Good Friday just has to be the most tedious day in the calendar. It turns the country into a ghost town, populated, if at all, by the living dead. I hate it, but when I was a teenager I hated it even more. In those days, Malta was even more fundamentalist than it is now, when things have relaxed enormously, even if there is still no clear separation between Church and State. Then, the only radio station played funeral marches and muzika tad-dwejjaq. The only television station showed (after the test card between midnight and 6pm) endless repeats of Jesus Christ Superstar, il-passjoni and ‘suitable’ films, like Ben Hur. The shops were closed, the cinemas were closed, the bars were closed, the restaurants were closed, the coffee shops were closed, the nighclubs were definitely closed, even Tanti Palmier’s kiosk on the Sliema front was frigging closed. It was awful, a waste of a day. We were told that this was ‘out of respect’, and that it was supposed to force us to contemplate – presumably because we had nothing better or more interesting to do – the death of Christ on the Cross. Of course, we did nothing of the sort. What 14-year-old contemplates the death of Christ on the Cross? When you’re that age, time drags on endlessly when you’re bored, the devil finds works for idle hands, and Good Friday topped the boredom polls, with its echoing, empty streets and its pervasive eerie silence.
As I got older, it wasn’t the boredom that got to me so much as having religion forced down my throat regardless of my disapproval. On Sundays and public holidays – even on Easter Sunday and Christmas Day, when presumably most people are with their families, if they have them and can stand them enough – life goes on. Only shops close, and there too is a movement towards Sunday opening for those who want to, as in the run-up to Christmas when everyone is out and shopping on Sundays and public holidays, or sitting around and having coffee with friends. Yet on Good Friday, whether you want to or not, you are prevented from going out and being sociable, on one of the few days that you’re not working, because the whole place shuts down. Not content to leave the decision to you as to whether you want to have a slice of cake or not, have a cup of coffee or not, have a drink or not, bars, restaurants and coffee-shops take it upon themselves to close down for 24 hours and prevent you from breaking religious rules with which you may not hold. On Good Friday, Malta turns into a fundamentalist State for the day, and God help anyone who wants to get a meal or even so little as a cup of coffee in the sunshine. The only places open last Friday were a couple in those dens of iniquity, Sliema and Bugibba. I found myself driving down to St Paul’s Bay to bask in the sight of people mobbing the fish shop, the bakery, and the vegetable vendor – signs of life!
Why do they close down for the day? Tradition? Respect? Whatever it is, it has become a joke. Not even in Rome, the seat of the Vatican, do the cafes close down on Good Friday. The streets are full of people, out for their passeggiata, drinking their coffee and eating their ‘Lenten’ sweets. And we in Malta have to be, as usual, holier than the Pope. Like the members of the Mafia in neighbouring Sicily, who march in processions behind statues, beat their chests during Mass and follow all the rituals religiously, while plotting to murder and maim, no doubt there were hundreds of Maltese last Friday who, while cheerfully cohabiting with somebody else’s husband or wife, producing broods of children in complicated circumstances, popping off to London to get rid of an inconvenient pregnancy, deciding how best to swindle people to whom they owe money, and generally leaving a trial of misery behind them, would have made a point of ‘fasting’, not having milk with their coffee, not eating sweets, and smoking half the usual number of cigarettes. The more time goes by the less patience I find I have. The only difference is that 15 years ago I would have railed against this weird hypocrisy, while now I just shrug and carry on, accepting that I have nothing in common with people who reason so irrationally, and that it takes all sorts to make a Malta. If they think that not putting milk in their coffee on Good Friday is going to win them a seat at the right hand of the Father, well then, let them labour under that delusion.
It’s not for lack of business that the coffee shops and restaurants don’t open. You know how it is with people in this country: if you set their minds at rest that something is all right, and that no one is going to think ill of them for doing it, then they’ll go right ahead. If one coffee shop takes the plunge and opens, and a few brave people decide to sit down and have a cup of coffee, and some even braver ones decide to take their coffee with milk (ooooooh, naughty!), then everyone will follow suit. We saw it with far more serious things, like marital break-ups, cohabitation, giving birth in extraordinary circumstances, and new families being formed out of the shards of the old. Once a few people did it and the sky didn’t fall on their heads, nor God reach a hand out of the heavens to smite them or turn them to pillars of salt, a thousand others followed suit. They might not have had the guts otherwise; they needed to have the way cleared for them, to be told that it was all right.
Sliema and St Julian’s were full of people milling around in the sun last Friday. Had a coffee shop opened, they would have pounced. They were actually walking right up to one popular place and peering through the glass, in the faint hope that its owners might have realised that life has moved on somewhat since 1978, when the only entertainment on offer was the Good Friday procession (God help us). People prefer to be left free to make their own decisions about these things, rather than being treated like kids who must be physically prevented from breaking their fast or their rigorous contemplation of the Lord’s suffering. Thank heavens for the De Cesare brothers, who decided to keep their Eden Century cinemas running as usual on Good Friday, since the year they opened, on the grounds that not everyone in Malta is a strict adherent of Catholicism, still less the sort of strict adherent who believes that going to watch a film on Good Friday is a sin. That way, I was able to go and watch something suitably wicked and frivolous, instead of being condemned to yet another rerun of Spartacus at home. Besides, it’s an open secret that the DVD rental shops do booming business on Maundy Thursday, as people stock up for the deadliest, dullest day of the year. Now tell me, why is it a sin to watch a film at the cinema on Good Friday, when it is not a sin to watch the same film on the same day at home? And why can you have a cup of coffee at home (but without milk, eh!) when you can’t have the same cup of coffee at your favourite paying place because they’re closed for the day ‘out of traditional respect’?
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I draw the line at the behaviour of those people who make a point of eating pork on Good Friday, in public if possible, at the hotel restaurants that are the only ones open. It’s very immature. There’s a difference between wishing not to have intrusion of the religious into the secular, and not to have other people’s religious preferences foisted onto you whether you agree with them or not, and deliberately seeking to cause offence. It is time we grew up about this, though, because no one is benefiting. Any Maltese person who is able to escape a Maltese Easter weekend does so, even to the extent of hopping over to nearby Sicily or Italy, where Easter customs are a great deal more congenial and do not involve turning the country into a giant funeral parlour. The young people who can’t flee for a few days instead bury themselves in Gozo for a booze-up that lasts between Maundy Thursday and Easter Sunday, when it is considered safe to resurface. Gozo on Good Friday is packed solid with people from the neighbouring island, all stuffing their faces and drinking themselves full to the gills. In years gone by, Gozo was where you went for a dirty weekend. Now it’s the place you go to eat and drink on Good Friday. Meanwhile, back home, an aura of funereal respect is maintained. Fortunately, I now find it merely ridiculous. Each to his own, and never mind the difference. Perhaps next year, a few coffee shops will open up and allow us to contemplate the suffering that led to our salvation over an espresso and a piece of kwarezimal.
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Happy Easter, and be sure to eat plenty of chocolate eggs and figolli. Now, those are traditions of which I certainly approve. I am far more able to contemplate the Lord with a glass of limoncello in one hand and a chunk of figolla in the other, than I am on an empty stomach listening to dreary band marches on the radio while a hippie Jesus wails and pirouettes on the television in the background, for the 34th time since 1971.