Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Page 25

  I was not convinced. The view from the Metropole seemed calm enough to me. But Socratis insisted. When arrests began, it was never clear when the arresting would end.

  So I have come here to a desert petrol station that is also a motel, a shop and a place for repairing lorries. I am in the corner of the car mechanic’s store. It is not as bad as it sounds. The exact location is a little obscure: Khat Rashid was the last sign I saw before we stopped. But to be ‘left alone’ is still what I want most. In my mind is an oil painting that is 350 years old. Mahmoud objects to visitors projecting upon modern Alexandria their images of the past. But to replace a dirty garage window with a Dutch master requires no one else, offends no one and does no possible harm.

  The picture is Jan de Bray’s dark family portrait, Banquet of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. I did not know it when it first appeared as one of the damp picture cards that Lew crossly crumpled in the Calthorpe Arms. But since its second appearance, on the wall of Hampton Court Palace during the Rout, it has been always with me. It looks very much at home in Khat Rashid – as in one way it should.

  A puzzled man, a pugnacious woman and a bright white pearl are as though freshly painted on the wall in this soldiers’ garage. The still life on the dinner table is alive, glowering, glowing, indestructible. This mysterious banquet scene can assemble itself anywhere for me – in hotel rooms, airport lounges and hospitals, on advertisement hoardings on Al Hurreya or the Gray’s Inn Road, in place of poster invitations to buy beer and soap, to vote Mubarak or Conservative.

  It fits neatly here now, merging its painted parts with the windows, ledges and walls. The grey of army uniforms and spanners behind the sand-smeared panes becomes Cleopatra’s oyster supper, the meal that Antony thinks so strangely modest. A Koranic exhortation to military mechanics is the tablecloth, freshly unfolded, ready to be smoothed by a final touch. A fading spot of neon is the pearl. Anywhere and at any time in the past twenty-five years I have been able to summon Antony as a red-cheeked bearded man, almost Christ-like in wonder, and the sterner face of Cleopatra, defiant, dominant, holding her right hand to her left ear and a wine glass in her left hand. Their children look puzzled and playful, the servants serene and there is Plancus, the dark man with an axe who supervises the revels.

  Jan de Bray was a Dutch artist of the seventeenth century. In Haarlem, just after 1650, he portrayed this bourgeois Antony and Cleopatra at the decisive point of their notorious competition over which of them can provide the costliest banquet. Antony is confident that he can outdo the miserable plate of shells at Cleopatra’s table – until she takes from her ear the world’s largest pearl, sits straight-backed, staring back, poised to crush it, dissolve it and drink it. The moment is absolutely still. The morality of the tale is untold, left to tell itself. The steadiness in the surrounding faces is intense, as if they are watchers at an execution.

  The picture has been in a palace of British kings and queens since it was purchased by Charles II. It might be thought an odd subject for any but the merriest monarch, the extravagance of a doomed queen of dubious reputation who ground down a pearl worth fifteen cities. Before coming to Hampton Court, it hung in the Queen’s Drawing Room at Windsor for two hundred years.

  The models were the painter’s parents, a mother who was wealthy, impetuous maybe, and a father from whom the young Jan was trying to break away. His brothers and sisters played the parts of the little Moon and Sun, of Caesarion, and their extended family and retainers. The Sun is querulous, the Moon is pleased to be allowed up late. The painter himself takes the part of Plancus, the axe-man who will decide the winner and who protects the second earring from a similar destruction.

  No one knows precisely how this part of Cleopatra’s story matched the life of the De Brays, Catholic stalwarts of Haarlem, pillars of the painters’ guild of St Luke’s, courtly collectors of Turkish carpets, peacocks, gold, glass, Delft-ware and devoted servants. The family members were surely more than mere models for a classical scene. This is a story set truthfully in two ages, two places, two worlds.

