A minor eddy in the peaceful course of Maltese government, preserved today only in one Board of Inquiry report. Suddenly as they had begun, the June Disturbances (as they came to be called) ended. Nothing was settled. The primary question, that of self-rule, was as of 1956 still unresolved. Malta by then had only advanced as far as dyarchy, and if anything moved even closer to England in February, when the electorate voted three to one to put Maltese members in the British House of Commons.
Early on the morning of 10 June 1919, Mehemet’s xebec set sail from Lascaris Wharf. Seated on its counter, like some obsolete nautical fixture, was Sidney Stencil. No one had come to see him off. Veronica Manganese had kept him only as long as she had to. His eyes kept dead astern.
But as the xebec was passing Fort St. Elmo or thereabouts, a shining Benz was observed to pull up near the wharf and a black-liveried driver with a mutilated face to come to the Harbour’s edge and gaze out at the ship. After a moment he raised his hand; waved with a curiously sentimental, feminine motion of the wrist. He called something in English, which none of the observers understood. He was crying.
Draw a line from Malta to Lampedusa. Call it a radius. Somewhere in that circle, on the evening of the tenth, a water-spout appeared and lasted for fifteen minutes. Long enough to lift the xebec fifty feet, whirling and creaking, Astarte’s throat naked to the cloudless weather, and slam it down again into a piece of the Mediterranean whose subsequent surface phenomena—whitecaps, kelp islands, any of a million flatnesses which should catch thereafter part of the brute sun’s spectrum—showed nothing at all of what came to lie beneath, that quiet June day.
V.
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and, most recently, Inherent Vice. He received the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
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