V.

Of the performance; yawn toward afternoon,

Begin to see the peeling paint on Judy's cheek,

Detect implausibility in the palsied stick

And self-deception in the villain's laugh.

But dear Christ, whose slim jewelled hand was it

Flicked from the wings so unexpected,

Holding the lighted wax taper

To send up all our poor but precious tinder

In flame of terrible colours?

Who was she who gently laughed, "Good night,"

Among the hoarse screaming of aged children?”

From the quick to the inanimate. The great "movement" of the Siege poetry. As went Fausto II's already dual soul. All the while, only in the process of learning life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Seeing his mother after a period of months away:

'Time has touched her. I found myself wondering: did she know that in this infant she brought forth, to whom she gave the name for happy (ironic?) was a soul which would become torn and unhappy? Does any mother anticipate the future; acknowledge when the time comes that a son is now a man and must leave her to make whatever peace he can alone on a treacherous earth. No, it's the same Maltese timelessness. They don't feel the fingers of years jittering age, fallibility, blindness into face, heart and eyes. A son is a son, fixed always in the red and wrinkled image as they first see it. There are always elephants to be made drunk.'

This last from an old folk tale. The king wants a palace made of elephant tusks. The boy had inherited physical strength from his father, a military hero. But it was for the mother to teach the son cunning. Make friends with them, feed them wine, kill them, steal their ivory. The boy is successful of course. But no mention of a sea voyage.

"There must have been," Fausto explains, "millennia ago, a land-bridge. They called Africa the Land of the Axe. There were elephants south of Mount Ruwenzori. Since then the sea has steadily crept in. German bombs may finish it."

Decadence, decadence. What is it? Only a clear movement toward death or, preferably, non-humanity. As Fausto II and III, like their island, became more inanimate, they moved closer to the time when like any dead leaf or fragment of metal they'd be finally subject to the laws of physics. All the time pretending it was a great struggle between the laws of man and the laws of God.

Is it only because Malta is a matriarchal island that Fausto felt so strongly that connection between mother-rule and decadence?

"Mothers are closer than anyone to accident. They are most painfully conscious of the fertilized egg; as Mary knew the moment of conception. But the zygote has no soul. Is matter." Further along these lines he would not go. But;

'Their babies always seem to come by happenstance; a random conjunction of events. Mothers close ranks, and perpetrate a fictional mystery about motherhood. It's only a way of compensating for an inability to live with the truth. Truth being that they do not understand what is going on inside them; that it is a mechanical and alien growth which at some point acquires a soul. They are possessed. Or: the same forces which dictate the bomb's trajectory, the deaths of stars, the wind and the waterspout have focussed somewhere inside the pelvic frontiers without their consent, to generate one more mighty accident. It frightens them to death. It would frighten anyone.'

So it moves us on toward the question of Fausto's "understanding" with God. Apparently his problem was never as simple as God v. Caesar, especially Caesar inanimate - the one we see in old medals and statues, the "force" we read of in history texts. Caesar for one thing was animate once, and had his own difficulties with a world of things as well as a degenerate crew of gods. It would be easier, since drama arises out of conflict, to call it simply human law v. divine, all within the arena in quarantine that had been Fausto's home. I mean his soul and I also mean the island. But this isn't drama. Only an apologia for the Day of the 13 Raids. Even what happened then had no clear lines drawn.

I know of machines that are more complex than people. If this is apostasy, hekk ikun. To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

More and more alien from himself, Fausto II began to detect signs of lovely inanimateness in the world around him.

'Now the winter's gregale brings in bombers from the north; as Euroclydon brought in St. Paul. Blessings, curses. But is the wind any part of us? Has it anything at all to do with us?