The Damned of Water

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Triton is a nautical deity of royal origin, of a much higher rung than the actual line of British kings and heirs, since his father and mother, Poseidon and Amphitrite, were both fully fledged sea gods. So, no commoners in his lineage. Endowed with the upper body of an athletic male and a lower body ending in a mighty fish tail, the dude has been recruited for centuries to bring water into cities through impressive artistic personifications. Whether honored as a central or unique piece within a fountain, the Triton’s task is not devoid of danger, water being simultaneously a principle of life and matter’s most powerful solvent. A mighty triton may well end up being eaten by water. For this reason, some of the most precious examples were hauled to museums and replaced in situ with phony replicas. So what? Altogether the public is blind! With these noble thoughts in mind (and smelling blood, see later), I decided to hit the  La Valletta Tritons’ Fountain as soon as possible.

So, the morning after my arrival at 11 Triq (street, in any other decent language) L-Argotti, near the botanical garden, I summoned what residues of strength, will, and pride I had left to escape the tower-like residence where I was living. I felt like a princess imprisoned by her father to protect her from random copulations. Fat chance!

After some hesitation, I advanced in a fairly straight line, moving with the impetuosity of a 400-kilo tortoise I met in the Galápagos fifteen years ago. My target was the circular plaza marking the encounter between the satellite city of Floriana, where I was staying, and Valletta’s city gate.

 

There I saw a circular monument bigger, in a way, than the plaza containing it. You can measure it yourself, but beware—the issue is entirely mental. It was the Triton Fountain (Il-Funtana tat-Triton), consisting of three tritons supporting a huge basin five meters across. They were laid, so to say, with regard to the particularities of their cruely twisted bodies—two sitting and one kneeling on rough, wooden-like stumps emerging from of a heavy, round concrete base. This base was plated with 730 tons of pale ocher travertine slabs brought from Rome, mind you. The kind of dough that must have cost? Forget it! The mighty base is encircled by two heroic-sized basins (vasches). I hope I haven’t forgotten anything, but it will be worth checking the photos. From the very first moment, I was fascinated by the sense of oddity wrapping, and floating upon the ensemble, by the conflict between very steady and very shaky visual elements, and by an aura of irrepressible tension coming from a contraption that is supposed to inspire relief and peace, like posh  spa for corporate flesh.

After taking in this sight, I indulged in an infamous samosa sold at one of the wheeled stands encircling (again) the Plaza of the Tritons, and cursed the fake Indian or Pakistani vendor accordingly in the English vernacular. Then, I returned hastily to the monument with the proud awareness that I had discovered a magnum drama thanks to my educated inner feeling and wide aesthetic experience to put it plainly. The drama had to do both with the supporting and enclosing construction of the monument, and with the  symbolic, of the desperate figurative providers of water jets and messages. Inspired by Renaissance cannons, the work had squarly  landed into a Gothic horror. I hope you are not a very emotional type, but to play it safe, I have to deliver the chronological schedule of this ambitious, epochal, nationalistic, elegant, and fragile artistic achievement, hysterically inaugurated in 1959.

The vasca of plenty—the upper basin—appears to hover, most likely resting upon the spread hands of the three raised, flexed arms (two right, one left) of the fleshy bronze, outward-gazing, manifestly asexual aquatic deities. A fact of beauty. Water spurts and jets create a kind of liquid vault, while the whooshing trill of water on water, I imagine, should be enticing at midnight. Spiral movement, equilibrium, local identity, monumentality, eternity, modernness, and, mind you, lightness are simultaneously and expressively suggested to the sensitive observer on a tray. The insensitive register their homely selfies against the fountain background and trot  throng-like, down the scarringly abundant, mercantile Republic Street towards the famous Fort St. Elmo.

In returning to the destiny of this cursed fountain construct I should emphasize that 19 years after the delirious inauguration in 1978 the exciting combination of marine atlantes (which may be an oxymoron) and the hovering basin collapsed. For nine long years, the compound was painfully repaired before returning to functionality in 1987—please excuse me—with a suppository kind of support: a central pillar embellished with sea gulls to hold up  the vasca of plenty. This gross impairment, which flatly contradicted the essential aesthetic message of the artwork, was conceived and carried out by the fountain’s revered father, Chevalier Vincent Apap. Who made him a chevalier? Alas, artists and commoners equally need a piece of meat. In 2010, and then again in 2012, the continuously deteriorating fountain barely escaped relocation to a whorehouse, a churchyard, or some other dubious perimeter. Against all odds, this stranded, embattled whale returned in glory in 2018, after the supporting “suppository” got the boot and the most intensive and expensive restoration took place under the confused leadership of the great Renzo Piano, who had previously ineptly voted for its transfer the devil knows why.

The drama that took place at the level of the fountain’s materiality undoubtedly oozed into its spiritual configuration, through the odd representation of the semi-human bronze characters that may induce heart grief and moral discomfort in any sensitive onlooker. Just look at them. Three wet individuals, continuously drenched, with crooked upper bodies and gasping mouths—identically shaped mugs (brothers? casted faces?), carying each a pair of silly goatees, looking into the void through empty eyes after having spent nine long years in an Italian Hospital for Ill Bronze Sculpture (IHIBS). And what about their stance? They are locked in a stand where they are threatened at any moment with being crushed by the three tons of heavy basin from above. Chained and riveted like galley slaves from vicious ancient times, they do not have any chance to escape their ill-fated condition. They are the Damned of Water.

Add to that misery their ambiguous sexual definition, lacking any hint of fair genital apparatus, and the greenish, sick quality of their skin surface after interminable treatments with acid patinas, and you realize the atmosphere of dismal embarrassment and general despair they spread around. To be fair, I must recognize that tritons in similar functions all over the world have not been very well treated, with the exception of the happy Triton of Queen Mary’s Gardens, flanked by two adorable, 100 percent sure female Dryads. These were the facts and it is not in my intention to challenge the world’s order.

 

 

 

But when I discovered, at the very end, that the commemorative plaque of the 2018 recovery pays tribute to Malta’s then-Prime Minister Mr. Muscat without even mentioning the brave chevalier, serving mainly as a beacon to the overwhelming mass of tourism devotees, I deserted the site. I planned to return as speedy as possible (!) to my tower to have an iced wheat beer, some cold cuts, and some delicious local pastizzi, detaching myself forever from the poisonous  stuff of moral judgments, activist snorts, and worthless critical comments. I want to be as corrupt and hedonistic as the throng advancing towards Fort Saint Elmo, and cease to be an eternal learned idiot. See? Let us go with the stream, day after days as long as the iron is in the fire.

The Wanderer