Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Page 14

  There was a stir by the door to the street. Two new arrivals brought champagne which they had purchased elsewhere, most certainly a breach of King’s Arms’ rules. The velvet hero of this hour – precisely midday on 20 October 1969 I can say, since I have the note here in my pocket now – said nothing as the wine was poured. Everyone else was already saying more than enough.

  Maurice came in last. The theatre boy ignored him in the way that only those do who are lovers, who have recently quarrelled, or are still quarrelling. Words of shouted abuse came in waves – most of them against the failures of imagination showed by others, by fellow actors, company managements, stupid students. His admiring audience seemed gradually to have heard enough. Soon Maurice too joined the bored majority and the boy was alone.

  James Holladay also lost interest in the scene. ‘I’ve got a friend who thinks that Caesar and Cleopatra were essentially the same person,’ I said, thinking that something more original might now be risked and that the next donnish rebuttal could hardly be more deflating than the ones that had come before.

  ‘Hang onto him. He might be onto something. They were both great bureaucrats. That is sure. Bureaucratic power was always essential. Never forget that. Look at the men in the middle ranks. Remember their names: Hirtius, Plancus, Dellius, Canidius. Study them closely. Don’t give up when the going gets tough. Nil desperandum, as Horace says. Read the poem in which he says it.

  ‘If you have to choose one man, choose Lucius Munatius Plancus. You will soon find out why. Forget the biggest names. Leave them to those who write for money or for children. Ignore the nameless masses. Leave those to Marxists. Just watch the office men, the trimmers, the men who were always watching the events most carefully themselves. Watch Plancus most of all.

  ‘Remember how Caesar himself was a bit of an office-man, dictating two letters at once to different secretaries while all three of them were on horseback. Cleopatra had the world’s first great bureaucracy at her command – and one of the few things that we do know about her is that she knew how to use it. So imagine them both at each end of a partner’s desk, passing memos.’

  It would have been churlish of me to say that this bureaucratic blend of anonymity was not what Maurice had in mind for his Cuppers performance. In any case, the historian had already ‘talked shop’ quite enough. He began to speak and drink more quickly, on subjects that were wholly different – not all of them easily understood – the loss of corkage fees for his friend the King’s Arms’ landlord, Vietnam, the Normandy landings, gooseberries again and whether the food at Trinity could any longer be held superior to that at neighbouring colleges.

  In a minute he had skipped out, with a surprising and sprightly skip, and was on the other side of the bar, a journey of five yards and as many decades, in a place of light and other sexes, buying a half-of-bitter for a round woman, about half his size in every dimension, who through their sharing of smiles and small movements could only be his wife.

  Next to them was a curtain of posters that hung from drawing pins, so many posters, so few pins, and in front of that, beside his pint of Special, stood Geoff the Editor with a copy of Cherwell in his hand, speaking inaudibly to the Holladays and waving that I should come out to meet them.

  *

  Late that night, after a dinner in college and a double emptying of the sherry decanter we talked again about our play. Maurice’s mood was subdued. It seemed that, without even showing him any words, I had already failed several tests. First, my attitude: my heart had not been in the project from the start. Secondly, my subject: I was a classicist and that meant that my subject, any ancient subject, was a barrier between me and my emotions. I read Latin and Greek because English was too much for me. Thirdly, my past: I had always been the one who wept when the teachers read Dickens at school. I had adopted Cleopatra because I could keep her at a distance. I could control. I could edit, I could desiccate. That was what classicists did.

  Marowitz, by contrast, was only for the most intimate of lovers or the bitterest of enemies. I would not possibly be able to match the master. Our project would be a disaster. Did I know that the New Theatre, Oxford, had just fired a major interpreter of Marowitzian Shakespeare in favour of some jerk who did pantomime? There had been a miserable few drinks to say goodbye in the King’s Arms. Perhaps he had seen me there. Perhaps he had not. Everything was wrong. Everything had to change. He had other options. A Cuppers actor could play many parts and he was going out to find them. The Trinity Players would have to find something else too.

