02 _ Maltese Goddess, The (9 page)

One would think that by this time I might have noticed that the alignment of whichever celestial bodies were responsible for the events in my life was hurtling me down a steep and slippery slope. At the time, though, I thought Joseph’s disappearance merely another in a series of rather vexatious events, all part of the project at hand.

To my mind, every day brought its particular trial. The problem of the previous day, Wednesday, for example was water, or rather the lack thereof, as I discovered when I went to shower the morning after Dr. Stanhope’s lecture. This brought Nicholas, the plumber. I was always surprised by the British-sounding names attached to people who were obviously Maltese, like Anthony for example, but I shouldn’t have been. The last British barracks closed for good in 1979, and the British influence was still pretty pervasive.

Nicholas, a greying man with considerable paunch, insufficient teeth, and what I took to be a perpetually grave and worried air, tsked and clucked his way around the house until the source of the problem was found. This took two hours— and four holes in the walls.

“The paint is barely dry on the repairs to one disaster before it’s time to mix some more,” I whined to Marissa.

“Why don’t you go and do some sight-seeing?” she replied. “We can look after this.” I took this to mean I was fussing and getting in the way. Actually, with the exception of the adventure of Tuesday evening, the days were beginning to be remarkably the same. Every morning I’d survey the progress and discover the next disaster. Repairmen would be summoned, and I’d spend the rest of the day and well into the evening literally watching paint dry. And listening to the one decent tape I’d been able to find to play on the antiquated tape player—the workmen preferring late seventies disco music— a collection of Italian arias sung by a Maltese soprano, Miriam Gauci. Fortunately it was a wonderful tape.

There was my research, of course, on the Great White Hunter, a project I began as soon as I got back to the house after Dr. Stanhope’s lecture, stimulated by the fear of another encounter with that dreadful man. I sat on the edge of the bed with the guidebook and a map spread out, and tried to figure out if in fact it was mere coincidence that I kept running into him. One thing I learned very quickly: Malta had the most amazing history. Almost everyone seems to have come to Malta at some point. It might be more accurate to say everyone and everything because even animals escaping the Ice Age crossed over a land bridge that linked Malta to Europe and possibly to Africa, back in the mists of time. For a while it seemed to be impossible to find any connection between my peregrinations and those of GWH, other than the somehow unlikely assumption that he, like Anthony, was a fan of Gerolamo Cassar, but in the end it proved reasonably simple.

Anna Stanhope would probably have said that the most important age for Malta was that of the temple builders, and if longevity counts, she would be right. The temple builders may have been on Malta for as many as six hundred years, and after they left, just about everyone in the Mediterranean used the island for some purpose at some time. The Phoenicians used it as a base, as did the Carthaginians. Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, is said to have surrendered to the Romans there, for example. The Greeks were there, the Romans, even St. Paul, who is said to have been shipwrecked off Malta’s coast.

But if one were to look for the most prominent influence on the island, in terms of its landscape, its customs and practices, arguably this title would belong to the Knights. And it was here that I began to see some consistency in the places I’d seen GWH.

The story of the Knights began, I learned, in about 1085 when a group of monks known as Hospitallers began to minister to Christians who required medical attention on pilgrimages to the Holy Land. It soon became evident, though, that what these pilgrims really needed was protection from the so-called Infidel, in other words the followers of Islam, much more so than medical attention. Thus the Knights of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem came into being, an order that offered care and service to those in need, backed up by knights prepared to do battle if need be.

Gradually the Ottoman Turks began to gain the ascendancy in the Holy Land and the Knights of St. John were driven out of Jerusalem by Saladin, then out of Acre, then Cyprus, at which point they got to Rhodes. Here they stayed a while, only to be driven out again, this time by Sulieman the Magnificent. Sulieman allowed them to leave Rhodes, but this time they had no fallback position. They had nowhere to go.

Charles V of Spain, at the time Holy Roman Emperor, had various lands in his possession for which he apparently felt no great need. The island of Malta was among them. At first the Knights were not interested—they thought the island disagreeable at best—but in the end, what choice did they have? Beggars can’t be choosers. It was that or Tripoli, which was even worse, and they couldn’t argue with the rent: one falcon a year for Charles, the real Maltese falcon. After seven years of negotiation, they agreed to go to Malta, and most of Christendom heaved a collective sigh of relief, homeless knights being an embarrassment to all. Henceforth the Order came to be associated with Malta, and they built the great cities and fortifications that are so much a part of Malta today.

What was relevant for my research of the day, however, was that while Anthony had emphasized the architecture and the current use of the buildings: the Post Office, the Prime Minister’s residence, and so on, the original use of every one of these places we had gone, and everywhere I had seen GWH, lurking in that way he had, led back directly to the Knights: either the inns or auberges in which various orders of the Knights had lived, their cathedral, their hospital, and so on.

The question was: So what? It was all very interesting, but it didn’t get me anywhere. GWH was as entitled as anyone to visit those places, and maybe he was just a student of that particular period of history. In the end my research was just about as rewarding as the rest of my evenings at the house.

After the repairs and the research, the daily phone call to Toronto to check on the furniture shipment was about as exciting as it got. Dave Thomson had been right about France. A national transportation strike had shut the country down. Toronto International was still experiencing delays because of the weather, and when I wasn’t bored, I was in a state of high anxiety.

“Anthony told me about the lecture you went to last night. It sounded… interesting,” Marissa said rather hesitantly after a particularly prolonged bout of complaining on my part. She probably thought she was taking her life in her hands to talk to me, my just having had a hissy fit on the subject of the water problem.

