The Maltese Goddess

SIXTEEN

Gone. All of them, gone. Free at last.

It was a few days before Rob and I were able to head for home. Tabone drove us to the airport to say good-bye, and as we left, handed us each a copy of the Times of Malta.

“cabinet minister questioned in assassination scare,” the immensely satisfying headline trumpeted. Even if the link to Galea’s murder could not be made, and something told me it wouldn’t be, at least the man I thought might be responsible would pay. Perhaps too, I thought, the Hedgehog would yet have his day in court.

Rob’s girlfriend Barbara and his daughter Jennifer met our flight from Paris. Jennifer was an attractive girl but with a rather sullen expression that I thought might be in danger of becoming permanent. Barbara, on the other hand, was bright and perky, young, of course, and presumably athletic, dressed as she was in a white tracksuit and shoes, her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. They offered to drive me home, and although I thought them quite sincere in wanting to do it, I insisted on taking a taxi, happy to sit in silence in the darkness of the backseat as the familiar sights sped by.

I was so glad to turn the key on my Utile Victorian cottage that I almost wept. I could see the lights on at Alex’s house next door, but decided to take some time for myself. I knew he’d be watching out for me and would be over in the morning to see how I was doing, but in the meantime I needed some time to think.

There was a huge pile of mail on the kitchen counter, sorted by Alex into little piles—“Junk,” one said; “Read at Leisure,” another said; “Bills” was the terse message on the largest; and finally “Read Now.” Life was coming back to normal.

There were really only two items in the “Read Now‘’ pile, one postmarked Belize, the second a postmark and stamp I hadn’t seen before.

I poured myself a glass of wine, threw a log or two on the fire, and sat down to read. First, I turned to the letter from Lucas. It had occurred to me that isolated as he was at the archaeological site in Belize, he might know nothing of my adventures, and I looked forward to a letter devoid of any sad references to the last few weeks. But if I thought the letter would put the world right for me, it was not to be.

Dear Lara,

This is a very difficult letter for me to write, and it may be equally difficult for you to read.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the future, about what I need to do, and about us. You have always respected my wish not to discuss my ties with one of the underground groups agitating for change in my country, but I think you have always known how important these ties are, how critical I consider the cause.

I have been persuaded that now is the time to move forward to the public stage, to begin a political push for change, rather than a clandestine one. In a way it is because of you that I make this decision. Your optimism and faith that justice will always prevail have made me dare to hope that I can change the inequities that exist in Mexican society, that if other people truly understand the situation, they too will support change.

This is, I believe, a very positive decision, except for one thing, and that is that I do not believe I can continue our relationship and do what must be done. I cannot see these two aspects of my life—my relationship with you, and my aspirations for my country—as compatible, in part because our lives, our cultures are so very different, but also because I do not, as you know, believe in doing anything by halves. To attempt to do both would deny both of us the relationship we need and deserve, neither would it serve my cause and my people well. Given that I must choose, I believe I must take the path that benefits my society, rather than the one I might personally prefer.

I think you will not be happy with what I have to say, but perhaps I presume too much. If you take anything from this letter, indeed from our time together, I hope it is that I love you. This may be the hardest thing I have ever done.

Please forgive me and try to understand. Love, Lucas.

I reread the letter many times that night, the pain so great I could not even cry. In the end, I set the letter aside. No, Lucas, you do not presume too much, I thought. This hurts me more than I will ever let you know. I promise only to try to understand. I do not know if I can forgive you.

Finally, I opened the mysterious letter.

Dear Lara,

I trust I may call you that? I hope more than I can tell you that this letter finds you safe and well. You have been through a terrible ordeal, if the newspaper reports are anywhere close to accurate, for which I feel in some way responsible, although I think my actions did not directly cause it.

But perhaps I rationalize. Perhaps what happened precipitated a chain of events that have caused you considerable pain, and this grieves me, more, I must tell you, than the original deed itself.

I did not plan for this. There is a Swiss bank account, set up by my father for emergencies—and surely this qualifies—so I am not penniless, though far from the financial status I once enjoyed. But I am rambling, wishing to delay telling you what I must.

Perhaps I should start at the beginning as they say, at least where life seemed to begin for me, when I first met Martin Galea. Before that I was a gawky, homely, painfully shy woman, afraid of life and living. When I met Martin, I was a librarian at the University of Toronto— not a real librarian, you understand. The McLean women do not seek employment, real work being, in the opinion of my father, beneath the dignity of the “ladies” in his family. I was a volunteer, such charitable activities considered the proper role for a woman of means.