  One week later, that is what we did, choosing some scenes from a Greek comedy, The Frogs, about a trip into the afterlife to wake up the dead and bring the best playwright back to earth. Maurice had particularly liked the name because it reminded him of our Frog from school, the sinister obsessive who was somewhere in the suburbs retaking his A levels.

  There was an ideal leading part for Maurice himself, the young playwright Euripides, a vain, radical writer keen to deconstruct the assumptions of the past. Suddenly it seemed much easier to ‘play’ an artist than to try to ‘be’ one. Maurice, we agreed, would be perfect for Euripides.

  Sadly, there would have to be rival actors too. Maurice could not now play all the parts. He would need to compete for attention from the judges. But then nothing was perfect. There was even a line in The Frogs that showed Euripides as the genuine author of Mr W’s Rhesus. My tutors might approve. That was beginning to be important.

  Two weeks later, on the splintering wooden stage in the Cuppers hall, we produced our thirty-minute production of The Frogs. There was a clinging white gown for Maurice, less attractive costumes for the other main actors, diaphanous dresses for the non-speaking women and less praise from the judges than Maurice had hoped for.

  10.1.11

  St Mark’s Cathedral

  St Mark’s is protected by armed police as though it were the top target for future bombs. There is a machine gun for every black iron railing. This grey-grassed garden of Alexandria’s Coptic cathedral, its entrance concealed between a confectioner and a chemist, is even more silent than the street in front of the Two Saints. The calm is like the inside of an automaton, mechanical, purposeful, enclosed.

  There are men inside in small groups, noiseless like chess pieces on their own fixed squares. There is a seriousness without sound in these footpaths of parliament. The only trouble comes from the resident mendicant, with three dogs and no legs, who rejects my Egyptian currency with a scream of ‘No good! Dollars! Dollars!’

  Mahmoud says she is an actress. All the beggars are actors. She has legs we cannot see. Her dogs deter the curious and her crutches are like wings. They are all her props. Alexandria has always been a great theatre city. Perhaps I should like to visit the Opera House. It is very peaceful there too. Or he could find me a restaurant. He had no time to join me but it was unhealthy for anyone to write so much and eat so little. Was I happy to be left to continue my Cleopatra story with the actress of St Mark’s? He would come back later and take me to lunch.

  Even after the loss of his Marowitzian muse Maurice was prepared to give Cleopatra one last theatrical chance. He discovered that Trinity College owned a unique account of her court, the bequest of a wealthy military family from the Lake District called the Dansons. In various parts of the college three generations of the Danson clan had left their name on benefactors’ plaques and in one room they had left an inventive collection of classical pornography.

  This was a secret library in which Virgil, Homer and the Alexandrian anthologies were much enhanced by colourful phallic shepherds and captured nymphs. In amongst the shelves there were also greyer guides on how best to punish female servants and other material made almost respectable (but not quite) by bindings in gold and contiguity to classical language.

  The book which attracted Maurice’s attention was called Crissie and it described a London staging of Cleopatra in Queen Victoria’s last years. In our sober Danson Library, alongside red-leather tran
slations of Horace, sat the green-leather story of Signor Frigaballerina, a theatre director who began every afternoon with an innocent new recruit to his casting couch. The story of Crissie set out at some length the doings of this lustful Signor and the undoings of the would-be dancers whose ‘litheness of limb’ and ‘subtlety of buttock’ fell into his hands.

  The rarity of the Trinity copy lay, it seemed, not in the English text itself, distributed to many a discriminating purchaser by the Al Hambra Press in 1899. Nor, Maurice had learnt, were the sea-coloured case and marvellously marbled endpapers a necessity for collectors. The glory of the Danson Crissie (and possibly only the Danson copy) lay in its enhancements, the exotic pink-and-blue depictions of those sensual arts for which Cleopatra and her friends were famed.