  Seventeen years after its completion, everyone in the picture except the painter and two of his siblings would be dead – from the plague that ravaged Haarlem as it ravaged London at around the same time before the Great Fire. Jan de Bray later painted the whole scene again as a theatrical tableau on an even grander scale, adding his own first wife who had also died. The story of Antony and Cleopatra was a play in which his family twice could star, filmed for posterity in roles of curiosity and wonder which, however anyone judged the original subjects, had survived for almost seventeen centuries. If Cleopatra could define and intertwine with the good burghers of Haarlem, she could fit almost anywhere.

  What then were Lew’s other postcards, the result of that half-hearted picture research for the Big Oil Times? Some of them were traditional court portraits, the type more routinely to Charles II’s taste, available aristocratic wives with pearls and snakes painted by lesser-known Italians. The model with the black stare to match her stockings and the marble matron looking down on her tiny tuft of pubic hair? She was the subject for a southern German classicist called Georg Scholz, working somewhat later in 1927. It is one of his best-known works.

  For the titillators of the Restoration the heroes of ancient history enliven and promote the present. For other artists they show how dead is the past. Scholz preferred flesh to marble, his now to his then. Picture research produces sometimes peculiar results. His model did not represent Cleopatra at all – except in the sense that the most sensual opposition to Roman virtue always has.

  It is late at night in the room above the garage, time for some more traditional ancient history, for Actium, the name for one of those battles deemed decisive in the history of the world, September, 31 BC, on a sandy outcrop on the eastern shore of Greece, East vs West. Antony and Cleopatra vs Octavian and Rome, one truth vs another.

  I will start with Dellius, Antony’s pimp historian. It was he who betrayed the battle plans. Dellius and Cleopatra had quarrelled over wine. Her officers at Actium, he jibed, had been reduced to drinking vinegar, vintages fit only for destroying jewellery. Octavian’s men meanwhile had the best of everything. So Dellius had no option but to change sides. Plancus had been right. The sailors with the best wine would surely prevail.

  All the auguries and odds were switching fast. That was only too true. Agrippa, Octavian’s admiral, had seized so many ports so very quickly that the Romans could now land their troops almost anywhere. Antony’s massive forces meanwhile were penned up, hemmed in by sand and shallows, suffering from plague and bad alcohol.

  Canidius wanted to lead the army back inland and lure Octavian to follow. A land battle would still have been Antony’s best chance if Cleopatra had permitted it. Antony was still the more experienced commander on open ground, while Agrippa was proving himself an ever more potent master at sea.

  But Cleopatra said no. The navy was hers. Her treasury was held by her navy. If they were to retreat to fight another day, it would be safer to escape by sea to Alexandria. Canidius could be left behind in Greece with their miserable, complaining army to prove that he was as good as he had always claimed. Those were her orders, the final orders.

  So Dellius’s defection was a fact. But it did not matter. Cleopatra’s orders were simple: as soon as the Egyptian captains saw an opening in the Roman lines, they were to burst through and sail away home. It was not much of a plan to betray. Octavian must have worked out most of it for himself. But it was all that Dellius had.

  19. 1.11

  Khat Rashid

  The wooden clock in this depot for armed men and carrot-sellers records 4.00 a.m. Dawn is fast approaching while the night stays sleepless and charcoal black. From the flat lands between here and the city the closest light comes from patches of faraway neon, the whiteness of invading stars. The advertisement hoardings are under repair. Across each square, from corner to corner, crawl small black figures, electricians jerking like tiny frogs,
painful to look at too long. Posters would normally protect our eyes. But this is the hidden part of an advertising display, the glare that we are not supposed to see.

  These bare fluorescent tubes ought to be behind invitations to buy a Coca-Cola or to vote for the son of the President. But on this nineteenth night of the new decade there is reduced demand to tell Alexandrians or their visitors what new delights they can have for their money. The election is over. The Mubarak family has won everything again. There has been a bombing. Egypt, the President claims, needs support for its fight against terrorists. There is the uncertainty of empty space.