My mother died when I was very young. I have only vague memories of her, but I have her picture. It is one of only two things of this kind I thought to bring with me. She was lovely. I, unfortunately, take after my father in looks, and was, in this and almost everything else, a disappointment to him. My upbringing was therefore given over to a housekeeper, a rather stern woman of limited imagination, and then a series of tutors of whom I have no fond memories. All of them, while uninterested in me as a person, had very definite ideas about what I should do and what I should think.

Despite his disappointment in me, my father saw to it that I was well educated, schooled in the great masters, taken as a child to the great centers of culture on my vacations. In my early twenties, I was sent to what was rather quaintly called finishing school in Europe. It was then and there that I discovered Italy. More specifically, I discovered architecture.

One of my fine arts professors used to say that the world could be divided into two kinds of people—those who love Venice, and those who love Florence. I think I can understand that. To me, Venice, while stunning, has a reckless quality to it, a sense of impending darkness, a certain dangerous wetness, like damp sheets after an afternoon of illicit lovemaking.

But Florence—ah, Florence. To me this is a city where reason and order prevail, not in a static way, but in a way that attains the sublime. Those porticoes with sunlight streaming in perfect patterns between the perfectly proportioned columns were the most beautiful urban spaces I had ever seen. I roamed the streets, captivated by the grandeur, the soaring domes of Brunelleschi, the spacious piazzas—my favorite, Santissima Annunziata, completely soothing in its proportions, the most beautiful square, I think, anywhere in the world.

But I digress again. After Florence, I desperately wanted to be an architect, but my father would not permit it. You may think that in this day and age women should be free to do as they please. This is not, after all, Victorian England. But I have never been one who had the strength, the courage, to defy those around me, most particularly, I must say, my father. In a way though, he was right, if for the wrong reasons. I lack the unshakeable confidence in one’s own abilities, the certitude that one’s decisions and choices are invariably correct, that being an architect seems to require.

Since I was not permitted to be an architect, I became, I suppose, what is rather unflatteringly called a groupie. I worked as a volunteer at the library at the School of Architecture, hung out at the back of the lecture halls to hear the guest speakers, sat in the cafeteria listening to the students talk about their work.

One day as I was tidying up, I found, sound asleep in one of the study carrels, the most beautiful man I had ever seen. His features were perfect, dark eyelashes flecked with gold, a perfectly shaped nose, cheekbones chiseled in marble, a Greek god in the living flesh. His head was cradled in his arms, resting on a set of architectural drawings I assumed he’d been working on.

I sat looking at him for several minutes, just watching him breathe, until he awoke with a start, embarrassed to find me there. To ease his discomfort, I asked him what he was working on, and he showed me the drawings on which he had been resting his head.

They were magnificent, as he was, and his enthusiasm for his work apparent. He looked very tired, and in a gesture so uncharacteristic of me that it surprises me to this day, I asked him if he would like to go for a coffee. At first he declined, then he laughed apologetically and confessed he didn’t have the money to pay for it. I told him money was not an issue for me, which of course it wasn’t.

We went to a little coffee shop nearby—the Cake Master Cafe in Yorkville, do you know it? He was effortlessly charming, in a way I could never be. He told me about his passion for his studies, how he wanted to be the world’s greatest architect, and thought he could be. However, he said, he might have to drop out of school before he qualified, because his scholarship had run out, and he couldn’t come up with the next installment of his fees.

At some point in that conversation over coffee, I knew my aimless days had come to an end. I had found my metier, my calling, and that was to support—to nurture— what I believed, and still believe, to be a prodigious talent. I paid his tuition, not just that year, but for several years of graduate study to follow. I cooked, although I dislike cooking intensely; I shopped; I bought his clothes, seeing to it that he looked and acted the part of the successful architect.

A couple of years after we met we were married, against the wishes of my father, who threatened to disinherit me. In the end he didn’t, he couldn’t, because of a promise he had made to my mother. I was much older than Martin, a good fifteen years. In fact, I was thirty-seven—the age he was the last day of his life—while he was only twenty-two. He said he didn’t care about age, that what counted was that I was his muse, his patron, his very own de Medici.

And I was. I introduced him to my friends, my father’s friends. I made sure he walked the halls of the wealthy and the powerful. I saw that his life was a comfort, his work unhampered by the demands of the sordid realities of having to pay the bills. In turn, our life together shielded me from the loneliness and fear I had come to dread before I met him. I did not have to face the world alone. He was charming enough for both of us. We were invited everywhere, at first because of my social status, but later because of his.

And he met, no, exceeded, my wildest expectations. He is—was—a genius, my own Brunelleschi. I think that history will judge him as one of the greatest architects of our age. How history will judge me to a large extent remains in your hands.

