Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  Had I collected everything I needed for lunch and for the rest of the day? Yes, I had. When we arrived at this restaurant without a name, he stayed only for a glass of lurid juice, a thick layer of orange beneath an alcohol haze. I did not join him in that or any other drink, intending a sober afternoon at a solid table in a warm, anonymous space.

  Maurice did not enjoy his Nubian night. When I returned from the King’s Arms, I found the would-be seducer sitting on our two-seat settee almost exactly where I had left him. The trainee drama teacher, in her plain red dress, most assertively still in her dress and looking not at all as imagined in our Cleopatra lesson, was also on the settee. The distance between them would not have troubled a chaperone. He said that V had called. Maurice said her name sourly. She had been wholly unexpected and unwelcome. She had not stayed long. She had said that she was looking for me.

  More trays of food have now arrived, red leaves, green pastes, yellow grains, a fifties sweetshop of artificial colours. Service for me, the only diner in this restaurant, is inattentive. But there is no harm in that. I have the whole day ahead.

  CLEOPATRA THE FIFTH

  In the new year of 1970, I began to follow James Holladay’s advice. If I wanted to understand the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s death, I needed to look at the lesser people left behind. What did they think would happen? What did they fear would happen? What did they want to happen?

  The assassination on the Ides of March left a huge hole in the politics of Rome. Cleopatra was just one of those uncertain which way to turn. Aulus Hirtius, one of the names first mentioned to me in the King’s Arms forty years ago, was another. Cleopatra was famous even then. Hirtius was not. But that did not make her view more significant than his – then or now.

  How do we rescue the forgotten people? The general, Aulus Hirtius, is one of them. He was not the dullest man in Rome. He was one of the so-called Continuators, not just an ally of Julius Caesar but one who had committed himself to finishing his master’s literary works, keeping the Caesar legend alive. He was not just a general. He was a pleasure-seeker, an aesthete and a gourmet too.

  More food has arrived, dancing dishes, delights that even Maurice might have liked. I can imagine my old friend here now, selecting among pavone, tartufi, ostrice, cervelli, strozzi and ricci di mare, translating for me the truffles, oysters, brains and sea urchins. I can imagine Hirtius here too, a good soldier, a loyal aide, a moderate general, an indifferent politician and an epicure of renown. None of that has saved him from being forgotten.

  Maurice was a wonderful cook himself. Perhaps if Hirtius had been a cook he would be better regarded in our culinary times. But any job aimed at pleasure for others was a disgrace to a Roman grandee. One might as well be a Greek prostitute or a flautist like Cleopatra’s father. Hirtius knew about enjoyment and style. He knew that if a dish had a Greek name and Alexandrian ingredients it was likely to be smarter (and much more expensive) than anything in Latin. No farcimen please, I’ll have an isicium. Keep your country sausage, a sophisticated rissole for me.

  His wine list? I can look here even if, for the sake of continuing to remember, I cannot drink. At Hirtius’s table there would have been Egyptian wine and wine from Cos, Canidius’s domestic competition as well as his personal monopoly brand of imports. There would have been Falernian wine too, full of sediment unless one took care. The skilled pourer could separate the liquid from the solids with a dove’s egg. The albumen could drag the dirt to the bottom of the flask. Throw nothing away.

  The Romans often liked to mock a gourmet. There were attempts in Caesar’s day to impose the vegetable diet of the Greeks as a Roman virtue. But vegetarianism was a cultural import that the Roman rich preferred to avoid. Fine food was becoming fashionable. Imported poultry was as much desired as imported poetry. The state was in chaos after Caesar’s death. What better time for the expensive and the new?

  Even vegetables could be attractive if they were rare and imported, like silphium, a giant fennel from the coast of Cyrene not far from Alexandria, growing then in no other place, a heart-shaped seed which cured fevers, prevented pregnancy and tasted delicious. Caesar had a friend, Gaius Matius, who was a famed cook (or perhaps his son was the cook; it is often hard to say). Matius wrote books on fish and pickles and helped to organise Caesar’s funeral.

