The stone Madonna and Child niche is floodlit.   It is only two in the afternoon, there is a sweltering heat and my sore tonsils desperately need a drink.   Good fortune brings me close to a watering hole.   The open-air bar is a makeshift one, reminiscent of some Colombian beach shack.   Here, in the square’s epicentre, it is offering spirits and beer. A six-year-old kid, naked bar faded skimpy underpants, lies on the counter, his willie showing. There is no clinking of glass; the chain-smoking barmen are under strict police orders to serve only in plastic cups.

They create smoke puffs, signifying the tension they’re working in. Abreast to them, women, arms covered in enough gold bracelets, il-fili, to shame Montezuma, are serving plonk and booze to stragglers like me. “Larger jew Irqiq? - Lager or Whisky?”, they howl.   “Lager, please.”   Beers change name, Heineken becomes HoneyKirt, Saatchi and Saatchi, kindly take note.

Huh, Günter Verheugen might just as well be the Milan’s new German striker, or a dancing wallaby. For them, there are more serious matters to contend with. Take this band march, for example.   I am in Zabbar, a fairly sized landlocked town in south-eastern Malta. The place is in fête; the noted Te Deum Saturday morning march is well underway.

This year it is the 50th anniversary of the town’s titular’s coronation. Shush, did I say town? Zabbar is actually a city, given the grade in 1798 as Città Hompesch by the German GrandMaster Hompesch, a loser if there was one. A year under Napoleonic rule, the Zabbar folk revolted against their rulers, fighting them “with great ferocity”, a contemporary remarked. Hundreds died. Here we are presented with their offspring.

Two band clubs slice the town in halves, the Greens from downtown Il-Misrah rooting for San Mikiel; the Blues from High Street back Our Lady of Grace, il-Madonna tal-Grazzja.   But then, both lay claim that this 200-year-old statue, made from some gnarled olive trunk, is their patruna, the patron saint.   Their devotion knows no bounds, so state their coloured tee shirts. "Inqumuk, Inhobbuk u Ahna l-Aktar li Ngawduk," declare the Greens.

Their band is the first to march around the town’s winding roads, the route plan drawn out weeks before by the local police inspector, in the presence of the clubs’ secretaries. A given plan, a stipulated time against a four thousand liri deposit, a guarantee that is forfeited if their supporters cause trouble. Trouble? Well mayhem, to be precise. Tempers flared a few years back.   A big brawl ensued, probably fuelled by some jealous shrews, who had stocked vitriol for this occasion. Women tuned in their charwoman vocabulary, men swirling fists high in the air or the closest chin.   Thankfully, that is a thing of the past. The pique remains, for this is all a fête that centers on two words: Irgulija, manliness and Kburija, pride.

San Mikiel’s members, known as Tigri, Tigers, are covered in green - clothes, hair and skin.   An enterprising corner shop is making brisk trade selling hair spray.   Their counterparts from High Street, the Ljuni, Lions, are in total blue. The colourful splatter is interrupted by yellow in green on some jester hats. Two kannizzati, rectangular mobile canopies, are parading the town, each shading its particular band. Add a troop of horses and the thing would resemble the triumphal cart that Patrick Brydone witnessed in 1770 at Santa Rosalia’s feast in Palermo. The first band is playing in upper High Street, enemy territory.   The flags fluttering on the rooftops confirm the allegiance.

All bar one belong to the Lions.   It is from this solitary Green intruder that they receive the hurrahs, the crackle of pyrotechnics and a sea of swirling saffron paper strips.   Some committee members show their gratitude to the accolade by bringing the mobile canopy to a halt.   A tune is played, and then they move on towards the main square.   Policemen are dotting all arteries; others stationed on the rooftops of prominent buildings monitor the situation below.   JFK would have been pleased, for there is more security than Dallas 1963.   All is on order, bar some idiots who throw their weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. A minor scuffle ensues, subsiding quickly.

The crowd knows the lyrics by heart, chanting every monosyllable to the loudest pitch possible. They are swarming around a massive coloured umbrella, obviously green.   “Move back, move back!!” a helper advises. A hydraulic pump is put in motion and, hey presto, the thing is opening like a lotus. Four hundred souls rush in, as if avoiding the atomic fallout at Nagasaki. Each octagon has elaborate hand painted images of the Madonna and Child, the works paid for by well-wishers.

An embroidered cloth reads 'Imhallsa minn Kevin u Natasha' - 'sponsored by Kevin and Natasha'.     Ah, Natasha, not the Russian au pair-cum-stripper but Natasha the local girl. Maybe she is the peroxide babe smooching in the corner, perhaps one of the tipsy wonder bra bimbos all out to impress.   Sponsorship schemes can be defined as either ego trip exercises, helping enhance one’s popularity in the community, or can be deemed as acts of blind faith in the band club, il-kazin. I enquire the umbrella’s cost price.   A burlesque woman bulges in. “Well over ten,” she informs.   Ten thousand liri, that is.   A baboon-faced rival supporter, in a rather courageous stint informs me that the umbrella stem is crooked, bent, imperfect. “Pure gibberish”, I retort. “It is all sour grapes”.

