Malta
He brought her to an island made of a single stone, so that the country could say the thing he could not.
One Stone
I had chosen Malta for its consistency.
A man who has spent his working life in the layered cities of Europe learns, in time, that the layering itself is the source of his unease. Rome is six cities stacked. Paris is three. London is a record of its own corrections. The stones do not match because the centuries did not agree on what stone to use. A man walks down a street in those cities and his eye is doing arithmetic without his permission. He sees the Roman course at the base, the medieval above it, the eighteenth-century facade pinned over both, the twentieth-century concrete intrusion two doors down, and his mind is sorting the periods while his body is trying to be in the street.
Malta does not do that to a man.
Malta is built of one stone. Globigerina limestone, the soft honey-colored block that comes out of the ground at Mqabba and Siġġiewi and goes into every wall on the island, and has for six thousand years. The Neolithic temple-builders cut it, and the Phoenicians and the Romans and the Knights of St. John after them, and the British after them, and the farmer on Gozo cut a block of it last Tuesday. It is always the same stone. You walk a street in Valletta and the eye does no arithmetic. The eye is permitted to rest.
I had wanted her to see it.
She had been to thirty countries by then. She had been to all the ones the front-of-the-book travel sections still recommend and most of the ones the back of the book quietly prefers, and there were two or three countries left on the continent of Europe that she had not yet been to, and Malta was the one I had been saving. I had been saving it because I had wanted to give her a place that was made of one thing. She had given me, over many years, the steady fact of herself. I had wanted to bring her to a country that did the same.
We landed at the small airport south of Valletta at three in the afternoon on a Friday in May. The car was waiting on the apron. The driver was a Maltese man in his sixties named Charles, who had grown up in Sliema and had been driving for the hotel since before the hotel had been the brand it now was, and he greeted her in English with a small unstudied bow, and he greeted me as the man whose company had booked the car. He took the bags. We got in.
The road from the airport runs along the harbor side of the peninsula and the city comes up on the right after a few kilometers, the whole walled city at once, the bastions golden in the afternoon light, the dome of the Carmelite church above the line of the roofs, the spire of St. Paul’s beside it, the whole compact mass of Valletta rising from the water on its limestone shelf.
Her Highness held the silence.
I watched her face. She had watched Istanbul rise from the Bosphorus and given it the small private acknowledgment a woman gives a skyline that has earned its rise. She gave Valletta something different. She gave it stillness. The city was not rising the way the others rose. The city was sitting on its shelf the way it had been sitting on its shelf for four hundred and sixty years, since the Knights had laid the first courses of stone after the Great Siege, and she was looking at it as a person looks at a thing that intends to stay where it is.
“It is all the same color,” she said.
“Every building, every wall, every kerbstone. One quarry for the whole island.”
She did not say anything else. She turned her face back to the window.
The car climbed the slope to the city gate and pulled into the curve of the drive at the Phoenicia, the long low palace of a hotel that the British had built at the edge of the bastions in the 1940s, and Charles set the brake and came around to the door before I could reach for it. He helped her down. The porter took the bags.
I had asked for the room I wanted. The hotel had given it.
The Phoenicia
The room was on the second floor at the end of the wing that faces the harbor.
It was not the largest room in the hotel. I had not asked for the largest. I had asked for the one with the long French doors that open onto a small private balcony above the gardens, with the bastions of Valletta directly in front of it and the Grand Harbour below and the Three Cities on the far side of the water. The hotel had set out a small bowl of fresh figs and a plate of pastizzi still warm under a linen cloth and a chilled bottle of Meridiana Isis on the table by the window, and the housekeeper had opened the doors so that the room held the air of the harbor when we walked in.
Her Highness walked the room. She did not announce that she was walking it. She moved through it in the way she moves through every room I have ever brought her into, looking at the walls and the windows and the corners and the height of the ceiling, taking the measure of the place she would sleep in. She set her hand on the limestone of the window jamb. The stone was warm where the sun had reached it.
“It is the same stone as the wall outside,” she said.
“The hotel was cut from the quarry the bastions came from. The room is part of the bastion. They brought nothing else in.”
She held her hand against the stone a moment longer.
“Honest,” she said.
She crossed to the balcony. The harbor was full of the afternoon. A pair of dghajsa, the small painted Maltese water-taxis with the high prows that the British navy had never managed to replace, crossed below us toward Vittoriosa on the far side. A container ship was leaving the breakwater for Sicily. The Three Cities, Vittoriosa and Senglea and Cospicua, sat on their own fingers of land across the water, each behind its own bastion walls, all of it cut from the same stone and weathered to the same pale gold.
I stood behind her.
She did not lean back into me. She did not need to. She let me stand where I was standing.
The afternoon went out of the room slowly. The light moved off the limestone of the jamb and onto the floor. She set her case down and crossed to the dressing room.
We dressed for dinner as we always do. Not required. Expected. We dress for each other.
I had brought one suit for two nights and the linen-and-wool blend of it carried the May heat without complaint. The cloth was the color of a darker honey than the city, an oatmeal that read as cream in some lights and as the color of the stone in others. The collar was open. No tie. The cufflinks were small and plain, two ovals of mother-of-pearl set in brushed silver, the ones I wear when I am in a country whose stone is the color of the same shell.