  Yes, there was the famous funeral, the pyre in the Forum, the ‘friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech (or something like it) and the fear of so many unknown futures. Cleopatra herself did not attend. She did not hear Mark Antony rouse the crowd against the killers. Nor did she immediately leave town. She was on no one’s side now. She had no wish to please Brutus, the pompous son of Caesar’s mistress, or Cassius, Pompey’s useless naval commander, or any of the rest of Caesar’s assassins. She wanted only time to consider what might happen next.

  There were many men – and women too – who without the protective shade of the Dictator were not quite what they had been before but who still had hopes. Lucius Munatius Plancus, the dead Caesar’s governor in Gaul, was one of them. Publius Canidius Crassus, was already on the side of Mark Antony. Hirtius himself was cautiously optimistic of exceeding them both. Rome seemed grey after Caesar’s brightness, cloudy after clarity, but there was still much at stake.

  Hirtius was not grand enough to be in any way Caesar’s successor or even a successor to part of his domain. He was a reliable trusty who wanted now to be more widely trusted. He had his ambitions and his dreams. It is easy to forget the dreams of those who fail.

  He was a writer. As a good servant, he hated the idea of a job unfinished, a duty undone. Caesar’s own political story was there to be completed. Hirtius could continue that literary part of their shared mission to the end, or to some sort of end.

  It was Hirtius and the Continuators who wrote the account of how Caesar finished his Gallic War and his wars with the implacable supporters of Pompey. He had to do the best job he could, admitting to a friend that, while he knew Gaul at first hand, he had not himself been present in either Africa or Spain. He had borrowed the description of the harbour battle against Ptolemy from a sea battle that Caesar had fought during his Gallic wars near Marseilles. He had added some bits from the Athenians’ harbour battle at Syracuse 400 years before. That was how history was written then.

  Hirtius had not always been personally at Caesar’s side. But while he had not been an eyewitness of Caesar’s last civil war battles, he had talked to Caesar about them and about restoring Cleopatra to her throne. Like many devoted followers of Caesar he thought that defence of a continued dictatorship was wholly justified. If only Pompey’s vicious sons had seen the inevitability of their failure. With good sense, good Roman common sense and acceptance of might’s rights, everything would have been fine.

  Instead, Caesar was dead too. Hirtius thought that his master had been too generous, too willing to forgive, too ready to treat his enemies as kindly as his friends. He had failed to placate his opponents and failed to give those who loved him the rewards of that love. He had been a living lesson for students of politics and history. But now he was on his way to join the gods. Aulus Hirtius saw himself as one of those left standing, often having to struggle to remain on his feet while Mark Antony drank and the whole world went mad. Writing, even not very good writing, was a relief.

  Caesar had been a great artist. The longer that he had been a writer of history, the more of an historian and the less of a mere reporter he had become. Hirtius had watched that change happen – and could keep it happening. At first Caesar had seen himself, his leadership and courage, as the cause of his success. But at the end of his life of war he was beginning to believe in causes beyond himself, the power of Chance, the real power of the goddess Fortune.

  Hirtius had listened carefully to everything that he had heard in the master’s presence. He had written first drafts of history before. Caesar often asked his legates to provide accounts of their actions. This was both to help him plan the next moves and to selec
t which moves should be remembered by others. A victory could be conjured from very little. A defeat could be buried beneath distraction from another theatre. The charge that Caesar had burnt Alexandria’s library was countered (rather too defensively in the view of later historians) by the claim that the city of the Ptolemies was of solid stone and absolutely fireproof. When the completed book, The Alexandrine War, appeared, this builder’s detail was on its very first page. Hirtius was a master of such art.

  Whether the words were to be literary in ambition, as Caesar increasingly preferred, or merely military, Hirtius knew what was required. A higher style was appropriate when the enemy was a foreigner like little, golden-armoured Ptolemy. A lower note was better for Roman foes. It was Caesar’s genius, Hirtius wrote, that his words stood in the way of future writers telling different truths. It was hard to contradict such a man. Once Caesar had breathed his magic on the prose it was fixed for ever, proof against interpreters. While he, Hirtius, lacked such powers (he made no pretence of being Caesar’s equal in any respect), there was value in his being a Continuator nonetheless.

