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.'
'Maratt's is pregnant again. Don't you miss the bachelor life?' They were walking down a narrow cobbled street made slick by the rain. To either side were rubble heaps, a few standing walls or porch steps. Streaks of stone-dust, matte against the shiny cobblestones, interrupted at random the pavement's patterning. The sun had almost achieved reality. Their attenuated shadows strung out behind. Rain still fell. 'Or having married when you did,' Dnubietna went on, 'perhaps you equate singleness with peace.'
'Peace,' said Fausto. 'Quaint word.' They skipped around and over stray chunks of masonry.
'Sylvana,' Dnubietna sang, 'in your red petticoat/ Come back, come back/ You may keep my heart/ But bring back my money . . . .'
'You should get married,' Fausto said, mournful: 'It's not fair otherwise.'
'Poetry and engineering have nothing to do with domesticity.'
'We haven't,' Fausto remembered, 'had a good argument for months.'
In here. They went down a flight of steps which led under a building still reasonably intact. Clouds of powdered plaster rose as they descended. Sirens began. Inside the room Tifkira lay on a table, asleep. Two girls played cards listlessly in a corner. Dnubietna vanished for a moment behind the bar, reappearing with a small bottle of wine. A bomb fell in the next street, rattling the beams of the ceiling, starting an oil lamp hung there to swinging.
'I ought to be asleep,' Fausto said. 'I work tonight.'
'Remorse of a uxorious half-man,' Dnubietna snarled, pouring wine. The girls looked up. 'It's the uniform,' he confided, which was so ridiculous that Fausto had to laugh. Soon they had moved to the girls' table. Talk was
