Maybe you’ve seen Azzopardi, who weights his line with a sparkplug and casts for flounder from the stern of the pilot boat when there’s no traffic in the bay. You never know what’s there in all that oil and plastic, he says, in all the shit from the Russian billionaire’s yacht and all the cruise liners with the captains in gold braid and the retired bank managers in their white tuxedos looking down at the greasy dock. I spit on them. Hey Azzo, we say, watch they don’t spit on you. You’ll never see it coming. But who knows what lives in the port. A child brought a sea horse once, nodding in a pickled onion jar. And once there was a harbour dolphin laughing as if it had heard the greatest joke in the world. Old Azzo lives in the apartments on Saint Guseppi Street, but his salmon is John West and then only on Friday. Hey presto, Azzo we shout, are you coming? And he comes.
Sometimes we have Ahmed too, from East Street, who will light a candle at Our Lady of Damascus before every voyage, because, my friend, even our pleasant excursions are voyages. For those in peril on the sea? Please don’t smile. We are seafarers too.
But Ahmed we say, you have no place in a good Catholic church. Go and bow your head and wiggle your arse under your broken moon. And Ahmed calls us ignorant fools for not knowing our history, and I agree with that. And he helps with the ketch and off they go, looking for lampuka, though I remember he and Oscar coming home once with an old grandfather octopus. The beast had a beak like an eagle, that old green grandad from the wrecks, grumbling and waving its arms, and we said no, take the monster back. It lay there and looked at us with disdain. A grumpy old patriarch with the sea hissing in his flesh. It will be tough as a tyre, we said, your axe couldn’t cut it. And anyway, it’s bad luck. This one’s old enough to have met the Emperor Napoleon himself. And it has survived those Sicilian pirates in their speedboats. Think of the life it has led. When that beast dies maybe the last memory of Lord Nelson will be lost to the world. And Ahmed looked at us then with octopus eyes.
But Masso? He lives with his mother behind Our Lady of the Victories. It’s a cellar like some whisky-dive but it’s their home when he’s not taking passengers around French Creek in his watertaxi. Masso brings that djhasja across the bay sometimes, and sometimes I go with him, or Oscar, or the African, even the moonmad Macedonian, if he promises to sit tight, and we have a good time with our rods in the summer evenings, the ocean flat and the air still warm, and flocks of songbirds crossing the bay, blackcaps and those little warblers no bigger than olive leaves, always heading away, away from us and the snarers’ nets.
And maybe we play a flawt or guitar but nothing to scare the fish. It’s bream we go for, slippery bream for our baskets and sometimes we’re lucky, but then Masso gets worried about his mother.
What if she’s fallen over? How will a bream help that? he asks.
She’ll only fall over if she has another suck of that duty-free she keeps under the floorboards, Oscar will say, but all too soon it’s ended and our taximan is taking the boat backwards, edging towards the walls and soon we’re under the ramparts’ shadow where the air is cool and purple.
Ciao, Masso, we say, and he putters and phutters back round to his mum, the lady of the victories all right, her shrine where his balls should be, the bottom of his boat full of torn up tickets.
Then there is David who lives on the ramparts above the yacht club in a room that once was a gun emplacement. Snug and dark. That’s the best that can be said for it. At night he will look out at the stations of the stars all the way to Tunis. David spends his money at the tattooist in Strait Street, that little entry between the Smiling Prince tavern and the Consulate of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. A story is unfolding upon his back and shoulders and it concerns his greatest dream. To catch a devil fish. David has heard many stories about them, but none of us, apart from our kingly African, will ever accompany him. Why? Because he sails out for days in an old motor-boat with an oildrum of drinking water and hardly a tarpaulin to hide from the sun. David, bless him, has read the great books and his hero is Odysseus.
David, I say, beware the tales. The poets are never to be trusted. They are an eelish tribe. But that young man has decided he has a quest. We need such things, he says. A great work. A challenge and a life’s undertaking. And I nod and smile and say no more. Too soon David will sleep the iron sleep.