How can I describe to you what happened that day? That one bright flame of passion in an essentially passionless life. To a certain extent, I viewed my life with him as a job as much as a relationship, and I thought myself fairly sanguine about it.

I knew his faults, every last one of them. I knew he was arrogant, but I thought he was entitled to be. I knew there were other women. That part of our lives together— the physical—had never been a big part of the relationship. Perhaps at first it was my fear of pregnancy, being so much older than he. And how could I have a child by someone I essentially regarded as a child himself?

Nonetheless, he stayed with me—I comforted myself with that—long after his success made my fortune unnecessary. All I asked was that I be permitted, as his wife, to share in his successes, bask in his reflected glory. And that he never lie to me nor humiliate me.

Strangely though, as his social skills increased, mine seemed to decline even more. I was so long in his shadow, as I had been in my father’s, that I became almost invisible. At some point, I think, I ceased to have a separate identity at all. I went almost nowhere alone, and an old dread of social situations I had known as a child came back with a vengeance.

Except at my club.

I think I described a little of my life to you that day you visited the house. I’m not sure if I was able to convey to you how much I enjoyed the few hours every day I spent at my club, cocooned in a soft pink haze against the world.

I’d go for lunch, almost every day. I knew the staff and many of the other members by sight, if not intimately, the menu from memory, although it didn’t matter, since I had the same meal, the house salad, every time. After lunch, I’d swim in the pool, relax in the sauna, and then, anonymous in a pale rose bathrobe, I’d curl up in the lower lounge pretending to read a book, but in actual fact, listening, eavesdropping, I suppose, on the casual conversations of the women around me. I listened to them talk about their children, their husbands, their hairdressers, their various medical conditions. It didn’t matter to me what they talked about, only that I could experience their lives, banal though they might be, in this vicarious and comfortingly safe way.

But then that day, the last I was there. One of the women in the club I like least, detest actually, is a woman by the name of Rose Devere. She calls herself a journalist, but she is really a gossip columnist. She insinuates her way into people’s lives—hinting, falsely I’m sure, of some exotic personal background—and then reports in a petty and occasionally malicious way about the people she seeks to befriend. It was a wonder to me that she is able to move in the circles she does. She is, in my opinion, and I hope I do not sound too much of a snob, simply common.

In the lower lounge of the club there is a telephone for use of the members. Rose got all kinds of calls, of course, and I really tried not to listen to her conversations because they invariably disturbed the tranquility of my day.

That day, that fateful day, she was called to the telephone as usual. I tried not to listen, also as usual. But one word caught my attention.

“Malta!” she exclaimed. “You expect me to drop everything and fly off with you to some tiny little island I’ve barely even heard of? Why would I do that?”

I could not, of course, hear the reply. “Help you entertain important people? Like who?”

Another pause while the person on the other end of the telephone apparently pleaded with her to come.

“All right, but I’ll need new clothes,” she said at last, putting the phone down. “Gotta run, girls. Things to do, people to see, dresses to buy,” she said to no one in particular as she hurried from the room, taking with her all the pleasure, the comfort, the security, I had ever felt in that place.

I actually didn’t feel anything. Not then. I calmly changed back into my street clothes, called the valet for my car, and drove home. I listened to the phone messages, one about a party a week or so later, the other a message from your shipper saying he would be by for the furniture before eight. I packed Martin’s suitcase for his trip as I always did. And then because he had asked for a light meal before his flight and it was Coralee’s day off, I set his place at the counter in the kitchen with my characteristic care—Martin liked everything to be just so—and sat in the darkening room, waiting for him to come home.

When he did, for a time I did nothing. If he thought it strange that I had been sitting in the kitchen in the dark, he didn’t say anything. I made him bacon and eggs and toast as I always do on Coralee’s day off. I am not a good cook, and this is really the only thing I can make that Martin likes… liked. While he ate, he talked a bit about the project he was working on in Rome where he was going to spend a couple of days, about the flight that evening, complaining there was no first or business class, then he started talking about Malta.

“So sorry you can’t come with me this time. But it’s business. Lots of boring entertaining. The Prime Minister and a couple of Cabinet Ministers. Men only. Just as well. It’s not your cup of tea, I know. You find these social events difficult. But when I get back, we’ll go to the house in the Caribbean, just the two of us, for a rest. A little romantic interlude, okay?”

I tried to respond to him, but I couldn’t. I felt as if all the air had been sucked from the room, my lungs, then my veins and arteries, collapsing in the vacuum until a film, a kind of reddish haze, covered my eyes.

What was I feeling? Fear? Anger? Rage?