  Meanwhile, preparing for better economic times, the neon-tube repair men are in harness, in sticky-footed shoes, scrambling slowly across screens that are impossibly white. These hoardings will soon be wrapped in new posters, ‘buy-me’ pictures, buy my cigarettes, buy my bathroom furniture, buy my houses by the sea. But on this night the empty neon taunts the eyes. Look too long and the screens become columns of giant type, seven across a newspaper page, occasional dark spaces, a pair of broken bulbs that need to be replaced, a tablet where once there was a picture of an apartment or a politician.

  Look harder, till the eyes hurt. In the vacant dark the site of the sometime lighthouse is shining too, many miles and two thousand years away. The sky is the colour of bruises, a punched cheek, a prayer-beaten forehead, an eye becoming black. This is not where I wanted to spend the night. But it is a fine place to look back at Alexandria and consider the last hours of Mark Antony, the time when he knew he had lost, when he was abandoned by the city’s gods. Any biography of Cleopatra is now in its final phase.

  The problem for the queen after Actium was to write the story of what had happened before her enemies wrote it. The parties to celebrate her success had to begin in Alexandria even before the killings did. Both celebrations and assassinations were essential. Actium had been only a skirmish. The danger was that it might be seen as a defeat. It was for her and her alone to define what a battle was – and when or if it had taken place.

  Actium had absolutely not been a defeat. Her supporters understood that. It was barely even a setback, and only a diplomatic setback at that. There had never been a battle of Actium. For so many reasons it was no shame to have left Canidius and his army to win on land, to do what he had wanted to do from the start.

  Yes, a land campaign had seemed unattractive at first. To leave the coast would have meant leaving her ships and her treasure and any possibility, even in victory, of returning quickly to Egypt. But she had not betrayed Canidius. She had allowed him his chance as soon as it had seemed impossible to win at sea. This was going to be a long game. Nothing had been decided yet.

  Yes, there was some small risk now that Alexandrian opponents (there were always a few) would present her strategic retreat as a rout. The best retort to that would be to invite them to parties, to cull their numbers, to take their property and to plan the next phase of the war as soon as Antony could rejoin her in the city.

  As a precaution she would slaughter some of the prisoners taken in Antony’s Persian campaigns. No one in that war, indeed in most wars, could agree what had definitely been a battle and what had not. This time she was the one who would draw the lines. She would kill the Persian survivors now so as to make her own distinctions a little clearer.

  Then she would kill some of her less reliable Alexandrian friends. With the money from their confiscated estates she would move some of her fleet south and overland to the Red Sea. A ship could move across the desert on rollers as easily as her granite pillars from Aswan. If she or her Caesarion, or the Sun and Moon twins needed to open a new front against Octavian, she could deepen her retreat as far as India or widen it to Spain, always as long as her treasure, the world’s greatest concentration of wealth, went with her.

  Socratis has sent a messenger. His driver in the yellow suit, for the first time cleansed of mud, asks if I mind being here for the rest of the morning. It is good, he mumbles, that I have stayed here. The news is confusing. There are all sorts of troubles coming. He hopes that I have been able to spend the time well. Before I can nod my head in assent he turns away and is gone.

  Optimism did not last long in Alexandria after Canidius returned, reporting the story of Actium as it had been told to Antony’s army, of how the legions had been ruthlessly betrayed, sailors preferred to soldiers for Cleopatra’s sake alone. Plancus had moved fast, telling Antony’s Greek allies that while they should have already changed sides they were still free to do so. The men of Ephesus had followed his advice. Others too. Canidius’s army had surrendered – and it too had been allowed to join Octavian. Canidius himself, Octavian claimed with persuasive effect, was a traitor to Rome.

  Cleopatra’s response was to declare Caesarion to be Egypt’s male ruler. The Sun and Moon were rising by his side.

  Low in the pale-blue sky the neon patches have turned to fading stars, a constellation connected by a low-flying plane in a continuous line of white air. A few minutes after 7.00 a.m. the first bus stopped by the petrol pumps. No one stepped off or on until a second followed and then a third. Five black-hooded crows, dancing around the dusty ground, scattered only when the first feet of the soldiers kicked out of the doors. From the second bus streamed a rabble of schoolboys. The third disgorged three mechanics, four women with fruit baskets and Mahmoud, screwing his eyes against the lights and limping. Every new bus – eleven of them now – has brought only soldiers until there is nothing but the grey of metal and uniform in every direction.

