Out of Place

The mozzarella cheese slides across the top of the marinara sauce, spills off the side of the pizza slice onto the red-hot electric element. Gray smoke spews from the toaster oven and the smell of burnt cheese spreads through the kitchen and into the dining area. Maki, the black dog looks anxious, if the smoke alarm activates, she will start running around, barking, go bat-shit crazy. I open the window above the sink, the ocean breeze pushes air into the kitchen, the smoke dissipates, and drama is averted.  Two crows swoop down from the nearby maple tree and land on the beach. They swivel-strut across the sandy shore, disturbing the sojourning ducks and seagulls, like two businessmen in dark suits ruining the vacation vibe at a spa. They seem out of place, like me. 

The acrid smell of scorched cheese lingers.

Mr. Friggieri’s studious son, Edward, exhibited the look and manner of a Jesuit seminarian. He was dressed in black slacks, white shirt, cinched at his narrow waist by a belt. He stooped slightly over the small stove and tossed the pasta and ragu sauce in the blackened pan until steamy with heat. He threw in some parmesan, maybe some mozzarella, I’m not really sure, but I do remember how the cheese melted then crisped in the pan. Edward expertly flipped the pasta a couple of times, folding the cheese into the tomato and meat sauce. When it was ready he divided the dish in two and we sat at the small wooden table in the tiled parlor, washing down spaghetti Bolognese with lukewarm water, sweet with minerals, poured directly from the ancient cistern in the courtyard.  Mum came to collect me, she and Edward went into the courtyard and dallied there under the stars for a few minutes. “I think this place might be heaven on earth”, she gushed, as we rushed down the narrow street into the walled city of Valetta, late for choir practice at the Anglican Cathedral, not far from Dad’s office overlooking the Naval dockyards and the Grand Harbor.

We - Mum and I - visited the Friggieris often, in the Ford Cortina. I think it was a shared love of music, he at the piano, she at his side, sometimes resting her small hand on his angular shoulder, singing show tunes, opera, and anglican chants, rushing through sheet music that he pulled from familiar nooks in his bookcase.  The raw emotion, the power of my mother’s voice, the intimacy of their piano-bound relationship overwhelmed me, and I would sneak out of the Friggieri house, and wander down the quiet little road in Floriana, beneath the gnarled Mediterranean pines, beneath the squat acacia canopy, until the singing stopped, and it was safe to return, drama-free again. Mr. Friggieri would retire to his study, and my mother bustled around helping the siblings - Edward and Lucia - the nieces, and cousins, tidying up the parlor, bumping into each other in the kitchen, and laughing.

The Friggieri house was built of solid stone, big blocks of ochre limestone quarried directly from nearby land more than two hundred years ago. The house was located in a quiet street near the twin towers of St Publis Church, near the siege-era granaries, hand-hewn holes in the limestone rock, covered with circular stone slabs. The front of the house was adorned with purple bougainvillea, the doors and windows painted lemon green, clashing with the racing green livery of Freddy’s e-type Jaguar, frequently parked outside owing to his courtship of the lovely Lucia, she of the luscious raven locks and the giant fake eyelashes. Freddy, a big fan of the Kinks, thought her imported Carnaby Street outfits made her look like Twiggy, a Maltese Twiggy, but I thought she looked more like Sophia Loren, especially when she bouffed up her hair. Mum and I once spied her sashaying along a narrow alley arm-in-arm with a girlfriend, near the Basilica, pursued by a pack of boys practicing their catcalling, blowing on their fingers - too hot to touch. 

The Timpani was presented to me as a giant wedge on a plate. It must have been a festival, maybe the Feast of Santa Marija. I was corralled into the parlor, three walls covered in turquoise-yellow-and-green swirly Turkish tiles and invited to sit on the wooden bench that lined the walls. Me and six or seven Maltese girls dressed in white lacy party dresses, black belts, white socks, sensible black shoes, all with wavy brown or black hair, tamed with red and yellow ribbons and bows and sparkly crowns: nieces and cousins of the Friggieris, descendants in a family tree spread wide by maternal branches. We sat on the bench, an arrangement of knobby and scarred knees, our legs swinging back and forth, too short to reach the cement-tiled flooring. The parlor, lit by a single bulb felt like the interior of a giant Kaleidoscope, my senses were reeling when the big wedge of pasta pie was handed to me. Cannelloni stuffed with pork and liver ragu, parmesan, provolone and ricotta cheese, onions, parsley, basil, boiled eggs, stuffed into a thick wheat drum pie. I remember how the marinara sauce dripped on dresses, smeared the cheeks of the girls, how every mouthful of the pie was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten.