The knife was just lying there. I have asked myself over and over, what would have happened if it hadn’t been there, if it had not been Coralee’s day off? But it was. Perhaps the question I should ask myself is, why? After all this time? Knowing him as I did?

With a strength I didn’t know I had, I stabbed him. He did not die immediately. Instead, for a few moments we were both locked in suspended animation, he with a surprised, almost sad, expression on his face. Then he just fell.

There was surprisingly little blood, not nearly as much as I would have expected, just a few spots brilliant red against the white marble. The strength that had driven the knife into him with such ferocity stayed with me as I lifted him into the oak chest, pulled the knife out, cutting myself in the process, and closed the lid.

With a strangely methodical quality, I cleaned up the blood with a paper towel, which I then flushed away, and then I removed your yellow marker from the sideboard in the hallway, and put it on his—coffin. I owe you an apology for that. I wasn’t thinking very clearly and it pains me to think I had inadvertently ensured you would be the one to find the body.

I changed my clothes and packed a few of my own clothes, only the barest of necessities, in his suitcase, took his billfold with the airline ticket, money, and passport, and drove his car, wearing his driving gloves, to the airport. I knew your shipper would be calling for the furniture shortly, but I also knew Coralee, predictable as always, would be home by the time he arrived. Indeed, as I got to the end of the street, I saw Coralee descending from the bus, but I don’t believe she saw the car. On my way to the airport, I dropped the knife and my blouse with Martin’s blood on it into a large garbage bin in an industrial park far from the house.

At the airline counter I presented his ticket and my own passport. Have you noticed how they never really look at you? No one noticed that the M. Galea on the ticket was a Mr. rather than a Mrs., and I boarded the plane, which was full. There was a mix-up with the seats of some kind. I did not get the one allocated to me, but it didn’t really matter. Nothing did.

In Rome, I encountered no difficulties. Here too they barely look at you. I’d worried all the way over about filling in a tourist card, but none was required. I showed my passport to the customs official, but he was talking to one of his colleagues in the next booth and never directly looked at me at all when he stamped my passport. And then I just disappeared.

I will not tell you where I went from there, nor how I did it. There were people who helped me out of sheer kindness, and I would not wish their generosity blunted by learning they helped a murderer. All I will say is that it is surprisingly easy, and requires very modest sums of money, to effectively vanish.

As I think I told you earlier, I have a little money, not much, but enough to live relatively well in a place where poverty is the norm, and where relatively small amounts of money have the potential to greatly ease the misery of those around me. I have pledged myself to do that, at least, to make up in some small way for what I have done.

It will be a novel experience for me, living without the perpetual advice and counsel of either my father or my husband, but I believe I will grow a little more confident every day. The Worryman you gave me that day in the shop is with me still, and I think of you when I rub my troubles on his back.

You will be surprised, no doubt, when I say that while I do not regret that last fateful act of my relationship with Martin, would even do it again, if the circumstances were the same, that I miss him so very much. I dream about him vividly, and wake with a feeling of his presence so real that I reach out to touch him. If I could bring him back, if I had godlike powers to make that happen, I think perhaps I would. But we, the two of us, would have to work out a new relationship, one where my newfound independence could be accommodated, where my opinions were held to be of some consequence.

I gather from the newspapers that the authorities believe that I may be dead, killed by whoever killed my husband. I would wish to remain so, yet I feel compelled to write to you. You were very kind to me on those few occasions we met. You seemed interested in what I had to say and respected my feelings. Now my fate rests with you. If you choose to tell the authorities of this letter— this confession—then so be it. I do not know if they can find me, but I know they will surely try. That decision I leave, perhaps unfairly, to you.

With best regards—and love, Marilyn Galea.

I sat for a very long time that evening, very still, watching the flames in the fireplace flicker in front of me, thinking about what I had read. I thought about all the truly dreadful things that had happened in the past weeks, the ache of the loss of friends, the anger that still was in me. Where was the Goddess now?

I am at the beginning as I am at the end. I am the sacred circle, spinner of the web of space and time. I am the cosmic “And”: life and death, order and chaos, eternal and finite.

How is it that you wrenched apart that which is inseparable? Why did you create the Either/Or? Because when you did, when you replaced Me with your despotic sky gods who rule from Without, you made Me something to be mastered, something to be conquered…

Neglected, devalued, insulted, and profaned I may be, but I remain. I wait in my sacred places, I live in your dreams. Nammu, Isis, Aphrodite. Inanna, Astarte, Anath. Call me whichever of my manifestations you will. I am the Great Goddess, and I will be avenged.

I took the letters, both of them, and page by page, consigned them to the flames.