V.

Is it night only that wraps Valletta? Or is it a human emotion; "an air of expectancy"? Not the expectancy of dreams, where our awaited is unclear and unnameable. Valletta knows well enough what she waits for. There is no tension or malaise to this silence; it's cool, secure; the silence of boredom or well-accustomed ritual. A gang of artillerymen in the next street make hastily for their emplacement. But their vulgar song fades away, leaving one embarrassed voice which finally runs out in mid-word.

Thank God you're safe, Elena, in our other, subterranean home. You and the child. If old Saturno Aghtina and his wife have now moved permanently to the old sewer, then there is care for Paola when you must go out to do your work. How many other families have cared for her? All our babies have had only one father, the war; one mother, Malta, her women. Bad lookout for the Family, and for mother-rule. Clans and matriarchy are incompatible with this Communion war has brought to Malta.

I go from you love not because I must. We men are not a race of freebooters or giaours; not when our argosies are prey and food to the evil fish-of-metal whose lair is a German U-boat. There is no more world but the island; and it's only a day to any sea's verge. There is no leaving you, Elena; not in truth.

But in dream there are two worlds: the street, and under the street. One is the kingdom of death, and one of life. And how can a poet live without exploring the other kingdom, even if only as a kind of tourist? A poet feeds on dream. If no convoys come what else is there to feed on?'

Poor Fausto. The "vulgar song" was sung to a march called Colonel Bogie:

"Hitler

Has only one left ball,

Goering

Has two but they are small;

Himmler

Has something similar,

But Goebbels

Has no balls

At all . . ."

Proving perhaps that virility on Malta did not depend on mobility. They were all, as Fausto was first to admit, labourers not adventurers. Malta, and her inhabitants, stood like an immovable rock in the river Fortune, now at war's flood. The same motives which cause us to populate a dream-street, also cause us to apply to a rock human qualities like "invincibility," "tenacity," "perseverance," etc. More than metaphor, it is delusion. But on the strength of this delusion Malta survived.

Manhood on Malta thus became increasingly defined in terms of rockhood. This had its dangers for Fausto. Living as be does much of the time in a world of metaphor, the poet is always acutely conscious that metaphor has no value apart from its function; that it is a device, an artifice. So that while others may look on the laws of physics as legislation and God as a human form with beard measured in light-years and nebulae for sandals, Fausto's kind are alone with the task of living in a universe of things which simply are, and cloaking that innate mindlessness with comfortable and pious metaphor so that the "practical" half of humanity may continue in the Great Lie, confident that their machines, dwellings, streets and weather share the same human motives, personal traits and fits of contrariness as they.

Poets have been at this for centuries. It is the only useful purpose they do serve in society: and if every poet were to vanish tomorrow, society would live no longer than the quick memories and dead books of their poetry.

It is the "role" of the poet, this 20th Century. To lie. Dnubietna wrote:

"If I told the truth

You would not believe me.

If I said: no fellow soul

Drops death from the air, no conscious plot

Drove us underground you would laugh

As if I had twitched the wax mouth

Of my tragic mask into a smile -

A smile to you; to me the truth behind

The catenary: locus of the transcendental:

y = a/2 (e^(x/a) + e^(-x/a))."

Fausto ran across the engineer-poet one afternoon in the street. Dnubietna had been drunk, and now that it was wearing off was returning to the scene of his bat. An unscrupulous merchant named Tifkira had a hoard of wine. It was Sunday and raining. Weather had been foul, raids fewer. The two young men met next to the ruin of a small church. The one confessional had been sheared in two but which half was left, priest's or parishioner's, Fausto could not tell. Sun behind the rain clouds appeared as a patch of luminous grey, a dozen times its normal size, halfway down from the zenith. Almost brilliant enough to cast shadows. But falling from behind Dnubietna so that the engineer's features were indistinct. He wore khakis stained with grease, and a blue fatigue cap; large drops of rain fell on the two.

Dnubietna indicated the church with his head. "Have you been, priest?"

"To Mass: no." They hadn't met for a month. But no need to bring each other up to date.

"Come on. We'll get drunk. How are Elena and your kid?"

"Well."