And somehow, the girls got this silly little English boy to dance and jig, dressed in his khaki school uniform, the Maltese Cross sewn to the shirt pocket, the long wooly socks that always sagged down to his sandals, the elasticated Drake’s House belt keeping my shorts from doing the same. We danced to The Beatles, to Ziggy Stardust, beneath the single bulb in that parlor, sometimes spilling into the kitchen and into the courtyard. Mr. Friggieri, senior, joined us at one point, waltzed to a Tom Jones song with my Mum, while Lucia and Edward watched from the doorway. Lucia was clapping and laughing, Edward was moving his hand in time to the music, open-palmed, as if he was rehearsing the dance, as if his hand, not his father's, was resting on the small of my mother’s back, guiding her around the room. I hoped the evening would never end.

There was a single explosion. Then another. The dance ended, and we were ushered out of Friggieri’s house, and marched as a noisy group to the Basilica, where the heavens were on fire. Massive fireworks were exploding in the night sky, above the tenements, above the baroque palaces, above the streets, alleys and piazzas. The smell of the smoke was intense, made the eyes water, bits of black flaming paper fell from the sky, charred remnants of cakes, rockets, roman candles drifted across the flagstones, and stairways. Through the streets came a procession of rowdy young men, roaring, followed by serious young priests and seminarian, yoked, bearing aloft an ornate carved, painted and gold-covered statue of the Assumption, St Marija resplendent in shimmery blue and gold, a silver tar-burst tiara atop her blue-and-gold bonnet. Lucia was my guardian, holding my hand, which made me feel six feet tall like James Bond or John Wayne, though for once she was not the center of attention, the crowd so thick. 

My ears were ringing as I fell asleep later that night, Mum singing “There’s a star man waiting in the sky”. My ears were still ringing the next morning when I woke up in our disappointing little flat on Birkirkara Road in Sliema. In my dreams I'd been dancing with a girl called Fatima, in the parlor. She had thick eyebrows that almost met above the bridge of her nose, and she was beautiful.

Truancy was forced upon me by Mum. We drove out to Dingli Cliffs one day that started out rainy but turned out typically hot and sunny. The scrubby gorse bushes were blossoming yellow, and the desolate Dingli peninsula, the highest point on the island, seemed like the end of the earth, surrounded on three sides by the Mediterranean Sea, a hundred feet or more below, at the bottom of the cliffs. We visited Peter the Potter, the maker of terracotta figurines in his small cottage, really just a stone hovel. We bought a sour dough loaf, still hot from the wood-burning oven, and devoured the whole thing in the car, so we had to buy a second loaf to take home for sandwiches the next day. Mum bought me roasted chickpeas, tucked in a paper cone, and an iced bottle of orange Fanta. Mum didn't eat, in fact she looked pale and sickly, and she seemed preoccupied throughout, as if killing time. We arrived at the Friggieris late afternoon. 

Mum and Mr. Friggieri went off somewhere, some kind of musical tryst I supposed, and I was left with Lucia and the old man. The old man, cadaverous, always in blue-striped pajamas, always with gray stubble, hobbled around with a walking stick. He didn’t speak a word of English, and I spoke no Maltese, so we communicated with pointing, simple nouns of the other’s choosing, of the other’s language, mimicked then forgotten. 

