Wherever I go, I go unprepared with no plan, in a resigned state of mind. Expecting nothing. I
am flexible. I come to Malta for the EUNIC mobility internship and also to walk around Malta on foot, but everyone talks about Gozo. I don’t want to go to Gozo. However Malta is overcrowded, nature is tame, and traffic is terrible. I buy a fast ferry ticket from Valletta to Gozo Harbour Mġarr.
With a condescending smile, I walk past taxi drivers who offer me a lift for a few euros and
warn me that I won’t find another taxi for the next eight kilometers. All the better. I bypass the harbor and soon join the Gozo Coastal Walk, which runs around the entire island (55km). I change into a T-shirt and shorts and soak up a spring so violent it almost takes my breath away. It’s April 8th and here the hay bales are being harvested, everything is blooming, turning green, and the larks are screaming from the sky. The life I didn’t find in granite Valletta is here in its essence, just as I imagine it.
Art Therapy
Everything is now. I don’t have time to realize it because I’m living it, so I’m sheltered from all
my internal comments about whether this is right or wrong. Yet I keep returning to my
experiences in Valletta. I am imagining that the murderer Caravaggio found his peace during
such lived moments when he created his work for St. John’s Cathedral. His detailed painting
of The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist is his art therapy, a coming to terms with the
violent nature of his that got him into trouble on a daily basis. In the pool of blood from John’s head, Caravaggio goes to the heart of the suffering in which he exceptionally left his signature.
I feel a similar shiver of life when I observe contemporary American painter Nora Byrne in the kitchen of the Valletta Design Cluster. The enchanted place, with one of Valletta’s two gardens, offers its workshops to artists and artisans alike. This time, Nora is not standing by the canvas, but actually in the kitchen, where she boils ink from meadow flowers and then uses it to paint other flowers and fragile fishermen’s houses.
I’m wandering Gozo alone, as I like to do. I dreamily watch the cliffs unfold, welcome spring showers, snack on biscuits, swim in the icy sea, and read about the emigration of Maltese women to Australia in Lou Drofenik’s beautiful novel Echoes. Until I reach the last village in the west. In her books, the writer Lou Drofenik likes to revisit the difference between hectic Malta and the untouched countryside of Gozo, not omitting the ecclesiastical iniquities of this Catholic bastion, writing about the still-legal hunting of songbirds, which she refers to as the killing of the innocents. It all connects together in one evening in the tiny town of Gharb, with nothing but the open sea beyond. It is Easter the streets are still empty. Behind the silent walls of the houses, the White Sunday evening parade is about to begin.
Lonely Karaoke DJ
I ring the doorbell of my Airbnb stay tonight. A man answers the door, obviously just awake. He yawns widely and apologizes for being in his pyjamas. It’s 5:30 in the afternoon. I don’t care if he’s in pyjamas or a tuxedo, I just want to check in and see where I can get something to eat. Just outside the door begins an ancient living room with a couch wrapped in a leopard blanket. A man invites me to drop my backpack right here, saying he’ll show me around the house. I look uncertainly into the dark hallway ahead of me. There are too many doors leading out of it.
The man doesn’t reassure me when he excitedly informs me that I am the only guest today. I clutch my backpack tightly and say I’d like to see my room. Vincent, as he introduces himself, doesn’t hesitate, taking the backpack from my hands and leaning it against the safari couch. I swallow uncertainly and follow the man deeper into the huge cold house. He points to one door, there’s a storage room full of junk, then his bedroom, several doors he doesn’t comment on as we reach the kitchen. I praise everything I see and my mind races on how to get out of this situation quickly. Instead, I sit at the table and wait until
Vincent sets a fresh mug of tea in front of me.
I mentally calculate how many minutes it will take me to drink the boiling beverage. I calculate if this situation is normal if I like it, or if it’s over the edge. I feel forced into something I don’t want to do, but I don’t have the “courage”,or the “strength” to say anything. Is this how I was raised? To let strangers decide what happens to me and not intervene? Is that my decency or my cowardice? Oh, damn it!
Vincent is talking and talking. I already know he’s a DJ, karaoke singer, taxi driver, tour guide, water-ski instructor and makes the best breakfast on all three Maltese islands. He shows me his show on his cell phone. He plays 90s songs for people on boats dressed like Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men. I watch the terrible videos with interest and still praise him. At which point I manage to scald my tongue with tea. After the fourth heartbreaking video, he made for a friend whose father died, I subtly pick myself up and make a mistake. I ask where I can find an open supermarket. DJ doesn’t even blink and tells me he’ll let me rest for fifteen minutes and then take me to a restaurant. Am I the victim of a lonely maniac,
or is this funny?
Have some lamb!
“Have a lamb, darling.” She actually said „darling“ to me! “It’s fantastically cooked, the meat falls completely off the bone. I come here every Easter for lamb!” Says an eighty-year-old woman wearing red lipstick, a red dress and a string of pearls. She sits with her husband next to Vincent and me in the fabulous Azure Window restaurant overlooking the Inland Sea, the blue-eyed lagoon. Fortunately, the woman in red – a former wine merchant dominates all conversation, and I am free to eat my seafood spaghetti in peace. Everyone is now conversing in Maltese, the only Semitic language, written in Latin with elements of Turkish.
After a glass of wine, I’m sure Vincent is a harmless chatterbox. Suddenly he switches back to English and asks me if I’m Orthodox or Catholic. The woman also waits with interest for my answer. I say that I am an unbaptized Catholic, which none of them understand. Vincent looks at his watch, there is Mass at seven, where he has to go because one should go to Mass at least once a week. A debate ensues about shrine attendance, confession, and sins, fortunately, they leave me out of it so I can keep on eating my seafood. We pay for our dinner separately, which reinforces my confidence in the noncommittal nature of tonight.
But the next thing I know, Vincent invites me to Mass and then a Netflix movie on the leopard couch. I smile apologetically and, like a professional bored wife, make excuses for my headache. I lock myself safely in my room for the night, hitting the road before eight in the morning, not letting another tea be forced on me.
Malta is hiring female bus drivers
My adventure doesn’t seem to end on the return flight to Prague with a transfer in Istanbul. I sit next to a round burping Indian who works as a bus driver in Malta. He spouts a string of words in exotic English that I don’t understand, so I just smile understandingly. I even get an offer to work as a bus driver in Malta, all he has to do is ask the manager Maria. I tell myself that even though the streets in Malta are narrow and you drive on the left, I recently got fired from my job, so I might consider the offer.
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