Confessions of Fausto Maijstral

 

 It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any  room into a confessional. This may have nothing to do with the acts we have  committed, or the humours we do go in and out of. It may be only the rooms  cube-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.

Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand  adventure about it all? "Oh, God is here, you know, in the crimson carpets  of sulla each spring, in the blood-orange groves, in the sweet pods of my  carob tree, the St.-John's-bread of this dear island. His fingers raked the  ravines; His breath keeps the rain clouds from over us, His voice once  guided the shipwrecked St. Paul to bless our Malta." And Maratt wrote:

   Britain and Crown, we join thy swelling guard

   To drive the brute invader from our strand.

   For God His own shall rout the evil-starred

   And God light peace's lamps with His dear hand . . .

"God His own"; that brings a smile. Shakespeare. Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot  ruined us all. On Ash Wednesday of '42, for example, Dnubietna wrote a  "satire" on Eliot's poem:

   Because I do

   Because I do not hope

   Because I do not hope to survive

   Injustice from the Palace, death from the air.

   Because I do,

   Only do,

   I continue . . .

We were most fond, I believe, of "The Hollow Men." And we did like to use  Elizabethan phrases even in our speech. There is a description, sometime in  1937, of a farewell celebration for Maratt on the eve of his marriage. All  of us drunk, arguing politics: it was in a cafe in Kingsway - scusi, Strada  Reale then. Before the Italians starting bombing us. Dnubietna had called  our Constitution "hypocritical camouflage for a slave state." Maratt  objected. Dnubietna leapt up on the table, upsetting glasses, knocking the  bottle to the floor, screaming "Go to, caitiff!" It became the cant phrase  for our "set": go to. The entry was written, I suppose, next morning: but  even in the misery of a Headache the dehydrated Fausto I was still able to  talk of the pretty girls, the hot-jazz band, the gallant conversation. The  prewar University years were probably as happy as he described, and the  conversation as "good." They must have argued everything under the sun, and  in Malta then was a good deal of sun.

But Fausto I was as bastardised as the others. In the midst of the bombing  in '42, his successor commented:

 Our poets write of nothing now but the rain of bombs from what was once Heaven. We builders practice, as we must, patience and strength but - the curse of knowing English and its emotional nuances! - with it a desperate-nervous hatred of this war, an impatience for it to be over.

 I think our education in the English school and University alloyed what was pure in us. Younger, we talked of love, fear, motherhood; speaking in Maltese as Elena and I do now. But what a language! Have it, or today's Builders, advanced at all since the half-men who built the sanctuaries of Hagiar Kim? We talk as animals might.

 Can I explain "love"? Tell her my love for her is the same and part of my love for the Bofors crews, the Spitfire pilots, our Governor? That it is love which embraces this island, love for everything on it that moves! There are no words in Maltese for this. Nor finer shades; nor words for intellectual states of mind. She cannot read my poetry, I cannot translate it for her.

 Are we only animals then. Still one with the troglodytes who lived here 400 centuries before dear Christ's birth. We do live as they did in the bowels of the earth. Copulate, spawn, die without uttering any but the grossest words. Do any of us even understand the words of God, teachings of His Church? Perhaps Maijstral, Maltese, one with his people, was meant only to live at the threshold of consciousness, only exist as a hardly animate lump of flesh, an automaton.

 But we are torn, our grand "Generation of '37." To be merely Maltese: endure almost mindless, without sense of time? Or to think - continuously - in English, to be too aware of war, of time, of all the greys and shadows of love?

 Perhaps British colonialism has produced a new sort of being, a dual man, aimed two ways at once: towards peace and simplicity on the one hand, towards an exhausted intellectual searching on the other. Perhaps Maratt, Dnubietna and Maijstral are the first of a new race. What monsters shall rise in our wake . . .

 These thoughts are from the darker side of my mind - mohh, brain. Not even a word for mind. We must use the hateful Italian, menti.

What monsters. You, child, what sort of monster are you? Perhaps not at all  of course what Fausto meant: he may have been talking of a spiritual  heritage. Perhaps of Fausto III and IV, et seq. But the excerpt shows  clearly a charming quality of youth: to begin with optimism; and once the  inadequacy of optimism is borne in on him by an inevitably hostile world, to  retreat into abstractions. Abstractions even in the midst of the bombing.  For a year and a half Malta averaged ten raids per day. How he sustained  that hermetic retreat, God alone knows. There's no indication in the  journals. Perhaps it too sprang from the Anglicized half of Fausto II: for  he wrote poetry. Even in the journals we get sudden shifts from reality to  something less:

 I write this during a night raid, down in the abandoned sewer. It is raining outside. The only light is from phosphorous flares above the city, a few candles in here, bombs. Elena is beside me, holding the child who sleeps drooling against her shoulder. Packed close round us are other Maltese, English civil servants, a few Indian tradesmen. There's little talk. Children listen, all wide eyes, to bombs above in the streets. For them it is only an amusement. At first they cried on being wakened in the middle of the night. But they've grown used to it. Some even stand now near the entrance to our shelter, watching the flares and bombs, chattering, nudging, pointing. It will be a strange generation. What of our own? She sleeps.