Ciangura? His home is an attic behind the Palazzo Carafa, opposite the Societa Dante Alighieri. You must have seen it? Near the amateur football HQ. Ciangura is determined to net cerna to sell to the restaurants. His cousin is a chef and looks out for our catch. Well this Ciangura, he lives with a dumb woman, her hair is greasy as sump oil. A skinny cat, not bad looking. Or so I’m told. And jumpy as a hare. That’s a poor corner now, though much of the district has become offices for notaries and advocates. You know the type. Well, this woman plays the zither and that’s what you’ll hear if you ever climb to Ciangura’s apartment, someone’s transistor in the middle flat, then this slithery zithery thing at the very top, zinging and zanging, not an atrocious sound. Not an insult to the ear, I have to say. And the sky blue in the roof.
Scibberas’s idea is always to go for ceppulazza, which doesn’t excite many of the others, though they sometimes agree. We always think he has an interesting life because next to him on Saint Christopher Street is a Moroccan trading company that claims to import furniture and musical instruments. But the door is covered in dust and there’s few have seen it open.
Hey Skibbo, we say. What goes on?
Then he will shrug and say ‘search me’ and pull his boat down the steps on a set of pramwheels. But we are suspicious of that smile. It is a dolphin’s smile. Because when the dolphin smiles it is thinking about something else. Well, we’ve heard that Scibberas and Aurelio and Ciangura sometimes help the Moroccans, lugging rugs out of vans. A bit of muscle. And as payment they are each given a pinch of hashchich.
Skibbo, we say, any fool can smell that sweet smoke. The air about you is like a dolceria. And your eyelids, Skibbo, are heavy as a goshawk’s, and a dreamy look upon your face and no edge to you man, these days. No zip in your zobb.
But Skibbo will pull the boat along on its wheels and laugh and stumble and tell us of his dreams and his girl friend’s dreams because they dream the same dream. And we always groan at that and shake our heads. We are experienced men. You must understand that. Men of the world. That kind of talk is bread dipped in tea. The same dream? Sop we call it here. Bloody sop.
2. The Bells
When I awake the Carmelites are chanting. Perhaps it is they who have broken my sleep. But that sound? I say to myself. That sound? I am born in bells. Their cast iron is this apartment’s walls. Green, I say. A green iron sound from which there is no mercy, no mercy from these bells that roar like bulls, green bulls that roam this city at dawn and dusk and every sanctified hour between, and my bed hard as a shelf, this bed drenched in dreams and the light upon me a crust of pearls.
Yes, I say. Praise the bells. They have freed me from the madnesses of sleep. So perhaps I should walk out now and join the devout and the poor and pray for my own soul. I should stand where the bells bellow, stand in the nave of the thunderstorm and let the priests prosecute this intruder. But I tell you straight. I will never confess. Never. I’ve done what I’ve done and I’ll pay what I have to pay but I will not do God’s dirty work.
3. Paradiso
I have seen her sometimes on the stair or at the Stage Door and we have exchanged greetings. Today in Leone’s, there she is, a cup before her like a white bell. Her treat to herself, she says. Coffee with cardamom.
As we have the theatre in common it is easy to talk. It seems she has been a cleaner there for thirty years, starting at fifteen, like her mother before her, her mother with whom she lives in an alley under the eastern bastion.
Not much money, she smiles. But a steady job.
What’s been your favourite concert? I ask.
But Manuela has never attended a concert in the theatre. Nor a play, no
r any paying performance. Rehearsals? Now that’s a different matter.
By the evening, I’m tired out, she says. So much dust. So many people and so much dust. There’s dust in the costumes and a dune of dust in the orchestra pit. It comes from the fresco.
The painting in the cupola?
The fresco. In the paradiso, she says.
I have heard about the painting, I say.
Yes. High up amongst the blue and gold. Three hundred years old. Caravaggio, they say.
Surely not?
