‘Do you want to stay?’ asks a dreamy young woman in jeans.
‘I do please.’
‘Only you?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Have I displeased her by being only me, or by wanting to stay in the first place? It’s impossible to work out what her curdled expression might mean. Maybe she’s not displeased at all.
‘Is anyone else staying here?’ I venture.
‘I think there’s one couple staying… Some people moved out this morning.’
The bed & breakfast rate is of a cheapness which says that if you like you could stay here for ever, so at once I feel safe. She hands me Key Number 3, explaining that it’s for Room Number 2, and calls mildly round the corner to an invisible presence which turns out to be an exceedingly tall chambermaid with a few long teeth in her upper jaw, who is persuaded to desert the mop-bucket and show me upstairs. The dreamy young woman smiles at last and melts away into a recess and I never see her again either.
The staircase displays more photographs, this time of the Royal Family itself, of both the official and unofficial kind, and they are hung so haphazardly as to suggest an irrepressible excitement: couldn’t wait to get them up and don’t care where they go. But now that the excitement has ebbed away, the photographs look random, poignant, even apprehensive.
At the top of the staircase I come to a large landing with a high ceiling. Its floor is laid with beautiful floral tiles, original nineteenth-century ones. A gilt mirror all foxed across, a console table and giant linen chest strive to an idea of grandeur whose appeal lies not in the achievement but in the attempt. After the shadowed uncertainty below it is so light-hearted up on this airy, flowery dance-floor of a landing, that I can’t help letting out a little laugh or two. Big Bertha looks round at me and shuffles on again. She really is one of the tallest women I’ve ever seen.
My room is a suite. Heavy double doors, once painted dark blue, open into an ante-room which has steps down to a bedroom with two beds, several cupboards, and another tiled floor in pretty colours. Beyond is a bathroom with ants scurrying round the bath-tub as though in a white rollerdrome. Overhanging it there’s a water-heater which Bertha switches on with pride, flicking at the ants with a cloth. Her English is not superb and when I say I’m from London she grunts and says ‘Yes, garden’, opening a door of frosted glass on to a balcony above the rear of the hotel. There’s a small swimming-pool out there containing no water. I divine at once that it will be possible to sit on the loo and stare through the open door at lemon and palm trees without being exposed. The balcony has a washing-line complete with wooden pegs and the afternoon sun streams on to it. Yes, one could live here for quite a while.
When Big Bertha has gone, half chuckling to herself, half amazed, having strenuously tried to refuse my tip, I test the bed. Comfy. Linen sheets, cream woollen English blankets, worn but spotlessly clean. Attached to the high ceiling is an electric fan which works. They tear out fans these days, lower the ceilings and install air-conditioning, but thankfully not here. I am describing the place in some detail because it is a rarity, an example of a kind of sanctum which has almost disappeared from the world. In how many tropical and subtropical rooms like this have I slugged from a bottle, or with luck kissed a neck smelling of sunshine, or opened a book, or daydreamed when the body has come to a horizontal halt but the mind is yet adrift with trains of thought flowing like silken scarves into empty spaces. The Fonseca Hotel, Aurangzeb Road, New Delhi, where I stayed with Sarah – it was a spacious Lutyens villa now demolished (someone said there is a Holiday Inn on the site). That fabulous hotel in Trivandrum with the teak interiors and white muslin mosquito-nets. It was called, I think, the Mascot. Is it still there and in proper shape? The Constellation in Vientiane, becalmed and mysterious during the monsoon season before the Communist takeover, or the Christina in Mexico City, with its vestigial French trimmings – do they retain anything of their anachronistic allure even if they are still extant? Those passe hotels with big cheap rooms, they were so sexy and useful, and heady with escape from personal history and with opportunity to live anew.
