NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (48 page)

After dinner I went on deck and strolled in the mild air for a while. The night was so clear that from the rail I could see the lights of Sicily slipping by; the places I had labored through on the coastal trains were now merely a glowworm of winding coast, Catania, Siracusa and, farther down, at the last of Sicily, the twinkling Gulf of Noto.

It is only sixty or seventy miles from the coast of Italy to Malta, but that night it was a rough crossing, and for the first time the
Seabourn
rolled in the westerly swell. Sometime in the early hours there was peace again, my bed was level, and by dawn we were anchored on the quay at the edge of Valletta, in Grand Harbor, walls and turrets and watchtowers on every side. I could see the staring eyes that had been sculpted into some towers by the Crusaders as a defense against the evil eye.

Malta has been identified as Calypso’s island in
The Odyssey
and was home to the Crusaders, the Knights of St. John, and is still an impressive fortress. It is also low, almost treeless, dusty, hot, and priest-ridden. There is so much Christianity in Malta, and of such a kneeling and statue-carrying and image-kissing variety, that there is an old Arab proverb that goes, “He’s calling to [Muslim] prayer in Malta!”
(Wu’ezin fi Malta!)
—in other words, asking for something utterly hopeless; trying to get blood from a stone, or as they said in Italy, “blood from a turnip.”

Most of the
Seabourn
passengers had already gone ashore, for the bus tour to Mdina. I decided to make my own walking tour of the town, though it would not have been difficult to include the whole island. It was about
eight miles wide and eighteen miles long. If you could take the heat and dust, much of it was walkable in a day. Apart from the forts and citadels there were small square houses and dusty streets, not very different from the place that Edward Lear described to his sister Ann when he passed through in 1848: “There is hardly a bit of green in the whole island—a hot sand stone, walls, & bright white houses are all you can see from the highest places, excepting little stupid trees here and there like rubbishy tufts of black worsted.” The people were very kind, he added, “But I could not live at Malta.”

But who could? Anthony Burgess and various British tax exiles had tried it in the 1970s but they were undone by the Maltese government, which harassed them. Burgess, an ardent and prolific book reviewer, was accused of soliciting and receiving pornographic books—that is, review copies—and the books were frequently intercepted by Maltese customs. He eventually left and moved to Italy, though the government seized his house and confiscated his library. The Malta sections of Burgess’s autobiography are chapters of sorrowful accidents and misunderstandings and frustrations. It baffled me why writers chose the most irritating Mediterranean places in which to live and be creative—Maugham in Cap Ferrat, Greene in Antibes, Burgess in Malta. After writing his masterpiece
His Monkey Wife (or Married to a Chimp)
and a movie script for
The African Queen
, John Collier went to Cassis, near Marseilles, and wrote very little.

I walked down the gangway and up the cobbled street into Valletta, bought a map and some stamps and listened awhile to a small sweating woman in a damp t-shirt shrieking into a bullhorn.

“Most important thing! Beauty with a purpose! You see? She is lovely but she is holding hands with two Down’s syndrome sufferers!”

“What’s going on here?” I asked a Maltese man in a snap-brim hat.

“That’s Miss Malta,” he said.

The buxom young woman in the yellow ball-gown tugged the two shy, bewildered girls down the sidewalk, past an outdoor cafe of gaping Maltese.

“Beauty with a purpose!” the bullhorn woman yelled. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!”

She lowered the bullhorn to get her breath.

“Hello,” I said. “Is that Miss Malta?”

“Miss Republic of Malta, yes,” she gasped. “We are going to the Miss World Pageant in Johannesburg next month.”

The Maltese seemed approachable, friendly, rather lost, a bit homely, dreamy, decent and well-turned-out. The garrison atmosphere was much the same as I had found in Gibraltar. Even the Maltese who had never been in England had a sort of shy pride in their English connection and spoke the language well.

The English had found these people, used them to service their fleet and dance for their soldiers, educated them, made them into barbers and brass-polishers, turned over to them London lower-middle-class culture and the sailor values of folk dances, fish-and-chips, BBC sitcoms and reverence for the Royal Family, and given them a medal. Every schoolboy—Maltese as well as British—knew that Malta had been awarded the George Cross for bravery in the last war.