El Greco, then.
Never.
Oh maybe, she says. Maybe. He is looking at it now.
Who?
The Superintendent. But he’s been called away.
Show me, I say.
Now?
Yes.
The theatre is always being restored. Its limestone flakes away in a tawny scurf. Its lead leaks, its boards rot. Out in the street, Manuela takes an iron key from her bag and opens the artists’ entrance. We step in darkness down a corridor and up a flight of steps. Suddenly, we are on stage.
Was there a concert last night? I ask.
Nothing.
Are you sure? I thought I heard voices. And singing.
No, nothing.
And strange music.
Manuela laughs. Manuela in her pinafore, Manuela in her slippers because her bunions hurt today. All her life Manuela’s feet have suffered the island’s broken steps.
The light is rosy here. The boxes above stage and along the walls are quilted in a red plush. And there is gilt everywhere, a circuitry of gold luxuriant as honeysuckle. A ladder stands in the auditorium and reaches a hundred feet into the paradiso, and yes, I am climbing, climbing a sketchy ladder towards God, out of the darkness and into the gilded light that filters in through windows like arrow slits, climbing further and Manuela laughing, Manuela whom I thought would protest, but who is laughing at me as if I was performing here for her, Manuela who has never seen a pantomime nor an oratorio, but who watches me now, Manuela who is already so far below in the black ranks of seats and I peer into the Superintendent of Singing’s box and then into the Presidente’s balcony and the light falls over me, a light that might devour me and no there’s no going back even as I feel the ladder shudder and bend, the ladder that is really three, four, five ladders held together in aluminium brackets, a ladder that bows like bamboo, some rungs wooden and some wire and once a rung missing but I am beyond that chasm now and the dust is falling, yes, the paradiso dust that has settled upon me every time I have entered here, the dust I noted in Manuela’s hair as she raised the coffee to her lips, I am ordained in that dust, as were the sopranos and the comedians, the cellists with their knees flung wide as if to receive the dust, that dust is falling past me into the abyss, and here are the nets that catch the goldleaf as it drifts out of heaven, nets of a fine silk stocking mesh with the gilt dull within that weave, dark fishscales of gold that must be counted and catalogued and replaced and the nets billow round me like webs but I shoulder through and there is paint in my mouth that tastes of lead soldiers from a lifetime ago and the ladder bends and my knees ache though all I am thinking of is the coffee in Leone’s, the coffee with cardamom that Manuela urged me to try; I’m surprised you didn’t know already, she had said, surprised you didn’t, the cardamom and the lead soldiers within my mouth, and a knifeblade somehow upon my tongue, which might be fear, an iron tine that presses harder between my teeth even though those teeth are clenched and when I raise my eyes at last here is the ceiling and the fresco foaming so close I might touch it if I chose.
And I choose. Finger by finger I unwrap my right hand from the ladder, the ladder that is tied to two iron brackets in the ceiling and I reach up towards a hand that extends towards me, a saint’s hand or even God’s or maybe the skinny finger of a demon because perhaps the fresco is a depiction of hell, but angel or devil I am glad to touch this figure in the paradiso, his face an empty dial, the colour gone entirely so that only his hand remains here one hundred feet above the auditorium, and beyond that hand yet unreachable are the stars, all dark lanterns now, those stars once silver which today are mere outlines of stars. Yes, a constellation of dead stars and black planets above the gods themselves.
4. Television
Yes, I say to myself. Or rather, no. But what’s certain is that it’s not taken long to lose my mind. Is that something to be proud of? Perhaps I should treasure the fact.
I turn on the television. Channel One is the Government Channel. Channel Two the same. These are live broadcasts of the government’s pronouncements. Channel Three is a repeat of what the government announced yesterday. Channel Four is what the government said two days ago. I zap and zap.
Then, at last. Channel Forty Two is the forecast. Here it comes.
Sea? Confused
Wind? Bourgeois.
Sun? Indiscriminate.
Air? Vanishing.
