Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary

"A House Divided," Part 1 of The Moor's Last Sigh, opens with the narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, called "the Moor," pausing to catch his breath in an overgrown graveyard somewhere in Spain. He had escaped from imprisonment by the artist, Vasco Miranda, and has been on the run, for reasons not initially disclosed. Cornered and resigned to his fate, he has left a trail of narratives nailed to gates, fences, and trees along his way, and he now wants to tell his tale in full, before the end comes. In breathless, staccato fashion he begins by depicting, with bitterness, his late mother, Aurora da Gama, as a renowned, quick-witted, sharp-tongued artist whom people, back in Bombay, had generally regarded as demonic. He suggests that Aurora will eventually clash with his lover Uma and this will leave him estranged from his mother. As swiftly...