Terrified and barely able to breathe, I grabbed his other arm and started pulling to save him. In the midst of this horror, he cracked a wry smile, released his hand from my grip and re-offered for a handshake. "I'm Mario Muscat," he said, wry smile still growing, "I am the graphic artist here and we will be working together". I felt like I was in a mystery-horror film gone wrong. Why was a man whose arm had just been chopped off smiling and introducing himself?
Confident that I had suffered enough, he elegantly moved away from the lift door and all was revealed. Mario Muscat, was born with only one arm - a fact I hadn't noticed because of his elegant jacket - and he had just played a very, very dark trick on me.
From that moment on, we weren't just colleagues. We became friends for life. Unfortunately, it did not turn out to be a long one. Mario was only 37 when he passed away, ten years ago last month.
He was a man I loved to introduce to people because he always added something special to any conversation. Alas, I cannot introduce him to you. So I will share the few words I said at his funeral mass. Double click on this newspaper report.
4 comments:
Mario - a truly unique friend.....so sadly missed....you will never be forgotten.....my dear friend you will always be in our hearts.
Mario was such a great guy. I was still very young when I got to know him. I was part of Karl Borg's team (tal-armar). Its very hard to accept, but sometimes death seems to take only the good guys
Mario was unique, in so many ways. I got to know him around 1983, when theatre and art was a release from what was going on outside our door. Elegant, charming, an interesting man in so many ways. One of the biggest regrets of my life is that when I left Malta, in 1985, he gave me a painting - a wonderful portrait of John Lennon - that got stolen from my flat in London some six months later. I remember telling him about the stolen painting years later and in that typical Mario way he shrugged his shoulders and said 'I hope that whoever has it now loves it as much as you did.'
I knew Mario at Sixth Form back in the early eighties. A truly unique character and surely deeply missed by his family and friends. May he rest in peace. Helen Caruana.
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