And then, for no apparent reason, this:

 O Malta of the Knights of St. John! History's serpent is one; what matter where on her body we lie. Here in this wretched tunnel we are the Knights and the Giaours; we are L'Isle-Adam and his ermine arm, and his maniple on a field of blue sea and gold sun, we are M. Parisot, lonely in his wind-haunted grave high above the Harbour; battling on the ramparts during the Great Siege - both! My Grandmaster, both: death and life, ermine and old cloth, noble and common, in feast and combat and mourning we are Malta, one, pure and a motley of races at once; no time has passed since, we lived in caves, grappled with fish at the reedy shore, buried our dead with a song, with red-ochre and pulled up our dolmens, temples and menhirs and standing stones to the glory of some indeterminate god or gods, rose toward the light in andanti of singing, lived our lives through circling centuries of rape, looting, invasion, still one; one in the dark ravines, one in this God-favoured plot of sweet Mediterranean earth, one in whatever temple or sewer or catacomb's darkness is ours, by fate or historical writhings or still by the will of God.

He must have written the latter part at home, after the raid; but the  "shift" is still there. Fausto II was a young man in retreat. It's seen not  only in his fascination for the conceptual - even in the midst of that  ongoing, vast - but somehow boring - destruction of an island; but also in  his relationship with your mother.

First mention of Elena Xemxi comes from Fausto I, shortly after Maratt's  marriage. Perhaps, a breach having been made in the bachelorhood of the  Generation of '37 - though from all indications the movement was anything  but celibate - Fausto now felt safe enough to follow suit. And of course at  the same time taking these fidgeting and inconclusive steps towards Church  celibacy.

Oh, he was "in love": no doubt. But his own ideas on the matter always in a  state of flux, never I think getting quite in line with the Maltese version:  Church-approved copulation for the purpose, and glorification, of  motherhood. We already know for example how Fausto in the worst part of the  Siege of '40-'43 had arrived at a nation and practice of love wide, high and deep as Malta itself.

 

 The dog days have ended, the maijstral has ceased to blow. Soon the other wind called gregale will bring the gentle rains to solemnize the sowing of our red wheat.

 Myself: what am I if not a wind, my very name a hissing of queer zephyrs though the carob trees? I stand in time between the two winds, my will no more than a puff of air. But air too are the clever, cynical arguments of Dnubietna. His views on marriage - even Maratt's marriage - blow by my poor  flapping ears unnoticed.

 

 For Elena - tonight! O Elena Xemxi: small as the she-goat, sweet your milk and your love-cry. Dark-eyed as the space between stars over Ghaudex where we have gazed so often in our childish summers. Tonight will I go to your little house in Vittoriosa, and before your black eyes break open this small pod of a heart and offer in communion the St.-John's-bread I have cherished like a Eucharist these nineteen years.

He did not propose marriage; but confessed his love. There was still, you  see, the vague "program" - the vocation to priesthood he was never quite  sure of. Elena hesitated. When young Fausto questioned, she became evasive.  He promptly began to display symptoms of intense jealousy:

 Has she lost her faith? I've heard she has been out with Dnubietna - Dnubietna! Under his hands. Our Lord, is there no recourse? Must I go out and find them together: follow through the old farce of challenge, combat, murder . . . How he must be gloating: It was all planned. Must have been. Our discussions of marriage. He even told me one evening - hypothetically, of course, oh yes! - precisely how he would find a virgin someday and "educate" her to sin. Told me knowing all the time that someday it would be Elena Xemxi. My friend. Comrade-in-arms. One third of our Generation. I could never take her back. One touch from him and eighteen years of purity - gone!

Etc., etc. Dnubietna, as Fausto must have known even in the worst depths of  suspicion, had nothing at all to do with her reluctance. Suspicion softened  to a nostalgic brooding:

 Sunday there was rain, leaving me with memories. Rain seems to make them swell like bothersome flowers whose perfume is bittersweet. A night I remember: we were children, embracing in a garden above the Harbour. The rustling of azaleas, smell of oranges, a black frock she wore that absorbed all the stars and moon; reflecting nothing back. As she had taken from me, all my light. She has the carob-softness of my heart.

Ultimately their quarrel took in a third party. In typically Maltese  fashion, a priest, one Father Avalanche, came in as the intermediary. He  appears infrequently in these journals, always faceless, serving more as  foil to his opposite number the Bad Priest. But he did finally persuade  Elena to return to Fausto.