  There is much still to admire in Hirtius. He knew the importance of modesty (mostly insincere, however much justified), the desirability of access to the highest authority and closest eyewitnesses (the first being often more useful than the second), the ability to write fast or to seem to be writing fast, the superiority of unfinished copy over not filing copy at all, and the essential need to note the contribution of bureaucrats.

  Hirtius was more than merely a writer after Caesar’s death. He was the designated consul for the following year, designated by Caesar himself. When he led an army to stop Antony himself becoming a dictator, he was briefly a hero. When he looked as though he might have defeated Antony in battle, his star rose still higher. But when the first war reports, as so often, were proved wrong, Hirtius was defeated and dead. He had outlived his master by hardly a year.

  Neither Hirtius nor any other of the Continuators who contributed to The Alexandrine War mentions Caesar’s sexual relationship with Cleopatra or Caesarion, their alleged son. Cleopatra, it is said, was made queen at the end of the war merely because she had been loyal and had stayed at home in the palace. Did these ghost-writers dutifully follow the party line of silence that Caesar himself had set? Or were their minds so restricted within the sealed world of Caesar’s court that they knew of no other reality?

  Would V have been any more impressed with the Continuators than with the film-makers? I doubt it. She had her own views. I was sorry to miss her when she visited on Maurice’s Nubian night. I would have been angry with him for sending her away if he had not been already so deflated. It would have been unfair of me to be angry. He had no idea that I wanted to see V that night. Neither did I until he told me I had missed her.

  11.1.11

  Place Saad Zaghloul

  Lunch yesterday was wonderful. Breakfast today at the Metropole is not. The waiters are few. The bomber is dead, says the man making the omelettes. His accomplices are also dead. Normality needs to come soon. In the restaurant I am alone.

  In October, 1970, V asked politely how my book was coming along. For a year after her interruption of the Nubian night we had not heard from her. That did not seem to matter. She looked little changed, still stubby and pugnacious, still restless, still apt to identify a person of possible privilege (not hard in Trinity gardens) and, as we sat together beside the battered lime trees, still asking and answering almost exactly the same questions as we had in Essex, 1968. How was Maurice and how was Cleopatra?

  The condition of the queen of Egypt was the easier to describe. She was back in Alexandria after Caesar’s assassination. It would have been good to know what she was doing there but more is guessed than known. The Roman mayhem was relevant to all Alexandrians but mostly it was hidden from them – by misinformation, mischief and hundreds of miles.

  The odds were first on Mark Antony succeeding Caesar. He had support from many of Caesar’s generals, including Canidius, Plancus and others of those lesser men that James Holladay had said should be watched. It seemed possible that all good men, Caesar’s killers, Brutus and Cassius, as well as Antony and Octavian, Caesar’s competing heirs, might come together. But that possibility was brief. It is doubtful that Cleopatra could have made much sense of the ensuing thefts and murders even had she known of them. Few in Rome could. Meanwhile the Queen of Egypt’s job was to maintain power in Alexandria and collect the news as best she could. We paused and poured some tea.

  ‘So how is the “queen” of Trinity?’ V gave a triumphant smile.

  I must have looked surprised. Maurice was still careful when he talked about sex. He liked to show openness in his preferences, a boy like a velvet mole, a Nigerian primary school teacher, whatever or whoever might be next. It was just a matter of mood and modernity. To hear him called a ‘queen’, not the most negative word then but not a kind word either, was a surprise. I tried not to show it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she continued firmly. ‘Maurice is not different. He has had difference thrust upon him.’ She laughed. I tried to look sophisticated and severe.

  This was not a success. Pretence with V was never a success. In some way, it seemed, his enthusiasm for men was all my fault. Or, at least, I was an accomplice to the fault, if only by attending the same school, the place where we listened to Rider Haggard and inscribed A THING OF on his thigh under the teacher’s desk.