Fire? Numb.
Earth? Mythic.
Snow? Bisexual.
Visibility? Salacious.
Pressure? Yellow.
Tomorrow? Xenophobic.
Long term? Vodka martini, no ice.
Yes, I say to myself. Yes, yes, yes. Then, no no no no no. Then I say, or. Or or. That’s it, I say. Or.
5. The Pealing
I make an appointment with the Superintendent of Bells. Because I have questions.
Why do the Carmelite church bells and the bells of the shipwreck church and the cathedral bells and St Pawlu bells and St Christopher’s bells and the Lady of Damascus bells and the Victories bells not strike on the hour or the half or the quarter? And if they do strike on the hour, why do they strike the wrong hour?
The Superintendent comes to my apartment to listen. He sits there on my sofa with a saucer upon his knees. We wait. When the bells start to ring, he consults his watch. After one hour, his tea not touched, the Superintendent of Bells says he will inform the pealers’ sergeant-at-arms and that officer will act. Or not, as the case might be.
There is a backlog of enquiries, he says, that must be dealt with first. Some complaints, of course. But also praise for the bells and the bellringers. Some people want more peals.
Did I know that?
There are one hundred and forty seven saints’ days, he says. And that doesn’t include Sundays. Also, there are victory celebrations. There are so many wars. It is lucky for you we do not celebrate the defeats. And of course the bells must be tested. Every so often bells must be brought to the boil. Bells must be allowed their bellowing, as I have heard it put. Bells must bawl. Bells are bowls. We must fill them to the brim. That is why they are bells. If bells don’t ring it is surely a crime and an insult to the bellmakers’ union, the bellbrokers society and campanologists everywhere. At one time, sir, we will all be summoned by bells.
You betcha, I say.
And as far as I am concerned, he says, these bells are not loud. I have visited homes where the grandparents’ dentures have rattled, where the window glass has shivered, where an ikon of Our Lady was disturbed from the wall.
What about the fresco? I ask. In the theatre?
What do you mean?
It’s flaking away. It’s unique and priceless and it’s flaking away. I blame the bells.
Surely not, says the Superintendent. Though now you mention it, the Carmelite bells are particularly…
Unbearable?
Particularly…
Deafening?
No, particularly fine bells.
Particularly loud bells, I say. With monstrous clappers. When they ring, as you’ve heard, it’s like a hundred blacksmiths hammering horseshoes.
Hmm, he says again. The fresco.
I look at the dandruff on his shoulders. The dust.
Perhaps, he says, regarding the fresco, perhaps the Department of Tintinnabulation should be informed.
6. The Soldier’s Tale
There was a man I sometimes saw at Leone’s on the island of lightning. We would talk,
and one day he told me his story.
Yes, I escaped, he said. Came here in the bottom of a fishing boat. The crew threw me out on the north side of the island, not a crust in my pocket, not a word of the island’s language in my head.
For months, maybe years I had stood in the black land. There were the stars, as thick as leopard fur. And below the stars was our platoon. You could predict each one of us: clown, psycho, clerk, coward. Which was I? Apart from such conscripts there was only one real soldier. The sergeant.
We knew that out there in the desert was the madman’s army. We could see their campfires and sometimes the plastic wrappers from their rations blew into our camp. Some of our boys would lick the sugar off the cellophane. But we all understood that their army was as poor as our army, as afraid as our army, as badly-equipped as we were, our guns without bullets, our boots without laces. And we knew they were as stupid as we knew we were stupid. And like our army we knew the other army would be full of beggars and boys and pederasts.
It seemed that I was always on guard. But there was nothing to guard. We were guarding the border but the border was a straight line. On one side, a grain of sand. On the other side, another grain. I used to look at the ground where the border was written and try to understand.
Surely it should be a special place, a border? Maybe it should be a holy place. So why such straight lines? Were the emperors so bored they required their draftsmen to draw the border through mountains and mosques and grazing land, separating the kid from the goat?
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