But the British soldiers had left, the brothels and most of the bars were closed, business was awful here too, and at a time when most British war heroes were auctioning off their medals at Sotheby’s—a Victoria Cross was worth about $200,000—Malta’s medal was hardly valuable enough to keep the economy going. The neighbor island of Gozo was the haunt of retirees living off small pensions. The only hope was in Malta’s joining the European Community, to make the islands viable.

I never saw Lear’s “stupid trees.” Presumably they had all died in the severe drought that was still going on—there had been no rain for six months. The earth was so parched that the plowed fields had the same look as the nearby stone quarries, for the fields were also littered with chunks and blocks of hardened clay. The fields were bounded by stone walls, cactuses, and spiky yuccalike plants. It was a fearfully rocky place, and still so dry that the island’s five desalination plants were going at full bore.

After the Carmelite church and St. Paul’s Shipwreck Church and the crusader fortress, I went to St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral. In this island of 360,000 people, all were Catholics, except for the 180 paid-up Protestants at St. Paul’s Anglican. Today the church was being prepared for the harvest festival: English ladies with the pallor and fretfulness of exiles polishing brasses, arranging flowers and piling fruit.

“I’ll put this bougainvillea on this wire frame and if it dies, there it is.”

“Quite.”

“And your maize cobs, Joan?”

“Trying to get them to spill out of this bally little basket.”

Fussy, helpful, panting church helpers, brass polish in one hand, cut stems in the other, and surveying their labors the keen eye of a vicar, hoping to impress a bishop. With so many dead heroes and clerics and crusaders and expired retirees in Malta the church was thick with brass plaques all in need of a good polishing.

“This plaque is coming up a treat, Gina.”

“I could do with a nice cup of tea.”

We then learned the island was called Malta and the natives showed us unusual kindness
, is written in Acts 28:1–2. In the King James translation the name is given as “Melita,” the Greek name (derived from
meli
, the Greek word for honey, for which Malta was renowned). The rest of the biblical chapter is a good traveler’s tale about shipwrecked Paul. Gathering some sticks for a fire, Saint Paul is bitten by a snake. Seeing this bad omen the “barbarous” Maltese take the stranger to be a murderer. But Paul plops the snake into the fire and shrugs, and “they changed their minds and said he was a god.” After some effective faith healing, Paul is feted by the Maltese and given all the provisions he needs to take him onward to Sicily and onward to Rome.

The cheeriest man I met in Malta was Mr. Agius, “coffin-maker and undertaker,” busy in his shop near the church. He had been taught the coffin trade by his father and grandfather and he told me that a good mahogany coffin with silver handles went for a thousand dollars while the cheapest one, of plain pine, cost $165.

“This is for poor people,” he said, showing me the cheap one. “There are many poor people in Malta. They choose this one.”

He disposed of three or four coffins a week. He nipped from one coffin to the next, pointing out its virtues, the flourishes, the angels, the crosses, the handles, the gilt, the panels.

All the while I talked to him his son sat with his face in a radio that was blaring old rock and roll songs—“Peggy Sue” and “Rock and Roll Music (Any old time you use it).”

Malta had the culture of South London in a landscape like Lebanon—news agents selling
The Express
and
The Daily Telegraph
, video rental agencies, pinball parlors, pizza joints, and a large Marks and Spencer. All those, as well as fortresses and churches and many shops that sold brass door-knockers. But chip-shops and cannons predominated.

“I want to see the sights,” I said to a man at a bus stop in Valletta in desperation.

“What about the salt pans of Buggiba?” he said.

It was early afternoon. On the afterdeck of the
Seabourn Spirit
, pecan pie was being served with vanilla bavarols with coffee and armagnac.

I boarded the goddamned bus and rattled down the narrow road to Rabat and Mdina, across the island. The names were Arabic, like many others in Malta, and for all its Italian loan words Maltese was a Semitic language. Even the people had a Arab cast to their features, though they sneered at such comparisons, for the English had taught them to despise Gippos.