  I protested that this abuse had been nothing to do with me. Again, she mocked. I was embarrassed. She was once again a superior, prim fifteen. I was trying and failing to be something different from what I had been. I tried to tell her about the end of the Nubian evening. But she already knew what had happened (and not happened) after she had interrupted the scene. She knew everything. There was nothing she needed to ask me about Maurice except as a check on what she already knew.

  V and he had been talking already that morning. She had arrived the previous night, with nowhere to stay, had found Maurice and stayed with him in his bed. She said this apologetically. She had tried my room first.

  ‘He is not really different,’ she said, reproducing the same ‘Queen of Trinity’ smile. ‘But he is easily led.’

  Socratis was back in the doorway of Room 114, breathing aniseed and olives towards the dressing-table mirror. It was midday. He had been to ‘a small party’ at the shop of his friend the carpet-seller. Everyone had been talking about a much bigger party. It was going to be wonderful.

  I had no idea what he was talking about and took a step back onto the balcony. He followed, pressing his face too close. It seemed as though he were about to repeat his interrupted address to supporters below.

  There would be tents in the square right under the scolding scowl of Mr Zaghloul himself, he continued unsteadily. Who cared now about the old man – or any of the old men? All of them were forever looking out to sea, ‘the other way, the wrong way for where the trouble was coming, the wrong way for the Cleopatra Ball’.

  Next January, a whole year from now, would be the perfect time. Either the bombing would be forgotten and he would be helping the tourist trade again; or Egypt would be free (he made his sign of the long and short dash) and all of us could celebrate the assassination of Julius Caesar or anything else we liked.

  There were other possibilities, he said. Maybe Egypt would be on the brink of its own civil war, hosting one of those eve-of-battle balls that no one ever forgets, the season of 1914, the ball before Waterloo. In every eventuality there had to be a big Cleopatra party. His mother said so. Yes, she was much better now. If we were fortunate she should be there herself. Your mother or Cleopatra? Both. It would be wonderful.

  He stepped back into the bedroom, misting the mirror with his breath. Not all his words were easy to hear.

  ‘A few difficulties’, he said, would have to be overcome. In the Metropole Hotel there was no room to cook. The regular food was proof enough of that. But oxen could be roasted on spits outside i
n the road, down where the horses waited for the caleche customers and the Polish drug addict darted among the honking cars in the hope of polishing a windscreen for cash.

  Each ox would be ready to eat at different times, perfectly ready for every guest’s whim, just as Mark Antony once demanded. If we ran out of oxen, we could roast the tourist horses though probably not the wild pigs that Cleopatra cooked nor the Polish boy. The Ptolemies loved vivisection but, as Socratis conceded with a burp, they drew the line at cannibalism.

  Mahmoud’s religion would not accept the pigs, the favourite meat of the meat-loving Romans. Horses were off the menu too: the nags would be worth more alive than dead. The Metropole’s street boy could be gainfully employed for the first time in his drug-driven life, gathering dirty glasses and half-smoked cigarettes. It would be a smoking ball. How far would you English come for that? Cleopatra didn’t smoke? Well, she would have certainly smoked, if she had known about smoking.

  Socratis took an untipped Cleopatra from the packet that Mahmoud had given him and lit it theatrically against the grey sky over the harbour. There was a knock on the door. Mahmoud was suddenly here himself, with a briefcase and a clipboard. He brought the smell of sweat instead of Pernod. We were packed against each other like fish in a tin.

  They both began to speak as though in a duet. On either side of the entrance on the Rue Zaghloul there would be wooden needles, Cleopatra’s needles, like the ones now in London and New York. We would need to find out exactly where they had been before they were taken away, where they had once announced the Caesareum. The precise site was probably somewhere now under the Metropole reception desk. That was unimportant. The needles had to be outside. They had to be seen. They would certainly be seen.

  Inside the ballroom there were five giant chandeliers. Each would have different-coloured bulbs, powered by thundering generators since the electricity was a little sluggish at the Metropole. Even at the best of times, the lamps responded to the flick of switch with a reluctant and only slowly growing glow. A sunrise every time you click, said Mahmoud, putting his characteristic best possible gloss upon a problem.