“The most beautiful country in the world awaits us.” You’d be pardoned for thinking this was the sales pitch for a millenarian cult. Instead, it’s the parting shot of one of many hyper-nationalist TV spot ads meant to lift the collective spirit in a time of crisis.
It shows beautiful happy people living in a beautiful happy land where wolves and lambs wear funny hats and hold hands to slide down rainbows. For an instant, I thought, my spirit was lifted.
Until I met a friend and colleague of mine, whom I shall call Anthony. Anthony and his wife Mary have lived in a terraced house in Pembroke since 1993. It’s a home they spend a lot of time in, quarantine or no quarantine. The room they particularly love is the kitchen, which faces north and is bathed in a diffused light. The kitchen window tends most days to catch the breeze, too. Now the whole point of a terraced house is that it forms part of a terrace. In Britain as elsewhere, terracing was a supremely land-efficient solution to overcrowding in working-class urban areas.
Typically, terraced houses have no side windows.
They get their air and light from the front and the back, which is why building height, and unbuilt space at the back, are – or should be – strictly regulated. Block the back and you have a tomb – at best, a tomb with a view of the street.
The shocking thing about the story of Anthony and Mary is that it will shock no one at all. That’s because it’s told and retold a thousand times over, every day, everywhere in Malta. It’s the story of the normality the spot ad tells us we should look forward to going back to, soon.
Last year, the owner of the house that sits back-to-back with theirs decided he’d had enough of a terraced house. He’d also had enough of a terrace, and proceeded to apply for permission to replace his property with a four-storey block of flats.
You’d think the planners would have seen through the lunacy of one person unilaterally deciding to give the finger to a whole neighbourhood. Instead, he got full permission to do so. More normality there, so no one was terribly shocked.
Funny, when you think about it. For some reason, the principle of condominium applies only vertically. Blocks of flats summon, and are regulated by, notions of co-ownership and common interest that extend to things as particular as colour.
If I decided to have my layer of the façade painted red, my neighbours above and below me would bite my head off. They’d be right, too, because my decision would affect – chromatically, shall we say – their homes and lives. So right, the law would back them.
Horizontally, no such sensibilities apply. One is free, it would appear, to rewrite the lives of neighbours in ways that make colour seem affected. A terrace only works if we think of it as a condominium lying on its side. Break it down into individual units and you have a disaster that’s far worse than my misguided slice of bright red.
You’d think the planners would have seen through the lunacy of one person unilaterally deciding to give the finger to a whole neighbourhood- Mark Anthony Falzon
Anthony and Mary are about to live that disaster. They’re in their early 50s, and were looking forward to spending the rest of their lives in a home and neighbourhood they’ve grown attached to over the years. Now, they’re no longer so sure.
For the next three or more years they will have to put up with noise and dust, inches away from their back windows. There will be no respite from side windows because there are none. They knew that when they bought the house, but then they did think they were buying a terraced house. In a terrace.
Both Anthony and Mary are the glass-half-full type. I’ve never seen them look so despondent. They’re writers and scholars, and their study overlooks their small back yard. They constantly looked out as we talked, as if trying to get the last glimpse of light before it goes out. Their kitchen, too, will have to replace the diffused with the sepulchral. Part of me hopes they’re not reading this.
Anthony told me of how he feels their domestic space will be invaded and violated. Curtains will have to be made thicker and blinds installed in a game of shadows they’re not willing to play but must. “Se jisirqulna darna minn ħalqna” (“our home will be stolen from under our noses”), he said.
The proverbial insult is that they’ve been told to celebrate and be happy. Even as it is devalued, their home will be valued into a plot. Given it will no longer belong in a terrace, it’ll be worth much more. Pembroke being what it is, they’d make a killing selling it.
Except neither Anthony nor Mary are particularly excited at the prospect of financial gain, certainly not of the kind that comes with losing a home.
As Anthony put it to me, he may as well think of his kidneys as an investment. He could sell one and retire comfortably. Except he doesn’t much fancy the idea of living in the most beautiful country in the world with only one kidney.