Victoria’s main street, accelerating in steepness to the small central square with its red telephone box and red pillar box, is lined with classical buildings of high quality put up in the local golden stone. These include two enormous theatres, the Aurora and the Astra, each belonging to one of the island’s two principal brass bands. At 9 pm it has grown cold and dark, the streets are empty, there is no passeggiata in this land, the Gozitans don’t go out, and there isn’t a single restaurant open, only a couple of bars lit by the heartless glare of strip lighting. Inside them a few gnarled peasants smoke and growl. From the citadel’s breezy ramparts one sees perhaps as many as twenty churches presiding from as many hills, near and far, all picked out in yellow lightbulbs like Harrods or the Maharajah’s palace at Mysore. It is a unique sight, so many large churches within such a small non-urban compass. They are lit like this because Easter is approaching, which for Christians is a mixture of misery and exultation, hideous death and weird resurrection, but which usually affects me more directly as the spring festival, joyous herald of the flowering year.
Back at the Duke of Edinburgh I discover the hotel restaurant is open, the only one in Victoria open at night-time, and I order a pizza which is all that’s on the menu. Pizzas, seemingly, are what keep the hotel going. Mine is excellent, but the other diners don’t give me so much as a glance and I retire to my room with the remains of a bottle of Gozitan red – good colour, robust taste, no tartness or trace of additives. It’s called Bacchus Wine on its charming label – and so… here I am on the island with the wonderful four-letter name, with my muscles easing as the ruby liquid suffuses them. But now that I’m here – well, what am I going to do?
I think I am going to do nothing. It seems to be what the locals are doing. In which case I’d better rent that car. In places like this you require a car if you are to wander aimlessly, lest you find yourself having to take buses to specific destinations. The bedroom has grown chilly, so I switch on the heater. The only other guests in the hotel, the couple, are lodged in the suite next to mine, presumably for the maid’s convenience. Through the wall the sounds of their love-making socialise the silence. No, I’m not envious. I have all that back in Palermo – otherwise, yes, I should be envious. And I don’t grow a sympathetic erection either, but am rendered cosy by the pulsations from the other side of the wall as though we were three dogs in a kennel. Then I get an erection…
In the morning I awoke too early for breakfast, and when I awoke again it was too late. In theory I always like to go down for breakfast – but in the event it’s always a bind, falling out of the shower and into one’s clothes and down the stairs in a mist of semi-wakefulness. Over at the car-hire, the agent pooh-poohs my enquiry of ‘Do I leave a deposit?’ This is remarkable, as is the fact that the car is one of half a dozen parked in the road outside his office, all of them unlocked with the keys inserted and ready to start. Surely we are in the only place in the entire Mediterranean region where such a thing is possible? The gears of mine are pretty much wrecked – it takes some fishing about to find one – but driving on Gozo is sheer honky-tonk pleasure. All roads splay out from Victoria, so basically you move in the direction you wish to go and trust to instinct. You may be on the wrong road but you cannot get lost.
Between stone-walled fields in a landscape of mesas and wild flowers, past yellow houses with green shutters, I head for the principal sight of the island, the prehistoric Ggantija Temples, but they are closed to-day and I judder on to Ramla Bay. I don’t think it’s warm enough to swim in the sea but you never know. Ramla is embraced by cliffs stacked in flakes and by terraces of maize and is overlooked by Calypso’s cave. One of her caves, that is. Her various caves are disputed by historians. But this is the finest beach in a not very beachy archipelago and developers therefore are always trying to destroy it. The Government has resisted – to date. There
are only three other cars parked where the road peters out. The sand is orange and blank except for a couple of stragglers, a van selling snacks, and a man with shaggy hair leading a donkey. An onshore wind has driven up the waves into frothing bands and I have a dutiful paddle where their extremities soak away into the sand. The water’s freezing.
I forgot to bring a towel and so dry my feet with the socks before putting on plimsolls and unzipping a banana. Deep breaths. Lungs of ozone. This is the life. What next? Explore of course. On the far side of the beach are rocks beneath cliff paths and I am soon scrambling over them, steadying myself by grasping at bulges of stone. I’m doing quite well until, on looking down, I see that my plimsolls are smeared with tar. It’s horrible. I’ll probably have to throw them away. I examine the situation more closely. Enormous clots of the stuff cling to the bases of the rocks like a black death. Patches of what one believed to be a type of colour variation turn out to be this treacly filth. It’s ghastly. It’s criminal. It shouldn’t be allowed. I’ll have to climb to a higher track, one that is above the sea’s deposit line along which tar has accumulated and which no doubt forms a satanic tourniquet extending round the whole island.
