The Pillars of Hercules

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.