There is splendour, extravagance and even an element of fecundity in this festival.   On the day the unexpected can happen.   Only a few years back I watched an acquaintance, Toni l-Ginger, universally known as It-Tikka, cajoling atop a kannizzata, his legs dangling in mid air, his arms spread out, skydiver fashion.   Beneath him the Tal-Baqra band happily playing away. This year, the Greens came up with a new mobile canopy. “Let me tell you”, a rugged man with an impressive paunch, blurts out “you reporters know nothing about feasts. The kannizzata is higher not for size matters but for better acoustics. We can’t come out as fools. There is our pride at stake.”

The Greens turn off to their own den, il-Misrah, the square in their heartland. As their last bandsman is through, two hand painted curtains, one green, the other blue, seal them in, Check Point Charlie fashion.   With the Greens out of the way, the Mater Maria Gratie Band, Tal-Baqra, approaches.   Tens of camcorder operators are proudly recording each significant movement, sending the footage to their Melbourne or Toronto brethren.

The crowd, as if anticipating the next wonder of the world, swarm around another gigantic scallop edged umbrella. It is brand new, sewn by Marco Fenech since May, the paintings the work of David Borg, considered by is-socji, the members, as Zabbar’s answer to Michelangelo.

There are no impatient sighs.   A child is lost and some commotion arises until abating quickly.   The brat is under the umbrella.   A gyrating prism, made from thousands of glued silver squares with four embedded lions on the sides, is throwing hundreds of reflected rays onto the mass. "Xadini, Xadini, morru ja xadini" ... "Monkeys, monkeys, go home”.   The band club’s 1883 façade is heavily decorated, “the work of Joe Fenech”, someone declares.

In a fountain on wheels, two merry blues are enjoying a cool shower, dancing underneath a golden crown. They are in its base, underneath a golden crown. Suddenly they turn the hose onto the unsuspecting revellers, drenching them considerably. This produces rising spreading waves of laughter.

This fountain is no novelty, claim the Greens, for it is from last year’s Te Deum. “Remember when we had a zeppelin, with a streamer running: "Qawwa Bandista", ‘Best band in Town’?   “They have never had one.   They were simply stunned by such an unpredictable event”, claims Joe, a 28 year-old bar tender.

“We had so many problems with that zeppelin. The helium gushed out and it deflated on the rival’s roof. We had an emergency operation of retrieving it in the dead of night. It was a touch and go affair.”

Back in il-Misrah, a concert is about to begin.   Hundreds of shapely girls, others plump, are carried shoulder height by their partners. Soaking in beer and sweat they chant the band songs to the lively voice of Dominic Cini.   Maltese is healthy here for there are no foreign songs. Two skinny individuals, swaying like pendulums, are on the clubhouse’s rooftop, creating a smokescreen with their firecrackers to their hearts’ delight, irrespective of the resulting cardiac damage. The Blues have retired to the Arena Theatre, “the only one in town”, I am reminded. “Huh, all locked in that stingy yard.   Can’t organize a piss up in a brewery, that’s all I know”, replies a Green.

With all their revelry, outsiders are quick to point out that Zabbar has as yet to own a plancier, elaborate mahogany bandstand. These usually come adorned with bronze cherubim, at a tune of a hundred thousand liri, as borne by the villages of Qrendi and Tarxien this year. What is the Mardi Gras to this? San Francisco and Los Angeles, eat your hearts out, you miserable gringos!

It is five thirty. The Madonna and Child statue is still floodlit. The crowd is dwindling, tottering home, tumbling bodies resting on doorsteps, others wriggling on by autopilot. Even the boy with the exposed thingy is no more. They are gone, having left mountains of paper streamers and shiploads of beer bottles in their wake, leaving an ecological impact bigger than the Exxon Valdez spillage. They may be Greenies, but hey, give them the Amazon and they slash and burn it in a week.

Some shall spend time downing pick me ups, or puking down toilets whilst swearing to convert into devout teetotalers, whereas the lucky ones are presumably copulating with Mary Grace, Catherine and Natasha, the girls with the big bouncing silicon-free breasts.

Maybe this is indeed a provincial yokel fête, but let us acknowledge that it does break the boredom and drudgery of small island living.   By tonight the revellers shall all become good Catholics again, staunch devotees of the Madonna, their dignity and solemnity reinstated. Thank God for the Madonna, they had a bloody good time. You see, at times it is good to be a Christian.   Osama Bin Laden please note.

Steve Borg © 2003