George Cini: Strada Stretta – Aktar dawl fuq it-triq li darba xegħlet il-Belt.
Self-published, 2015. 276 pp

My parents never quite resigned themselves to the fact that Strada Stretta was just round the corner from where we lived. When I was 10, I had to cross it daily to reach the Lyceum and back. They made me promise I would only cross at corners where policemen stood on duty and that I would not glance sideways when hurrying over that polluted ground. Such, in the eyes of the bourgeois, was the infamy Strait Street inspired after the war.

Hate it or love it, it was one fact of life Valletta inhabitants could not ignore. George Cini, I suspect, rather loves it, and has turned into the modern Virgil of Strada Stretta. He sings its myths and minutes its nostalgia. I was surprised one can think of a red-light district as material for a homely epic, but Cini certainly has, and with very evident success.

If you can bring yourself to accept the subjects he writes about as an integral part of a national collective memory you would rather not delete, you will be spellbound by what he records, and the passion with which he records it. Many must have shared that thrill, if his first book hogged the bestseller ratings for so long.

Let me say from the outset that Cini’s books on Strada Stretta have given me a rather un-clichéd perspective on Malta’s prime red-light district. Before reading Cini, the Gut was just that: a squalid one-street slum, crawling with sad whores and sadder transvestites, reeking of urine and vomit in the evenings and of cresol during the day, a golden mile where the inspectors of venereal disease were on duty round the clock and the rodent-control officers were wrong not to be.

To outsiders, the Gut meant dead-drunk British sailors anxious to have their pockets vacuumed, and quarrelsome American GIs spoiling for a brawl, both well-gratified in their cravings. When they had exhausted their conversation, which rarely strayed far from the F-word, they hollered along with the music, raucous intoxicated mortals scared they would incur a fine if they sang in tune. After that, the blockbuster fistfights.

Inspectors of venereal disease were on duty round the clock

This was the very obvious side of Strait Street that Cini almost takes as a given. He is really more interested in profiling the individual actors, many of them devout church-goers and contributors to the parish festa, though not necessarily subscribers to Christian chastity. Here is some of the best musical talent that mostly had its hotbed in the Gut and here is the camaraderie, the staunch family bonds, a compelling spirit of enterprise, the sly or crafty survival tricks, the slogging and the discipline.

The main actors are given voices, some of them amazingly articulate: the owners of the bars, the music halls, the lodging houses, the restaurants. The barmaids who were not prostitutes, those who were and those who left you guessing. The cross-dressers and the undressers. And then the tattoo artists, the barbers, the musicians, the singers and dancers, the inspectors who closed an eye and the policemen who closed both, the card sharps – each an engrossing human narrative, often of decay, sometimes of compassion, always of mercantile greed.

For if there is one common thread snaking through every narrative, it is everyone’s thrall to money. Everything, but everything, had a price; everything was calibrated by its commercial advantage, whether it was rents, musical virtuosity, the manipulation of beauty, or love as a passion or a commodity. Jekk iddawwar lira, it would evidently be good on any ethical scale. A wilderness of intregrity.

Strada Stretta mainly recruited its workforce from three popular districts of Valletta: the Mandraġġ, the Arċipiergu and the Diu Balli. True, Strada Stretta locals took comfort from their claim that the rotten apples, the horizontal women, were mostly imports from the three cities, Gozo and other far-away reaches. It may well have been the case.

The provenance of the players reflected the local political divide. The Diu Balli had traditionally been mostly Strickland Constitutional, eventually turning Labour. The Arċipiergu, on the other hand, had housed an old Nationalist fortress. The tattooist learnt he had to translate this fracture in his job: Labour stalwarts paid for a tattoo of Mintoff; the Nationalists, of the maduma. He inked both willingly, in ecumenical spirit, biex idawwar lira. Political tattoos went out of fashion – not a devastating loss – with the Gut’s decline when the British base finally wound down in 1979.

It seems to me quite amazing that this short stretch of a mostly disreputable road should, over a handful of years, have inspired three committed books: the two Cini ones, which look at Strada Stretta from the inside outwards, the narratives of those who lived it and loved it. Theirs is an unrepeatable, if perhaps sanitised, experience which would otherwise have been buried with them when the last ones pass away.

The third, the 2013 Strait Street by Schofield and Morrissey, looks at the same venue, but from the outside inwards. It recorded the street’s history, its evolution over centuries, its context and its abnormal niche in the capital city. Together, these three books outline, as consummately as anything human can, unique times and the landscapes of desire.

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