“Actually, it was,” I said, cheering up slightly. “Whether you agree with Dr. Stanhope’s point of view or not. I had no idea a little island like this one could sustain such a rich and fascinating heritage!”

“It does.” She smiled. “One of the temple complexes the professor told you about isn’t far from here—Hagar Qim and Mnajdra. They’re very close by car.”

“I’ll bet!” I said, remembering my harried drive of the day before in crystal clear detail.

“Really!” she affirmed, then giggled. I guess Anthony had told her how lost I’d managed to get. I’d given him the edited version on the way home, omitting the part about the Great White Hunter. Tourists trying to find their way around this tiny island seemed to be a grand source of merriment for the locals.

“How far is it, exactly?” I asked.

“It’s exactly a mile… or thereabouts,” she said, not being quite as precise as I’d hoped. “You could actually walk if you wanted to.”

I thought this a much less stressful mode of travel than the car from hell, so soon I headed out with Marissa’s carefully drawn map in hand.

She was right. It was relatively easy. I just had to keep the sea on my right.

Walking is a wonderful way to see a new country and for a little while I was able to enjoy, indeed revel, in the sights and sounds and smells of a new place. It might have been the dead of winter at home, and an exceptionally harsh winter at that, but here it was already spring. There was warmth in the air and fields of poppies everywhere, bright flashes of brilliant color against the subdued pastel of the terrain.

Several times I stopped to look at tiny mauve and white flowers—I had no idea what they were—bravely clinging to existence in the thin and arid soil. I followed a rough path along the edge of the cliffs for a time, then turned inland to pick up a footpath that arched to the north and then angled back toward the water, passing just inland of the temple complex.

You could see the huge stones that formed the temple walls, megaliths indeed, their color bleached almost white in the bright sunlight, long before you reached the site. Maltese temples are circular in shape, made from huge limestone blocks, each weighing several tons, I should think. Some of the stones are covered with what look like pockmarks, put there by ancient craftsmen. The temples reminded me a little bit of the shape and grandeur of Stonehenge or some of the other stone circles you see in Northern Europe and Britain, but the Maltese temples are much older, and their design seemed more complex to my eye: circular chambers that lead into other circular chambers to form either a trefoil or a cinquefoil, three or five rounded chambers or apses leading off a central area. I knew from Dr. Stanhope’s lecture of the previous evening that these temples are the oldest freestanding stone structures in the world, and the huge statues of the Goddess that once rested there, probably the first freestanding statues anywhere as well.

I recalled Dr. Stanhope had said these complexes were built between about 3600 and 2500 b.c.e., by people who had neither copper nor bronze, and who used only blades made from local stones or from flint mined in Pantelleria over 125 miles away, an incredible feat when you thought about it. She had also said the temples were designed in the shape of the Goddess Herself, although I had difficulty conceptualizing what exactly that meant.

I wandered about the site for a while, marveling at the workmanship, enjoying the shade provided by the massive stones. An old woman also resting in the shade smiled at me and gestured in the direction of a path that led toward the sea. I followed her pointing finger and walked down a long stone causeway to a second site nestled on a snug promontory on a steep cliff well over a hundred yards above the sea. I took this to be Mnajdra.

Walking through the portal flanked by large stones, I suddenly felt I was indeed in a sacred place. From time to time we come to places which contain a special power for us. Where each individual feels this power, this mystery, probably says more about the person than the place. I consider myself fortunate to have been touched by this feeling more than once, not, as life would have it, in the monuments deemed spiritual by our society, but instead in the ancient remains of past civilizations.

Mnajdra was such a place for me. I thought about the people who built it, 11,000 of them at the height of the temple building phase Dr. Stanhope had spoken of; how they had chosen this site, perhaps because it also spoke to them; how they had eked out an existence on these rocky shores while seeking to transcend their physical existence through the concrete expression of their spiritual longing in the carving and placement of each of these stones.

I suddenly understood what Dr. Stanhope had meant about entering the body of the Goddess each time you entered a temple. Viewed from the sky above, I realized, a smaller chamber at the top would be Her head, the rounded chamber in the middle Her encircling arms, the much bigger chamber at the entrance Her large belly and thighs. The body of the Great Goddess of Malta, I knew, was large, like her Paleolithic forebears, a symbol of fecundity. Fat Ladies, Anthony had called them.

Outside again, I found a place with a breeze, overlooking the site and the sea, and sat, lost in my thoughts. More than anything else I thought about Lucas. His specialty was Mayan archaeology, of course, but he had a wonderful sense of exploration and delight in new experiences, and I thought how much he would have loved it here.

He would have known, without being told, how the temples were constructed, what kind of roof had covered them, and he would have had a theory about each and every component and artifact. I’d noticed a pitted stone monument at Hagar Qim— I’d assumed it to be an altar—on which was carved what could have been a spinal column but more likely was a plant of some kind growing out of a pot. Lucas would have told me all about tree cults, I’m sure, or about something similar from his part of the world. I could almost see him standing there, tall and slim against the sunlight, his long dark hair streaked with grey, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt as he almost always was. I could picture the way he’d look at me as he spoke, the shape of his arms as he pointed out the features of the sight.

I suddenly missed him so much, I could feel a constriction in my throat and a burning behind my eyes. I could only hope that halfway round the world at his archaeological site, he was thinking of me at that moment too.