The higher track restores my equanimity a bit, because the views are panoramic, but before long this track too becomes impassable, waterlogged at vital points because of recent rain. Looking round for an alternative route, none is obviously available. But some distance ahead across the rocks I spy a figure, the first person I’ve seen since leaving the beach. He is walking towards me. So the way must be possible to negotiate somehow. Suddenly I realise that this is the man from the traffic lights, the one who gave me the fierce look through the taxi window. I hope he’s in a better mood this time and I sit on a boulder to await his arrival. He will know all about the condition of the path.
But strange to say, he never does arrive. The track curves in and out of one’s line of vision but the man does not again emerge into view. Where has he gone? I cannot see that it’s possible for him to take another route – so has the earth swallowed him up? In a disturbing way I feel associated with his disappearance, in that had he not seen me, had I not been here, he would surely have passed by this boulder. In fact it’s obvious that he’s decided to avoid me. But how has he managed it? Is there a secret tunnel in the cliff? Or a grotto wherein he lurks, waiting to pounce on me should I proceed? Or is he crouching behind a rock until I’ve gone? I’ll go back. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go back to the beach. Because for the first time in Gozo, or in Malta for that matter, I’ve experienced the warning bell of personal danger.
The wind has strengthened. I stumble around searching for shelter among the low dunes and scrubland… that looks like a choice spot over there, a sandy glade protected from the weather, and from onlookers, by thick bushes. But I pull up almost at once; it is already occupied. A middle-aged man is in there, reclining on a towel and reading a book. He doesn’t resemble the frowning one in any way but wears a polo-neck sweater in a fine material of salmon-pink colour and his face is shaded by a straw hat with wide brim. I can see he has a white moustache clipped short but not much more. But on my sudden intrusion into his privacy he lays the book aside and looks up. ‘Hullo,’ he says. His eyes are very blue and seem pleased by the prospect of company, so we exchange smiles and introductions. His name is Gregory. He says he’s a painter but it turns out that painting is only one of his activities. He seems more of a polymath as references to harpsichord music, Ancient Greek, geology, and much else, crop up in his conversation. ‘I’ve been living on Gozo since 1968,’ he says with neither relish nor distaste. It is far from his place of origin whose name I can’t remember; it was somewhere in the USA.
‘God, I bet you’ve seen some changes round here.’
‘Oh, the centre of the island’s almost filled up with houses. I think they’re running out of stone. Do you know, I was reading an article on Postmodernism in architecture the other day, and the author said that Gozo is the only place where the production of the classical pillar has gone on uninterruptedly since the Roman Empire. Have you been swimming?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Rain or shine, winter or summer, I swim every day,’ he declares. ‘But I don’t sunbathe any longer. I had a touch of skin cancer which is now sorted out but that’s why I’m done up like this.’
There is an outburst above us and both our heads turn. A shepherd boy, capering down the rocky hillside in S-shaped descents, is whooping and laughing as he leads his flock in a Gadarene run. The sheep dart hither and thither in unison like a school of fish. I look at Gregory, thinking he might say something, but he is now gazing sublimely out to sea through his translucent blue eyes, with the expression on his face of a stranded deity – thoroughly here, thoroughly not here, as if he has a great deal more space between his atoms than do most people. I pick up handfuls of sand and let the grains trickle slowly through my fingers.
After a few minutes he makes another observation. ‘The atmosphere can sometimes be very unobstructive. Do you know, once or twice a year you can see Sicily from Ramla. And once in a decade you can see Aetna.’
‘Do you go to Sicily much?’
‘I don’t go anywhere much. I have travelled. Widely. But now I stay here. I can hardly get it together to go into Victoria to have my eyes tested.’
‘I met some Gozitans on the boat. They said that sailing up to Sicily was like sailing to civilisation. Did you find that?’
He thinks a while before replying: ‘It probably depends on what you’re looking for.’