 She came to me today, out of smoke, rain, silence. Wearing black, nearly invisible. Sobbing plausibly enough in my too-welcoming arms.

 She's to have a child. Dnubietna's, came my first thought (of course it did - for all of half a second - fool). The Father said mine. She had been to A. for confession. God knows what passed there. This good priest cannot break the secrecy of the confessional. Only let slip what the three of us know - that it is my child - so that we should be two souls united before God.

 So much for our plan. Maratt and Dnubietna will be disappointed.

So much for their plan. We will return to this matter of vocation.

From a distraught Elena then, Fausto learned of his "rival": the Bad Priest.

 No one knows his name or his parish. There is only superstitious rumour; excommunicated, confederates with the Dark One. He lives in an old villa past Sliema, near the sea. Found E. one night alone in the street. Perhaps he'd been out prowling for souls. A sinister figure, she said, but with the mouth of a Christ. The eyes were shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat; all she could see were soft cheeks, even teeth.

Now it was none of your mysterious "corruption." Priests here are second  only to mothers in order of prestige. A young girl is naturally enough  deferent to and awed by the mere glimpse of any fluttering soutane in the  street. Under subsequent questioning, it came out:

 "It was near the church - our church. By a long low wall in the street, after sunset, but still light. He asked if I was going to the church. I hadn't thought to go. Confessions were over. I don't know why I agreed to walk there with him. It was not a command - though I would have obeyed if it had been - but we went up the hill, and into the church, up the side aisle to the confessional.

 "'Have you confessed?' he asked.

 "I looked at his eyes. I thought at first he was drunk, or marid b'mohhu. I was afraid.

 "'Come then.' We entered the confessional. At the time I thought: don't priests have the right? But I did tell him things I have never told Father Avalanche. I didn't know then who this priest was, you see."

Now sin for Elena Xemxi had been heretofore as natural a function as  breathing, eating, or gossiping. Under the agile instruction of the Bad  Priest, however, it began to take on the shape of an evil spirit: alien,  parasitic, attached like a black slug to her soul.

 How could she marry anyone? She was fit, said the Bad Priest, not for the world but for the convent. Christ was her proper husband. No human male could coexist with the sin which fed on her girl-soul. Only Christ was mighty enough, loving enough, forgiving enough. Had He not cured the lepers and exorcised malignant fevers? Only He could welcome disease, clasp it to His bosom, rub against it, kiss it. It had been His mission on earth as now, a spiritual husband in heaven, to know sickness intimately, love it, cure it. This was parable, the Bad Priest told her, metaphor for spirit's cancer. But the Maltese mind, conditioned by its language, is unreceptive to such talk. All my Elena saw was the disease, the literal sickness.   Afraid I, or our children, would reap its ravages.

 She stayed away from me and from Father A.'s confessional. Stayed in her own house, searched her body each morning and examined her conscience each night for progressive symptoms of the metastasis she feared was in her. Another vocation: whose words were garbled and somehow sinister, as Fausto's own had been.

These, poor child, are the sad events surrounding your given name. It is a  different name now that you've been carried off by the U. S. Navy. But  beneath that accident you are still Maijstral-Xemxi - a terrible  misalliance. May you survive it. I fear not so much a reappearance in you of  Elena's mythical "disease" as a fracturing of personality such as your  father has undergone. May you be only Paola, one girl: a single given heart,  a whole mind at peace. That is a prayer, if you wish.

Later, after the marriage, after your birth, well into the reign of Fausto  II when the bombs were falling, the relationship with Elena must have come  under some kind of moratorium. There being, perhaps, enough else to do.  Fausto enlisted in the home defence; Elena had taken to nursing: feeding and  keeping sheltered the bombed-out, comforting the wounded, bandaging,  burying. At this time - assuming his theory of the "dual man" to be so -  Fausto II was becoming more Maltese and less British.

 German bombers over today: ME-109's. No more need to look. We have grown used to the sound. Five times. Concentrated, as luck would have it, on Ta Kali. These grand chaps in the "Hurries" and Spitfires! What would we not do for them!

Moving towards that island-wide sense of communion. And at the same time  towards the lowest form of consciousness. His work at the Ta Kali airfield  was a sapper's drudgery; keeping the runways in condition for the British  fighter planes; repairing the barracks, mess hall and hangars. At first he  was able to look on it all over his shoulder, as it were: in retreat.

