How to Disappear (3 page)

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.

A Sicilian friend of mine has a theory that the people of the sea are more intelligent than the people of the mountains because sea-air confers some chemical advantage to the development of the brain. The Gozitans seem not to support his theory in that, though generally good-natured when you do get through to them, they are not conversationalists or mentally agile. Rationality isn't their strong suit either. So to-night in the bar of my hotel it takes persistence to extract from the owner's son that the hotel is over one hundred years old and has always had the same name. For some reason he feels this is compatible with its being named after the Duke of Edinburgh who is the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. Such elementary failure of logic is what can stun you hereabouts and, as so often, one wonders whether religion be the cause or effect of such a condition. In fact the hotel must be named after the previous holder of the Edinburgh title, Prince Alfred, ‘Affie', Queen Victoria's fourth child, who married the daughter of Tsar Alexander II. (Subsequent research discloses that Affie was also Commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, a keen violinist, and a collector of stamps which on his death in 1900 he left to the British Museum.)

The hotel is very conveniently situated. All the amenities of the town – bank, post office, newspaper shop, the Rundle Gardens, the two theatres, the Telemalta overseas telephone service – are only a few steps from its front door. I must tell you – I was phoning from the Telemalta office yesterday and asked for a London directory. They didn't have one; they had very few directories. ‘We have this,' said the pretty girl, eager to help, and she handed me the directory for Costa Rica.

Good Friday. The Crucifixion of Our Lord. Why do they call it ‘good'? It's like Sunday with knobs on, a gloom of the spirits so palpable you could bottle it and sell it as paperweights. Every flag is at half-mast. The theatres have placed crosses over their entrances and from the balcony of the Aurora two loudspeakers broadcast tapes of their brass-band blowing sedate Victorian and Italian marches and slow dance tunes, all in minor keys, with very miser-able effect. The failure to hit notes adds an extra blighted touch and all is smeared into a whine by the poor quality of the sound system. A little boy and girl holding hands stare up perplexedly at the speakers as though trying to work out how the awful noise got up there.

Gozo's relative treelessness means that the salt air carries right across the island and when it isn't hot this makes the air clammy and chill. There is consequently a stickiness to the bedcover over which I am this afternoon extending my limbs, with a bunch of pillows at the head, reading Pope's
The Rape of the Lock
while, between verses, I fitfully consider my solitary state…There is nothing to worry about. Which can sometimes induce a free-fall vertigo because worries are the banisters of life. But at present, no free fall. Thoughts and impressions pass through me in leisurely, comprehensible chains of reflection. Yet the very blankness of the worry sheet supplies a surface on which a fine seismic needle can now and again scratch a distant unease and it takes mere moments to realise that this unease derives from the frowning one. In a busier world I'd not notice it – or him – but here… well, I suppose without unease there can be no adventure. Unease is the awareness of exposure, of possibility, that something else might happen. Unease brings alertness – which means that Gozo is not bland. The couple next door appear to have left. I am now the hotel's only guest. I wonder if I shall be the only person in the building when they close up at night. I do hope not. From the balcony the garden looks dull and damp. I come back in and give the book on the bed a shove with my knee. A shudder passes between my shoulderblades. I look round, and again I look round. My pulse quickens. Suddenly I am anxious.