having no persuasive powers of its own. The room simply is. To occupy it, and find a metaphor there for memory, is our own fault.
Let me describe the room. The room measures 17 by 11 by 7 feet. The walls are lath and plaster, and painted the same shade of grey as were the decks of His Majesty's corvettes during the war. The room is oriented so that its diagonals fall NNE/SSW, and NW/SE. Thus any observer may see, from the window and balcony on the NNW side (a short side), the city Valletta.
One enters from the WSW, by a door midway in a long wall of the room. Standing just inside the door and turning clockwise one sees a portable wood stove in the NNE corner, surrounded by boxes, bowls, sacks containing food; the mattress, located halfway along the long ENE wall; a slop bucket in the SE corner; a washbasin in the SSW corner; a window facing the Dockyard; the door one has just entered; and finally in the NW corner, a small writing table and chair. The chair faces the WSW wall; so that the head must be turned 135 degrees to the rear in order to have a line-of-sight with the city. The walls are unadorned, the floor is carpetless. A dark grey stain is located on the ceiling directly over the stove.
That is the room. To say the mattress was begged from the Navy B.O.Q. here in Valletta shortly after the war, the stove and food supplied by CARE, or the table from a house now rubble and covered by earth; what have these to do with the room? The facts are history, and only men have histories. The facts call up emotional responses, which no inert room has ever showed us.
The room is in a building which had nine such rooms before the war. Now there are three. The building is on an escarpment above the Dockyard. The room is stacked atop two others - the other two-thirds of the building were removed by the bombing, sometime during the winter of 1942-43.
Fausto himself may be defined in only three ways. As a relationship: your father. As a given name. Most important, as an occupant. Since shortly after you left, an occupant of the room.
Why? Why use the room as introduction to an apologia? Because the room, though windowless and cold at night, is a hothouse. Because the room is the past, though it has no history of its own. Because, as the physical being-there of a bed or horizontal plane determines what we call love; as a high place must exist before God's word can come to a flock and any sort of religion begin; so must there be a room, sealed against the present, before we can make any attempt to deal with the past.
In the University, before the war, before I had married your poor mother, I felt as do many young men a sure wind of Greatness flowing over my shoulders like an invisible cape. Maratt, Dnubietna and I were to be the cadre for a grand School of Anglo-Maltese Poetry – the Generation of '37. This undergraduate certainty of success gives rise to anxieties, foremost being the autobiography or apologia pro vita sua the poet someday has to write. How, the reasoning goes: how can a man write his life unless he is virtually certain of the hour of his death? A harrowing question. Who knows what Herculean poetic feats might be left to him in perhaps the score of years between a premature apologia and death? Achievements so great as to cancel out the effect of the apologia itself. And if on the other hand nothing at all is accomplished in twenty or thirty stagnant years - how distasteful is anticlimax to the young!
Time of course has showed the question up in all its young illogic. We can justify any apologia simply by calling life a successive rejection of personalities. No apologia is any more than a romance - half a fiction - in which all the successive identities taken on and rejected by the writer as a function of linear time are treated as separate characters. The writing itself even constitutes another rejection, another 'character' added to the past. So we do sell our souls: paying them away to history in little installments. It isn't so much to pay for eyes clear enough to see past the fiction of continuity, the fiction of cause and effect, the fiction of a humanized history endowed with 'reason.'
Before 1938, then, came Fausto Maijstral the First. A young sovereign, dithering between Caesar and God. Maratt was going into politics; Dnubietna would be an engineer; I was slated to be the priest. Thus among us all major areas of human struggle would come under the scrutiny of the Generation of '37.
Maijstral the Second arrived with you, child, and with the war. You were unplanned for and in a way resented. Though if Fausto I had ever had a serious vocation, Elena Xemxi your mother - and you - would never have come into his life at all. The plans of our Movement were disturbed. We still wrote - but there was other work to do. Our poetic 'destiny' was replaced by the discovery of an aristocracy deeper and older. We were builders.
Fausto Maijstral III was born on the Day of the 13 Raids. Generated out of Elena's death, out of a horrible encounter with one we only knew as the Bad Priest. An encounter I am only now attempting to put in English. The journal for weeks after has nothing but gibberish to describe that 'birth trauma.' Fausto III is the closest any of the characters comes to non-humanity. Not 'inhumanity,' which means bestiality; beasts are still animate. Fausto III had taken on much of the non-humanity of the debris, crushed stone, broken masonry, destroyed churches and auberges of his city.
His successor, Fausto IV, inherited a physically and spiritually broken world. No single event produced him. Fausto III had merely passed a certain level in his slow return to consciousness or humanity. That curve is still rising. Somehow there had accumulated a number of poems (at least one sonnet-cycle the present Fausto is still happy with); monographs on religion, language, history; critical essays (Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, di Chirico's novel Hebdomeros). Fausto IV was the 'man of letters' and only survivor of the Generation of '37, for Dnubietna is building roads in America, and Maratt is somewhere south of Mount Ruwenzori, organizing riots among our linguistic brothers the Bantu.
We have now reached an interregnum. Stagnant; the only throne a wooden chair in the NW corner of this room. Hermetic: for who can hear the Dockyard whistle, rivet guns, vehicles in the street when one is occupied with the past?
Now memory is a traitor: gilding, altering. The word is, in sad fact, meaningless, based as it is on the false assumption that identity is single, soul continuous. A man has no more right to set forth any self-memory as truth than to say 'Maratt is a sour-mouthed University cynic' or 'Dnubietna is a liberal and madman.'
Already you see: the 'is' - unconsciously we've drifted into the past. You must now be subjected, dear Paola, to a barrage of undergraduate sentiment. The journals, I mean, of Fausto I and II. What other way can there be to regain him, as we must? Here, for example:
'How wondrous is this St. Giles Fair called history! Her rhythms pulse regular and sinusoidal - a freak show in caravan, travelling over thousands of little hills. A serpent hypnotic and undulant, bearing on her back like infinitesimal fleas such hunchbacks, dwarves, prodigies, centaurs, poltergeists! Two-headed, three-eyed, hopelessly in love; satyrs with the skin of werewolves, werewolves with the eyes of young girls and perhaps even an old man with a navel of glass, through which can be seen goldfish nuzzling the coral country of his guts.'
The date is of course 3 September 1939: the mixing of metaphors, crowding of detail, rhetoric-for-its-own-sake only a way of saying the balloon had gone up, illustrating again and certainly not for the last time the colorful whimsy of history.