 Not a night since Italy declared war have we known raidless. How was it in the years of peace? Somewhere - what centuries ago? - one could sleep a night through. That's all gone. Routed out by sirens at three in the morning - at 3:30 out to the airfield past the Bofors emplacements, the wardens, the fire-fighting crews. With death - its smell, slow after-trickling of powdered plaster, stubborn smoke and name, still fresh in the air. The R.A.F. are magnificent, all magnificent: ground artillery, the few merchant seamen who do get through, my own comrades-in-arms. I speak of them that way: our home defence though little more than common labourers are military in the highest sense. Surely if war has any nobility it is in the rebuilding not the destruction. A few portable searchlights (they are at a premium) for us to see by. So with pick, shovel and rake we reshape our Maltese earth for those game little Spitfires.

 But isn't it a way of glorifying God? Hard-labour surely. But as if somewhere once without our knowledge we'd been condemned for a term to prison. With the next raid all our filling and levelling is blasted away into pits and rubble piles which must then be refilled and relevelled only to be destroyed again. Day and night it never eases off. I have let pass my nightly prayers on more than one occasion. I say them now on my feet, on the job, often in rhythm to the shovelling. To kneel is a luxury these days.

 No sleep, little food; but no complaints. Are we not, Maltese, English and the few Americans, one? There is, we are taught, a communion of saints in heaven. So perhaps on earth, also in this Purgatory, a communion: not of gods or heroes, merely men expiating sins they are unaware of, caught somehow all at once within the reaches of a sea un crossable and guarded by instruments of death. Here on our dear tiny prison plot, our Malta.

Retreat, then, into religious abstraction. Retreat also into poetry, which  somehow he found time to write down. Fausto IV has commented elsewhere on  the poetry which came out of Malta's second Great Siege. Fausto II's had  fallen into the same patterns. Certain images recurred, major among them  Valletta of the Knights. Fausto IV was tempted to put this down to simple  "escape" and leave it there. It was certainly wish-fulfillment. Maratt had a  vision of La Vallette patrolling the streets during blackout; Dnubietna  wrote a sonnet about a dogfight (Spitfire v. ME-109) taking a knights' duel  for the sustained image. Retreat into a time when personal combat was more  equal, when warfare could at least be gilded with an illusion of honour. But  beyond this; could it not be a true absence of time? Fausto II even noticed  this:

 Here towards midnight in a lull between raids, watching Elena and Paola sleep, I seem to have come inside time again. Midnight does mark the hairline between days, as was our Lord's design. But when the bombs fall, or at work, then it's as if time were suspended. As if we all laboured and sheltered in timeless Purgatory. Perhaps it comes only from living on an island. With another kind of nerves possibly one has a dimension, a vector pointing sternly to some land's-end or other, the tip of a peninsula. But here with nowhere to go in space but into the sea it can be only the barb-and-shaft of one's own arrogance that insists there is somewhere to go in time as well.

Or in a more poignant vein:

 Spring has come. Perhaps there are sulla blossoms in the country. Here in the city is sun, and more rain than is really necessary. It cannot matter, can it? Even I suspect the growth of our child has nothing to do with time. Her name-wind will be here again; to soothe her face which is always dirty. Is it a world anyone could have brought a child into?

None of us has the right to ask that any more, Paola. Only you.

The other great image is of something I can only call slow apocalypse. Even  the radical Dnubietna, whose tastes assuredly ran to apocalypse at full  gallop, eventually created a world in which the truth had precedence over  his engineer's politics. He was probably the best of our poets. First, at  least, to come to a halt, about-face and toil back along his own retreat's  path; back towards the real world the bombs were leaving us. The Ash  Wednesday poem marked his lowest point: after that he gave up abstraction  and a political rage which he later admitted was "all posturing" to be  concerned increasingly with what was, not what ought to have been or what  could be under the right form of government.

We all came back eventually. Maratt in a way which in any other context  would be labelled absurdly theatrical. He was working as mechanic out at Ta  Kali and had grown fond of several pilots. One by one they were shot from  the sky. On the night the last one died he went calmly into the officers'  club, stole a bottle of wine - scarce then like everything else because no  convoys were getting through - and got belligerently drunk. The next anyone  knew he was on the edge of town at one of the Bofors emplacements, being  shown how to operate the guns. They taught him in time for the next raid. He  divided his time after that between airfield and artillery, getting, I  believe, two to three hours' sleep out of every twenty-four: He had an  excellent record of kills. And his poetry began to show the same "retreat  from retreat."

Fausto II's return was most violent of all. He dropped away from abstraction  and into Fausto III: a non-humanity which was the most real state of  affairs. Probably. One would rather not think so.

But all shared this sensitivity to decadence, of a slow falling, as if the  island were being hammered inch by inch into the sea. "I remember," that  other Fausto wrote,

   I remember

   A sad tango on the last night of the old world

   A girl who peeped from between the palms

   At the Phoenicia Hotel

   Maria, alma de mi corazon,

   Before the crucible

   And the slag heap,

   Before the sudden craters

   And the canc............