Freddy dropped by looking for Edward, looking for Mr. Friggieri, seemed irritated by my presence, but he promised to race me, front crawl at Armier Bay on Saturday, or at the Marsaxlokk marina sometime soon. Lucia appeared, seemed agitated too, and left me with the old man, who retreated to his small ground floor bedroom, leaving me alone.  I wandered into the courtyard, hoping I might find an abandoned cricket bat and ball, or an old football, but coming up empty-handed, so I turned my attention to the insects that were flitting around the flowerbeds. Suddenly there was a commotion in the upper story of the house, people wrestling or fighting, an argument between two men, and the woeful cry of a woman. Moments later my Mum came out of the backdoor of the house into the courtyard, buttoning her blouse, urgently beckoned for me to come with her. She looked on the verge of tears, Edward was shouting at her in Maltese from an upstairs window. On our way out, Mr. Friggieri intercepted us in the hallway, his shirt untucked, his suspenders hanging at his side, graying hair tousled. He reached for Mum’s arm, “Rosie!”, but she brushed him off and we left the house, not knowing it would be for the last time.  

Mum told me that she and Dad were getting a divorce, that she and I would soon be leaving Malta, alone, and return to England, to a small house in a suburb of North London, miles from the ocean. It would be cold, I would need a sweater, it would be wet, I would need a coat, It would be dark in winter, the flowers would die. I wiped a tear from my mother’s face, and she smiled sadly, told me I was a good boy, that I shouldn’t worry. When she wasn’t looking, I licked her salty tear from my fingertip, and it tasted like the Sea.

They say we are 70% water, that we came from the sea, but that day I cried tears that ran into the ocean, and I knew that they were wrong: the sea flows from us. The ocean is a vast expanse of sorrow, where dreams die, where love is lost, where hope goes when it is abandoned. 

Our departure date was set, Dad had moved out weeks ago. Mum and I drove once more to Floriana in the Cortina, the windows wide open so that we didn’t bake in the heat, the streets shimmered.   Mum knocked at the door, no answer, pushed against it, but it would not yield. Freddy’s sports car was outside, Mr. Friggieri’s cobalt blue Simca too.  The Friggieri’s were at home, but not answering my Mother’s urgent rapping.  I thought she would give up, we would go back to the car, be discrete, but there was something desperate about her, something un-English, an anguish that scared me. Standing proud, facing the Friggieri home, softly at first, then louder Bellini’s “Casta Diva”, filled the street, the neighborhood, the entire island of Malta. Two jackdaws, startled, flew off as her voice crested and broke, and I wanted to follow them, hide somewhere in shame. 

The door opened, Freddy and Lucia appeared, and shushed at Mum, waving as if trying to put out a fire, “You cannot do this Mrs. Davenport, you cannot sing like this in the streets!”, they looked distraught, “you will cause a problem for all of us”. From behind them, from out of the shadowy hallway, Edward stepped into the street. He was expressionless, as if biting the insides of his cheeks, smoking a cigarette. My mother’s distress was boundless, her platinum blonde hair was a rat’s nest, mascara ran down her face, and mucus bubbled from her nose. This was not my mother; this was not the fixed and certain center of my universe. I started to cry, tugging at her sleeve, looking for comfort, but there she had none to give. “You must go now”, said Edward, “you must be a man. Take your mother back to the car, and go home”, the instruction was not unkind, but it was resolute, “there is no place for you, or your mother here”.

We left Malta soon after, Mum and I, aboard a VC10, a BOAC flight from Luqa to Stanstead, a small airport somewhere near London. It was only 5.00 o’clock in the afternoon when we touched down, but it was already dark, and it was cold, wet and dreary. We had carry-on bags and two old trunks full of clothing, some photos, some sheet music and not much else. Just memories.  Standing outside the terminal, waiting for Uncle John to pick us up and take us to a place called Barnet, under the sodium light, in light rain, Mother seemed older, lost and out of place, song torn from her. 

An osprey is circling above the bay, the gulls and ducks are agitated, the two crows take flight, back into the branches of the maple tree. Two crows, two jackdaws. The Osprey floats off out to sea, out to where a white boat is throttling back to the harbor. It is said to be beautiful here, but the sea is gray and opaque, a different shade of sorrow, the people are gritty, their homes utilitarian and their stories are written in prose. I am still out of place.

I take a bite of hot pizza, the molten cheese cools and congeals in my mouth, and I remember the one place where I thought I might have belonged.