could I not be seduced by its opposite? I mean anti-naturalism - the only real ism of our absurd, turned inside out time. Whoever was rejected by the MA-TH, of course, SH-MA beckons. Thrown out of his history, Moraish Zogoibi rolled into the history of the world.)

- And all this spilled out of the pepper pot!

Well, there is more than one, of course, pepper - also cardamom, cashews, cinnamon, ginger, pistachios, cloves; and in addition to nuts and spices - coffee and tea leaves. But we have to admit that, as Aurora said, “pepper was not even in the first place, but out of any queue, because if you want to be first, you don’t have to get in any queue.” And what is true of all Indian trade is also true of our family capital: pepper, the coveted black gold of Malabar, was the main source of income for my obscenely wealthy ancestors, Cochin's largest spice, nut, coffee, and tea merchants, who, without any reason , except for centuries of rumor, descended from the side son of the greatest Vasco da Gama! ..

No more secrets. Everything is written and nailed.

At the age of thirteen, my mother Aurora da Gama took up the habit of wandering barefoot at night through her grandparents' large, smelly house on the island of Cabral - at that time she was often visited by insomnia, and, wandering through the rooms, she invariably threw open the windows everywhere: first the inner doors , covered with fine mesh that protected the inhabitants of the house from tiny mosquitoes, then frames glazed with flint glass, and finally shutters made of wooden planks. As a result, Epifania, the sixty-year-old mistress of the house, in whose personal mosquito net over the years a fair number of small but significant holes had formed, which she did not notice due to myopia or pretended not to notice, out of avarice, as a result of which she woke up every morning with an itch in her bony hands with bluish veins and let out a squeaky scream at the sight of insects curling around a tray of tea and sweet biscuits placed by her bedside servant Teresa (she instantly disappeared). Epiphany thrashed about in her concave teak boat bed and often spilled tea on her lace bedspread or white muslin nightgown with a high, frilled collar that hid her once swan but now wrinkled neck. And while she pounded right and left with a flyswatter clutched in one hand, at the same time tormenting her back with the long nails of the other hand, the night cap fell from the head of Epifania da Gama, revealing tangled gray tangles, through which, alas, the speckled skin was too clearly visible. When young Aurora, eavesdropping at the door, decided that the noise and fury of the hated grandmother (curses, the clinking of a broken cup, the helpless slaps of a fly swatter and the contemptuous buzz of mosquitoes) had reached its climax, she put on the sweetest smile on her face and, with a kind of light breeze, flew into the bedroom of the venerable widow with overjoyed wish good morning, knowing full well that the furious anger of the mother of the entire Cochin family da Gama, caught in senile helplessness, will now spill out beyond all conceivable limits. Epifania, kneeling in the middle of the tea-stained sheet, shaking her tousled hair, waving a fly swatter like a broken magic wand, screamed at the sight of an uninvited guest like a real witch or rakshasa - to Aurora's secret pleasure.

CORPUS ® Publishing

Dedicated to E. J. W.

family tree

DA GAMA - ZOGOYBI

divided house

I have lost count of the days since I fled from the horrors of Vasco Miranda's crazy mountain fortress in the Andalusian town of Benenheli - fled from death under cover of darkness, nailing my message to the door. Then, on my hungry, sultry path, there were other tufts of written pages, the swing of a hammer, the sharp screams of two-inch nails driven into wood. A long time ago, when I was still green, my beloved said to me tenderly: “You are my Moor, a strange dark person, you always have a lot of theses, like Luther, only there is no church door to beat them.” (A woman who considers herself a devout Hindu remembers Luther's proclamation at Wittenberg to tease her utterly ungodly lover, a descendant of Indian Christians - in all sorts of ways stories go, out of which mouths they speak!) Unfortunately, my mother overheard the conversation and fired , like a hidden snake: “I don’t know about Lutherism, but he doesn’t have to be ferocious.” Yes, mom, the last word on this topic is yours (however, on all others, too).

"Amrika" and "Moscow" - as someone called them, my mother Aurora and my beloved Uma, alluding to the warring superpowers; they said that two women resemble one another, but I did not see it, I was not able to see it. Both died not of natural causes, but I ended up in a foreign country, where death breathes down my back, and in my hands lies their history, which I crucify on gates, fences, olive trunks, with which I mark the landscape along my last path - a story that indicates on me. My escape has turned the area into a sort of pirate map, rife with clues, slanting crosses leading to the treasure that is myself. When the pursuers get to me by the signs I left, they will find me meekly waiting, breathing hard, ready. Here I stand. And he couldn't do anything else.

(More like, here I sit. In this gloomy forest - that is, on this mountain of olives, in this grove, under the gaze of the stone crosses tilted this way and that, a small overgrown cemetery, just down the road from the gas station Ultimo Suspiro, - without Virgil and without the need for him, on the half of the earthly path, which for intricate reasons became its end, I, like a dog, die from exhaustion.)