Her Highness came out of the dressing room in the dress she had brought.
The dress was the color of the sea, not the harbor at the foot of the bastion, the deeper sea further out, the Mediterranean blue that the chart-makers have given a dozen names to and that no name has ever quite caught. A linen slip with a fine cotton tulle over it, the tulle so light it moved on the air the room was holding from the balcony. The straps were narrow. The hem hit at the calf. No jewelry at the throat. A pair of small pearl studs at the ears, freshwater, irregular, the color of the inside of the cufflinks.
She had dressed as the only color the country did not contain.
She had read the country on the drive from the airport and she had decided, without consulting me, to be the water around the rock.
“Ready?” she said.
“Yes.”
I offered my arm.
Rampila
The restaurant was inside the walls.
It is set into the lower vaults of St John’s Cavalier at the foot of Ordnance Street just inside the city gate, a series of rooms cut from the stone itself when the Knights built the city, with limestone barrel ceilings and limestone walls and limestone floors and one narrow window through the bastion that gives onto the harbor. The Rampila family runs it. The kitchen is small. The list is short. The wines are Maltese and Sicilian. The chef knows the fishermen at Marsaxlokk by name.
We walked from the hotel along Republic Street as the light began to go.
This is what I had wanted her to see.
Republic Street is the spine of Valletta. It runs from the city gate to Fort St. Elmo at the tip of the peninsula, half a mile of compact stone, no part of it built later than the eighteenth century and most of it built in the sixteenth, and the walking of it at six in the evening in the third week of May is the walking of a single material against a sky that has begun to soften. The light at that hour does what it does to honey limestone. The stone holds the sun longer than other stone does. The shadows are not blue. The shadows are a paler version of the color the stone is in the sun, a creamy buff that the eye reads as warmth even though no warmth is being given off.
Her Highness walked beside me. She did not talk. She was reading the street the way she had read the room.
The Co-Cathedral was closed by the time we passed it, the tall doors shut, the Caravaggios inside the side chapel waiting until tomorrow. She paused at the steps and looked up at the facade. The facade is austere, much less elaborate than the interior, the Knights having built the outside to look like a fortress and the inside to look like a baroque jewel-box. She did not need me to tell her that. She had read about the cathedral on the plane.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes.”
We walked on.
A pair of cats slept on a doorstep near St. George’s Square. A woman in a black housedress watered a row of bougainvillea in a stone trough outside her ground-floor flat. The bougainvillea was the color of the dress she had not worn, a magenta so bright the eye took a second to admit it. The woman nodded at us. We nodded back.
The restaurant was at the bottom of a short flight of stone steps off Ordnance Street. The host knew the booking. He led us to a corner table in the second room. The vault overhead was the same vault the Knights had cut. The candle on the table was the only light in the room except for two small lamps on the wall.
She sat.
The stone of the country had come into the room.
The waiter brought a basket of warm Maltese bread and a small dish of olive oil from a grove outside Mġarr and a smaller dish of crushed sea salt from the salt-pans at Gozo. She broke the bread. She dipped the corner. She tasted it.
She did not close her eyes.
The eyes-closed gesture is the one she gives the table that has surprised her. The Maltese bread, warm in the basket, is not a dish that surprises. It is a foundation. It is a dish that asks to be acknowledged with the open eye, with the slow chew, with the small nod to the kitchen. She gave it that.
The wine list was on the table. I read it. The local list was strong. I ordered a bottle of the Meridiana Melqart, the Cabernet Sauvignon-Merlot blend the small winery at Ta’ Qali makes with their own grapes from the Mosta plain. He opened it at the table, poured a small measure for me, and I nodded. He poured for her, then for me.
She turned the glass on the stone. The wine moved in the candlelight.
“You have ordered the local,” she said.
“I wanted you to taste the island. The wine, the bread, the fish.”
She lifted the glass, held it under her nose, drank.
“It tastes of the stone,” she said.
I did not answer that. There was nothing a man could answer to that. The Cabernet in that bottle had grown in soil that was a meter of red clay over a hundred meters of the same globigerina limestone that the city was built on, and the vine had pulled the mineral up through itself and put it into the grape, and the grape had put it into the wine, and she had tasted it on the first sip without being told.
We ordered. She took the octopus carpaccio to start and the dentici, the local dorado, with capers and a tomato compote the kitchen made themselves. I took the bigilla, the Maltese fava-bean dip with crusty bread, and a fillet of swordfish off the same boat the dentici had come in on, with charred fennel and a salsa verde. The waiter wrote nothing down and withdrew.
She looked at me across the candle.
“This is a small country,” she said. “Smaller than I had pictured.”
“Smaller than most pictures of it carry. Three hundred square kilometers, two islands and a smaller third, four hundred and fifty thousand people, about the size of a single borough of New York. And the stone is everywhere. The temples at Ħaġar Qim, older than the pyramids by a thousand years, cut by men whose names no one knows from the same quarry the Knights would use four thousand years after them, and the man who built the Phoenicia in 1947, and whoever builds the next wall in Valletta next year.”
She set the glass down.
“You have brought me to a country,” she said, “that has only ever made one decision. And kept it.”
She did not say anything else for a while. The octopus came. The bigilla came. We ate.