More fortifications and cannon emplacements at Mdina, a walled town on a hill, looked over dusty fields and complaining donkeys; and seeing this landscape of powder and dead trees I began to understand Malta’s serious water shortage. The brackish water from the faucets had forced nearly everyone to drink imported bottled water. Mdina and Rabat were parched, and were lifeless, like Valletta. It was as though only war, or talk of it—memories of plucky heroics—animated the Maltese. The war was advertised all over Malta in exhibits and museums and memorials; it was all that anyone talked about. But the war stories ranged from the earliest Crusades to World War Two. The reason for this was obvious enough. The Maltese had only been useful during military campaigns, but in times of peace they had been ignored. This was a garrison.

Wandering down the street of Mdina, I saw some people from the ship.

“I don’t think much of this place—”

“A little disappointing, like Pompeii—”

“I could use a drink—”

They were headed back to the ship, so I joined them on the bus, just got on after my ten-cent ride on an old British bus to Mdina.

The Maltese guide, haranguing on a microphone for the ship’s passengers, was determined to make a case for Malta.

“This has become a very very fashionable part of Malta,” she said. We passed a low hill of square houses. And at a small row of shops: “This is a very trendy discotheque—all the young people in Valletta go here,” and “Major shops. Your Bata Shoes, your Marks and Spencer, your Benetton.”

After that she uttered the sort of sightseeing sound bite I had started to collect.

“The Germans dropped a two-hundred-and-twenty-eight-kilo bomb on that church, while five hundred people prayed. It did not go off. People said it was a miracle of the Virgin Mary.”

At Valletta, the busload was offered a choice of visiting another church or going back to the ship.

“Ship” was unanimous. The feeling was that Malta—magnificent from the ship, with a drink in your hand—was rather disappointing up close. Afterwards, no one had a good word for Malta, even after having given it a good five hours of thorough scrutiny.

That night, as the
Seabourn Spirit
crossed the Ionian Sea at twelve knots, I dawdled over my note-taking and went to the dining room late. On this ship, everyone had a right to eat alone, but the maître d’ said that if I wished he would seat me with some other people—providing they did not object.

That was how I met the Greenwalds, who were from Montreal. Constance was demure, Jack more expansive—the previous night I had seen him polish off two desserts.

“What did you think of Malta?” I asked.

“If you wanted to buy a brass door-knocker,” he said, “I guess you’d come to Malta. There are thousands of them for sale there, right? Apart from the door-knockers, it wasn’t much.”

“Did you buy one?”

He was a bit taken aback by my question, but finally admitted yes, he had bought a brass door-knocker. “I thought it was an eagle. But it’s not. I don’t know what it is.”

“Isn’t that a regimental tie you’re wearing?” I asked.

“Yes, it is,” he said, and fingered it. “The Royal Household Cavalry.”

“They let Canadians join?”

“We are members of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth,” he said. “Though as you probably know, there’s a secessionist movement in Quebec.”

“What sort of work do you do?”

He semaphored with his eyebrows in disgust and said, “Scaffolding.”

“Really?”

He smiled at me and said, “See, that’s a conversation stopper.”

“Mohawks in New York City are capable of climbing to the top of the highest scaffolds,” I said, to prove it was not a conversation stopper.

“I’m not in scaffolding, I was just saying that,” he said. “‘What do you do?’ is the first question Americans ask. But it’s meaningless. ‘I’m Smith. I’m in steel manufacturing.’ ”

He was a big bluff man, and his habit of wearing a blazer or a peaked cap gave him a nautical air, as though he might be the captain of the
Seabourn
if not the owner of the shipping line. He seldom raised his voice, and he took his time when he spoke, and so it was sometimes hard to tell when he had finished speaking.

The waiter was at his elbow, hovering with a tureen of soup.

“Oh, good,” Jack Greenwald said. “Now I’m going to show you the correct way of serving this.”

After we began eating the conversation turned to the cruise. Most people on the cruise talked about other cruises they had taken, other itineraries and shipping lines and ports of call. They never mentioned the cost. They said they took ships because they hated packing and unpacking when they traveled, and a ship was the answer to this. It was undemanding, the simplest sort of travel imaginable, and this sunny itinerary was like a rest-cure. The ship plowed along in sunshine at twelve knots through a glassy sea by day, and the nights were filled with food and wine. Between the meals, the coffee, the tea, the drinks, in the serene silences of shipboard, young men appeared with pitchers of ice water or fruit punch, and cold towels. And there was always someone to ask whether everything was all right, and was there anything they could do for you.