When you run out of steam, when the air that drove you forward is almost running out, it's time to confess. Let it be a testament, a dying (not too free) will; booth "Last gasp". Here is the explanation of this “here-I-stand-or-sit” with self-denunciations nailed to the landscape and the keys to the red fortress in my pocket, here is the explanation of this brief pause before the final surrender.

It is appropriate, therefore, to sing the song of the end: about what existed and could not exist further; about what was good and what was bad. Let out a farewell sigh for the lost world, shed a tear after it. Also, however, to shout a farewell “Hurrah”, pickle the last poisoned scandalous tale (for lack of a video, you will have to be content with words), play a few dissonant funeral melodies. Listen to the story of the Moor, full of noise and fury. Would you like? However, even if you don't want to. And for starters, pass the pepper here.

- What did you say?

Trees are also capable of speaking out of surprise. (And you - you never in despair and darkness turned to the wall, empty air, stuffed dog?)

I repeat: pepper, please; for, were it not for these grains, what is now being completed in the West and in the East would not have begun at all. Pepper made the slender ships of Vasco da Gama pass through two oceans from the Lisbon tower of Belen to the Malabar coast - first to Calicut, and from there to Cochin with its convenient harbor-lagoon. Following the Portuguese pioneer, the British and French followed, so that in the era of the so-called discovery of India - although how could we be opened if no one had closed us before? we were, as my illustrious mother put it, not a set pearl, but a condiment for dinner. “From the very beginning it was clear what the world wanted from the notorious Mother India,” she said. - All sorts of piquancy, for which men go to a brothel.

Listen to my story, the story of the disgrace to which a high-born half-breed was subjected - I, Moraish Zogoibi, nicknamed the Moor, for most of my life the only male heir to the untold wealth of the da Gama-Zogoibi family from Cochin obtained through the trade in spices and other goods, excommunicated from everything for which , as he believed, had the full and inalienable right, by the will of his own mother Aurora, nee da Gama, an outstanding artist, the brightest of our masters of this century and at the same time the sharpest-tongued woman in her generation, from whom anyone who approached her , got a fair share of pepper. Her own children were no exception. “We are Catholic girls, bohemian brats, we have red chili peppers in our veins,” she said. - And no indulgence of native flesh and blood! My dear ones, flesh is our food, blood is our favorite drink.”

“To be the offspring of our infernal Aurora,” I heard in my youth from Vasco Miranda, an artist from Goa, “truly means to be the Lucifer of our day. Well, you understand – the son of the dawn.” By that time my family had already moved to Bombay, and in the semblance of paradise that was the legendary salon of Aurora Zogoibi, these words could pass for a compliment; but I remember them as a prophecy, for the day came when I was expelled from this fabulous garden and cast down into Pandemonium. (Deprived of my natural environment, could I not be seduced by its opposite? I mean anti-naturalism- the only real ism of our absurd, turned inside out time. Whoever was rejected by MA-TH, that, of course, beckons TH-MA. Thrown out of his history, Morais Zogoibi rolled into the history of the world.)

- And all this spilled out of the pepper pot!

No more secrets. Everything is written and nailed.

At the age of thirteen, my mother Aurora da Gama took up the habit of wandering barefoot at night through her grandparents' large, smelly house on the island of Cabral - at that time she was often visited by insomnia, and, wandering through the rooms, she invariably threw open the windows everywhere: first the inner doors , covered with a thin mesh that protected the inhabitants of the house from tiny mosquitoes, then stained-glass windows, and finally shutters made of wooden planks. As a result, Epifania, the sixty-year-old mistress of the house, in whose personal mosquito net over the years a fair number of small but significant holes had formed, which she did not notice due to myopia or pretended not to notice, out of avarice, as a result of which she woke up every morning with an itch in her bony hands with bluish veins and let out a squeaky scream at the sight of insects curling around a tray of tea and sweet biscuits placed by her bedside servant Teresa (she instantly disappeared). Epiphany thrashed about in her concave teak boat bed and often spilled tea on her lace bedspread or white muslin nightgown with a high, frilled collar that hid her once swan but now wrinkled neck. And while she pounded right and left with a flyswatter clutched in one hand, at the same time tormenting her back with the long nails of the other hand, the night cap fell from the head of Epifania da Gama, revealing tangled gray tangles, through which, alas, the speckled skin was too clearly visible. When young Aurora, eavesdropping at the door, decided that the noise and fury of the hated grandmother (curses, the clinking of a broken cup, the helpless slaps of a fly swatter and the contemptuous buzz of mosquitoes) had reached its climax, she put on the sweetest smile on her face and, with a kind of light breeze, flew into the bedroom of the venerable widow with an exaggerated joyful wish of good morning, knowing full well that the furious anger of the mother of the entire Cochin family, da Gama, caught in senile helplessness, will now spill out beyond all conceivable limits. Epifania, kneeling in the middle of the tea-stained sheet, shaking her tousled hair, waving a fly swatter like a broken magic wand, screamed at the sight of an uninvited guest like a real witch or rakshasa - to Aurora's secret pleasure.