Island of Lightning (10 page)

Yes, says Omar. Our fortune is built on such men. So God help us. First there's Oscar, who lives in a hovel on Mediterranean Street. Oscar's family have been sailors since the beginning. But Oscar likes the marsovin too much. He owns a paint-bleached barkazza and a broken gondola, and he sails out of an evening, looking for octopus.

Then there's Georgiou of St. Ursula Street, who steals lobsters from the pots under the western ramparts. That used to be a capital offence, I've seen men keelhauled for such. But of course, a sailor is a man and a man must live. So don't mind Georgiou. His barque is worse than his bight.

Have you met Manoel from Eagle Street? Ah, Manoel, he braves seas so rough in that old ketch of his, you think he's never coming back. Force nine is a child's breath to Manoel. But as I say, fishermen must live and Manoel casts nets for bristling and white pilchard.

And you must have seen the African from the warren in the walls? He's made a boat from the planks of other boats, bits of driftwood and floats. He sets off in that raft with his five-tanged fork searching for angel shark. Maybe he was a great captain in his own country, which is Sierra Leone, a kingdom of cruelties where most of the murderers are children. Or so I'm told. And yes, there are scars on his back, healed violet. And burns on his wrists and ankles. But sometimes I look at him and see a stateliness in his eye.

Then there's Hilario of South Street who puts to sea in a gharbiel, the water coming through the joints, a real sieve, hardly a bucket, more like a nightsoil barrel, yes a pisspot with a crack in it, that's Hilario's galleon, mad old Hilario who couldn't catch himself but one morning came back with a mermaid, and friend I tell you, Hilario married this mermaid and she lived with him on South Street. Well, that's the story. Dispute it with Hilario when he's sober. He comes out with us sometimes when we go after flapperskate. Bloody old Hilario, he's fathomless to me, bobbing out there like a cork, an old man astride his mustardiera, the wind taking the sail of his trousers. Old Hilario, blown along by his farts.

Of course you can't forget Marcello, coming across the harbour in his scutch. That's Marcello of St. Elmo Street where there are more boats than headlice and the nets hang like spiderwebs.

Now Michelangelo, he lives on Old Theatre Street and works on the dredger, ‘Sapphire' in the grand harbour. He borrows his brother's gondola and rows to the islet where the softbodied crabs live in the rock pools. Sometimes he brings us a coffeesack full, the whole bag wriggling and the crabs wheezing like tiny bellows. That's a peculiar music to hear at dawn.

Don't forget McCale, the nostromomu. He doesn't usually come on our voyages. But he offers us stories. Once, marooned on the Black Isle, he milked a cowfish. That's how he survived. The milk, he said, tasted as diamonds might taste, though salty as caviar. Yes, yes, McCale we say, go back to your cactus juice and Neptune save the ships you steer towards port. Why not sleep it all off in St. Pawlu Street with your fat wife?

Then there's Aurelio, a good boy from the poorest barrakka on the western side, who will dive from the side of any boat and bring back cowries. Once he came up with an oyster filled with a rainwater-coloured pearlseed that somehow Hilario swallowed when he was sniffing it. May it grow to choke that imbecile. Or maybe I think, maybe Hilario is not as stupid as he pretends. That gumboil of his…

Of course, there's the Macedonian too. He cannot swim nor sail and once went round all night under the moon. We found him the next morning in the same place and that Macedonian moonstruck, babbling away in his abominable Greek. We gave him espressos in the QE2 bar, and the next day he brought us aubergines from his garden, and sweet peppers he had grown in a window box. Stay home we told him, and water your seeds, or we will be lighting a candle in a red glass for you down at the shipwreck church. The fool had seen meteors all night and had thought them portents of his own death. Ah, we laughed there in the tavern, you must be a great man for heaven to fill with fire for you. Look, we'll take you to the fishmonger in the suq so you can learn why we sail out. Why we do what we do. But no more ragtime with ragworm for you.

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, nor 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.