  Crissie begins with scenes of casting for the roles as silent Greek statues and the costume fittings of gauzy enhanced undergarments. There is dialogue of protesting squeals and diagrams, formulaic but freshly painted, of every sexual act. Each stage of selection is addressed by the anonymous artist whose works, of varying page sizes and precision, fully illustrate the journey from stage door to stage.

  Within 154 printed pages, between the gilt phallic decorations of the cover and the phallic cannon of the final full stop, there are parts for many minor players, suitable for such ingénues as Miss Daisy De Nuderham Blockington whose ‘bloodstained drawers’ hold up the narrative for an unreasonably long while. A Monsieur Zama takes the role of Mark Antony and fights violent back-office disputes about why he is required to ‘fock’ the heroine as well as dance with her around Signor Frigaballerina’s living statues.

  Maurice wondered whether it might be daringly modern to transfer this wordless tragedy from the college library to the college lawn, perhaps as part of a future Commemoration Ball. A series of silent tableaux, enhanced by appropriate readings from the Danson Crissie? Perfect. I did not quickly enough disagree.

  We would, of course, still need a Cleopatra. Crissie Cazarotti, according to the text, had to stand out distinctly from the reluctantly undressed ladies of the chorus. The leading lady of the play was a creature of ‘stark and carnal lust’, only five foot high in her ballet shoes but of massive and hideous libido. As the author describes her, ‘Crissie is all the better for being a bit of a drab: she is just the little bitch to make the part of Cleopatra look as hot and whorish as it should be.’

  There was one ambitious undergraduate of a faraway woman’s college whom Maurice thought might fit the part. He sent me out to discuss the possibility with her. He thought I would be the more gently persuasive of us, the less threatening. I was to talk only in the broadest terms, stressing the artistic integrity and limited learning required. But sadly, I had to report, this Crissie was anxious about her Politics and Philosophy prelim exams and offered only to think about it for another year.

  Mahmoud and Socratis have each warned me, quietly and separately, to be careful what I write, and to be careful even about what I remember. There are ‘mind police’ among the security forces of Alexandria. If it might be unwise to sit in a cafe and recount the assassination of an ancient dictator, the telling of Crissie’s story, I realise as I write it, might be even worse.

  There must be material just as amusing behind these garden walls. Even a Coptic cathedral has its secret cabinets, locked and lightly guarded shelves where the bookish can broaden their understanding away from the public gaze. Rain is starting to fall. The drops are just enough to sit like oil on the beggar-polished slabs, not yet enough to make mud from dust. The custodian beckons me inside and motions me to a pew with its own wooden desk.

  Despite the rebuff from one potential Cleopatra, Maurice had still not given up on his staging of Crissie. He also complained of wanting a woman off stage. I agreed with him. He began to talk openly about ‘normal sex’ and the lack of it. Yes, I said. When Maurice wanted something he always wanted it very much more than I did. He thought briefly that his theatrical and sexual ambitions might be combined.

  In the Cuppers audience for our Frogs, clapping politely while others were being less attentive, had been a group from a local college for would-be women teachers. Among them he had met a dark, commanding Nigerian who had asked for our advice about Greek plays for primary schools.

  He did not know her name but she had muscled shoulders, fierce eyes and a mannered, mildly mannish walk, a combination that somehow convinced Maurice she might be an ideal Cleopatra for his casting-couch. This Nubian in her fire-red dress, as he quickly redefined her, would surely ‘come across’ if the rehearsal conditions were propitious.

  He saw no immediate competition. He chose a Friday evening when I would normally be in the library. He had to have our rooms to himself. He was insistent that I should follow my book work with a late night in the King’s Arms. All would be perfect. I agreed – with every aspect.

  ‘Wait’, he said. There was a second problem: how to impress his target with appropriate subjects of shared interest, some knowledge of Africa perhaps. He could hardly last long discussing Greek comedy for eight-year-olds. Could I bear to return briefly to Cleopatra? Had I said something about her being black, or a bit black? Or had he been too sherried or Marowitzed at the time? Had I not said something about women in ancient Alexandria being more free, more sexually liberated than they had been in either Greece or Egypt before? Was everyone bisexual then? Or was he confused about the truth of that that too?