  For all her stratagems, Cleopatra could do little more than kill. Plans to sail a fleet across the desert to the Red Sea were foiled by the unforgiving tribesmen whose bitumen business she had disrupted in better times. She succeeded only in sending Caesarion away with his tutor on the route to India. She sent messages to Octavian, embassies and bribes, gold to pay his armies in exchange for guarantees that her children could rule in Egypt after she had gone. Octavian responded with silence, threats and the sending of his own emissary, a poet whose charm and eloquence with the Queen pushed Antony into depression without achieving any other purpose.

  Their parties took on a new tone. In the past they had created a club called the ‘inimitable livers’. Now they called themselves by a new name, ‘those who would die together’. Cleopatra built herself a mausoleum into which she brought her treasure of emeralds, pearls and gold. Inexorably the news came that Octavian was advancing on Alexandria.

  Antony roused himself for a cavalry charge which won a modest and much celebrated victory. But that was his last success. Alexandrians later described the following night as the one in which the gods of Greece led a procession out of Alexandria. This was when Antony was abandoned by his protective deities. Dionysus led Isis away into Octavian’s camp.

  Antony’s response was to bluster and bribe, challenging Octavian to single combat as though they were heroes at Troy, offering money to Octavian’s troops to change sides as though he were a captain of mercenaries. He sent a fleet to meet Octavian, the ships of both sides shadowing their armies along the coast. Then suddenly the Egyptian navy defected to Octavian, just as everyone and everything else was defecting.

  It is now 9.00 a.m. in the troop depot that was once a service station. There is a clock at a table beside a coin-operated roundabout of camels. Mahmoud did not approach me immediately. We had not spoken since he climbed into the back of a black car at the Montaza Palace, saying that we would meet again on his return from Athens. He limped towards the metal shelters full of officers. After ten minutes he emerged smiling, waving his glasses. He was still walking awkwardly like a much older man.

  He did not stay long. He did not mention Athens. He did not explain why he was here. He did seem pleased to see me. He said only that he and Socratis had a surprise which they were sure I would like. He asked politely about my literary progress. I said that it had almost ceased. Then he left on the same local bus that had brought him, the sole passenger now that the mec
hanics and basket carriers had reached the end of their journey.

  I am suddenly more sleepless and confused than at any time since I arrived in this city. Uncertainty now seems as normal as exhaustion. The ancient story tumbles into a chaos of its own. Antony accuses Cleopatra of ordering her fleet to betray him. She flees to her mausoleum. He thinks she is dead and tries to kill himself with a sword. In fact (inasmuch as there any facts here), she is not dead and he is hauled up to her for a bloody reconciliation, and then a lengthy process of dying. Many years of scholarship and literary invention have been since deployed in establishing – or not – who was betraying whom.

  Sharia Yousef

  I am back now in the city. The three of us were to meet again at 4.00 p.m. at the Roman Theatre, in the archaeological gardens on the other side of Nebi Danial Street from the Dead Fountain cafe. That was the driver’s first instruction when he collected me at Khat Rashid and his last before he left me at the hotel. Socratis was going to bring his mother. This was to be a great privilege, a rare appearance. So I had to be punctual, and to be waiting precisely when requested on the steps in front of the ancient heads.

  Mahmoud was the first to arrive, just after 4.30, still limping, stroking fondly the smooth surface of the eyeless granite as though for comfort. Socratis himself appeared next, without either his mother or his driver, arriving suddenly from a hut beside the wall to the barracks. He looked past us toward the tourist gate, smiling first at Mahmoud and then at me. The absence of his driver seemed to be a good sign that his mother too might be with us soon.

  No one spoke. Mahmoud seemed lightly dazed. The peace was like the moment before the firing of a gun. Behind us were the stone goddesses in their drapery, rows of silent survivors of so many saltwater centuries.