“Oh, not gone entirely, of course. Tamed but not obliterated. She can be found, if you look for Her, but hidden, the dangerous other. In Greek mythology, She is demoted to mere demonhood: She is Charybdis, the bottomless whirlpool who drags sailors to their deaths, and Scylla, the six-headed sea monster whose lower half rests in a cave and who springs up to snatch hapless passersby. On Gozo, Malta’s sister isle, She is Calypso, the mesmerizing siren goddess who diverts Odysseus from his purpose for seven years. In the Old Testament She is Leviathan, and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Still later She is the dragon slain by St. George. And in our own times, we find vestiges of the Goddess, much diminished, in the Virgin Mary.
“What did we lose when we lost the Goddess? We lost our place in Nature, our sense of the sacred circle, of the Cosmic whole of existence. We underwent one of those major shifts of perception, a paradigm shift if you will, that came to govern how we saw everything. We began to see the universe in what has been called binary polarities, or opposites, and we thought one polarity better than the other. Like good and evil. Or male and female, from which came sexism. Black and white, from which came racism. We also moved from a belief in a relationship between all parts of creation to a belief that we were, like our gods in whose image we believed ourselves made, something apart from nature.
“From there it was a very small step to wanting to master Nature, and believing we could do so. Master? Perhaps conquer is a better word for it. And if Nature could be conquered, so could other people.
“And from there it was only a tiny step to Hiroshima.” She paused. “Who will speak for the Goddess?” For several seconds after Dr. Stanhope stopped speaking, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Then she turned and abruptly left the stage. Pandemonium erupted. I looked over at my young charges. Sophia’s eyes were shining. Anthony looked thoughtful, his usual cheerful face altered by a somewhat puzzled frown. Everyone spoke at once. Some applauded, others left, offended, still others shouted outrage. Regardless of whether you agreed with her or not, Dr. Stanhope had made an impression.
The three of us made our way out of the noisy crowd and over to the car. The young boy was still there, smiling happily, and the car looked fine. That was one problem taken care of, but there was another.
“I got lost,” I said to Anthony.
“Yes,” he said. “Everyone new here does.”
“Can you direct me back?”
“Sure. How about we take Sophia home, and then go on to my place? Mr. Galea’s house isn’t far from there, and it’s easy to describe the route.”
“Thanks. Would you like to drive as far as your house?”
“Sure.” He grinned.
So that is what we did, and I got home without incident. None of us had much to say on the way, all lost in our own thoughts. Sophia gave me a hug at her place. I could see a man, her father presumably, silhouetted in the window waiting for her. Then Anthony gave me very careful directions from his home, seeing me off with a cheery wave.
As I carefully checked that all the doors and windows were locked, I thought how friendly and accommodating all the Maltese I’d met had been. Indeed, the first exception might be Martin Galea when he found out I hadn’t got the job done.
Then I thought about the foreigners I’d become acquainted with, in a manner of speaking. Dr. Anna Stanhope, who’d probably insulted half the population of Malta in the short space of an hour or two by implying their religion was responsible for most of the world’s ills, including the atomic bomb. To say nothing of her opinion of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Next the Great White Hunter. He obviously didn’t like me at all. Maybe even, I’d have to admit, he was trying to kill me. And for what reason I absolutely could not fathom. Surely not for stepping on his toe! Perhaps for some reason I did not understand, I was the Hunter’s prey.
And then there was the unknown. What had Dr. Stanhope called it? The dangerous other. The hooded figure at the back of the yard. Was he just a car parts thief? Somehow I didn’t think so.
All in all, I could only hope the Goddess was looking out for me.
FIVE
What do you think I am? A mere pawn in the battle for control of this sea called Mediterraneo? Your Hannibal, am I to admire his audacity in challenging Rome? Elephants in the Alps? Do you not hear it, the thump and groan of the Roman galley, the clang of the Roman legion? They are coming. Soon those among you who have ruled here, who have used My tiny island for your forays across the sea, you who have taken My people as slaves, will know what it is to be a slave. Go home. Your cities are in flames. Delenda est Carthago. Carthage must be destroyed!
Just when I thought nothing else could go wrong, Thursday Joseph went AWOL. Well, perhaps not exactly AWOL. Marissa probably knew where he was, but she wasn’t saying. Her pale, tired face and slightly teary eyes when she told me her husband wouldn’t be coming to work that day forestalled any questions I might have liked to ask.
To be fair, he’d seen to it there was lots of help. A handful of cousins stood by, ready to unload the furniture the minute it arrived. It wasn’t the same, though. I missed his quiet and somehow solid demeanor and perpetual air of calm. I even missed hearing him call me missus, a practice he persisted in, despite his wife’s having come to call me Lara with ease. Even Anthony did so when his parents, who would not have approved of such license, weren’t around. Still, Joseph would have been a definite asset on this rather harried of days, the one when, at last, the furniture was due to arrive.
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.