  Forty years on, it is hard to remember whether I said anything useful. Today there are biographies that claim Cleopatra as a lost black icon, a Mrs Martin Luther King in the white-dominated past. There are books about how the ancients had sex, with whom, in what position and why. There are claims that all Greek philosophy and science came out of Africa, research projects on Alexandrian body-piercing, contraception, homosexuality and clitoridectomies. There was none of that when Maurice was looking for conversation points to turn his African queen into a Cleopatra, any Cleopatra, from a bewitcher of Roman generals to a star of late Victorian burlesque. The seventies were a simpler age.

  Masged El Attarin Street

  I feel faintly embarrassed by that last episode. It seems a little sleazy, something to forget rather than remember. But, in the months before he died Maurice did remember it. And I am remembering it again now because it is part of the Cleopatra story. Good taste cannot always be my guide. If there is sleaze, there is not very much sleaze.

  I am now in what is probably a restaurant. Socratis eventually arrived at St Mark’s to bring me here. There is no menu outside or inside and not even a name. Like the carpet shop it may be sometimes just a house. But it does have marble tables and iron chairs, a bar as thin as a plank and a staff of at least one. There is lunch on the table though I have ordered nothing yet – tiny fishes upon a plate patterned with tiny fishes, pastes like damp fish food.

  On the way to Masged El Attarin Street he asked if I needed anything first from the hotel. We stopped outside the Metropole and I walked in quickly, pushing past the security guards, electric gates and potted palms. Without being asked, he followed me, abandoning the car in the road beside a pair of horses. I did not ask him to come up to Room 114. He came anyway.

  Once inside, his heavy body filled the cramped space around the bed. He threw open the shutters, shuffling my papers off the counterpane, riffling through the piles for the different decades, looking for anything, it seemed, in letters large and clear enough for him to read. He seized the few pages that were typed, fanned them in front of his chest and stepped out onto the balcony as though he were about to make a speech.

  He posed. He strutted. If there were cameras to record this act they were invisible to me. And then he laughed, turned his back to the sea and, within seconds, was back inside, squinting at the two maps of Oxford and Roman Africa, dropping the first back on to the bed, carefully studying the second.

  In Cleopatra’s time, he asked quietly, who was properly in charge here? He then snapped a second question without waiti
ng for an answer to the first. What difference did any dictator make to anything? What difference had Julius Caesar made, to Africa, to anywhere?

  Socratis has never alarmed me before. Mahmoud has been the sterner of the two, Socratis sometimes the more dissident but, even in the carpet shop, the more relaxed. Perhaps I have misread them all along. I am nervous of Socratis now, almost for the first time fearful. Maurice once said that I was unduly trusting of men with uncontrollable curly hair like my own. The thin trust the thin and the fat trust the fat, he liked to sing. What would he have thought now?

  There was nothing wrong with Socratis’s question. What exactly had Caesar achieved? It was a reasonable thing to ask. It was not clear what sort of answer he wanted. I wondered what was the safest answer.

  Only one thought came instantly to mind, an old thought. At Brentwood Mr W said that Julius Caesar’s greatest gift to mankind had been to save Gaul from the Germans. On his way to his dictatorship, Caesar had made his name and fortune in Gaul. He had killed and enslaved hundreds of thousands of Gauls. He had written his own story of those wars, the book which began: ‘All Gaul was divided into three parts.’ But Caesar had left Gaul a Latin country. The Germans had been left outside. Caesar was the father of France. That was a legacy that lasted ever afterwards. It was not always easy to find such legacies, even for the greatest of men. So that was what I told Socratis as he stared out to sea.

  Socratis forced a thin smile in return. In Egypt, he said, there was no reason to dislike the Germans. They had done much less damage here than the French and the English. And anyway history was just a code. It did not tell us anything. It merely helped to disguise what we already wanted to say.