In a place like Victoria, with nothing to do at night, with no radio or television or company in my room, I rediscover the fantastic power of cinema. I hunger for every film that comes on at the Aurora or Astra, any piece of trash. At the Aurora this evening I’ve seen Diamond Skulls, about extreme nastiness among the British upper classes. The Aurora’s auditorium was built on a lavish scale in the nineteenth century, but gutted by fire, later refitted in the Festival of Britain style, and to-night there was a distinct pong of rotting fish weaving about inside. A mere two dozen customers partook of this giant space for the Saturday night show. And there was an interval. A proper one in the middle of the programme. Haven’t known a proper interval at the cinema since the double-film shows of my boyhood or the two-part epic films of my adolescence. But they had one here. Of course it was a bit odd: they simply stopped the film mid-reel halfway through. Nobody did anything; no girl in a bonnet came round with ice creams on a tray slung from her neck; the film ground to a halt, the lights – red by the way – came up for ten minutes, went down again, and the film flickered back into life.
But this wasn’t all that happened, because when the lights came up, bringing a break from the murderous mayhem on screen, I stood up to stretch my legs, looked round the great blood-red space, the mother of all wombs – and saw that man again, the traffic lights one, the man who’d vanished into the rocks. He was sitting about eight rows behind me and over to the left. I didn’t like to stare because his dark features were lost in the umbra and I’d be unable to determine his eye. But it was the frowning one all right. I decided to walk out to the foyer as an excuse for a better glimpse of him, and as I passed he held his eyes rigidly ahead, deliberately not looking at me. Therefore – yes – he’d noticed me too. On coming back in, I didn’t return to my former place but sat three rows behind him and observed how the red lamps reflected on his black curls. When the film restarted I was only tenuously reabsorbed by its unpleasant narrative. Quite a lot of the time I meditated on the back of the frowning one’s head until – I don’t know how it happened – it wasn’t there any more. He’d gone. The man had gone. How could he have left without my noticing? He couldn’t have done that. But he had. There was a quick flutter of panic. I felt ridiculous. I suppose I’d been more attentive to the film than I thought and he’d subtly slipped away. Who is he? And why is he playing these tricks on me?
Gozo is not fashionable. The
last notables to live here were Nicholas Monsarrat who took to drink but who was writing up to a week before his death from cancer, and Anthony Burgess who’d taken to drink long before arriving and ‘who complained,’ said Gregory, ‘that Maltese Government censorship was so bad that he couldn’t receive some of his own books!’ The reason for its unfashionable-ness is the food, which if anything is even worse than on Malta, which means it’s the worst food I’ve ever encountered, worse even than Poland’s (my visit to Russia lay in the future). They simply have no awareness of nutrition or taste at all, and the food shops are filled with rock-hard rubbish and are often dirty. But there’s a small supermarket selling British and German tins and sadly (on those days when I can’t face another hotel pizza or afford the only decent restaurant, Salvina’s) I’m relying on these plus vitamin pills. The menu attached to the snack-van at Ramla Bay reads: spaghetti & chips, hot dog, hamburger, fried egg, white bread & butter. When one lunchtime I went to its counter, the only things I could bring myself to buy were a bottle of soda water and a packet of banana chewing-gum manufactured in South Korea.
To-night (to-day being the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows) a Madonna is paraded through the central square, supported by grim or giggling males, and accompanied by rocking candles in red glasses. The effigy is followed at snail’s pace by a baby Austin van inside which a big peasant priest, his knees forced up under his chin, drones intonements through a crackly loudspeaker strapped to the roof. Around it, and behind, shuffles a throng of Gozitans in subfusc clothes, muttering responses. Some German tourists, jazzily attired, are silenced by the spectacle, and look on motionlessly until one of them takes a photograph, and the spell is broken, and they disappear noisily down the hill. Overhead meanwhile, thousands of birds are screaming in the trees. Their multiple, overlapping chirrups grate violently on the eardrums. The triple conjunction – shuffling Gozitans, jazzy Germans, screaming birds – makes me feel sick. Why this particular form of helplessness should strike, I don’t know, but I’m not surprised by it and decide to return to the refuge of my room and an evening with a book, a bottle of Bacchus, and tins.
How to Disappear Page 2