Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Read online

  I asked about the investigation into the bombing. Normally a question about that could draw an answer from Mahmoud, even if only his usual answer that the plotters were foreigners and fortunately dead: and that the good fortune was their own as well as that of Egypt, the hollow-eyed phone pictures of their faces suggesting hideous last hours. This afternoon he said nothing at all.

  The only tourists were far away by the outer walls. The Roman stage was empty except for the skinny shadows of trees. From the Villa of the Birds there came suddenly a high note of opera, a trill, a pause and a repeat. The sequence was repeated as though it were a summons, again and again, until Socratis rose and gestured for us to follow. We crossed some hundred feet of Polish masonry and imperial mosaic until we were only a few steps from the singer, to whom he politely bowed.

  This was Socratis’s mother, she of the personal relationships claimed with Cleopatra, King Farouk, all the little Farouks and every other leader of eternal Alexandria. She was standing in the villa behind an open glass door. At her feet were the brightly coloured floors, the mosaic birds, somehow brighter than I had seen them before, washed stone feathers of a purple water-hen, a peacock, a duck and dove. The dove was flying, the duck staring at the sun, and the water-hen was stretching its red legs. Behind her were rosettes and a panther and the rough-cut stones of what was once one of the finest houses in the city.

  I looked up at her before Socratis did. She was disappointingly normal, wearing a thin black dress and a shawl weighted with pearls sewn as stars. Around her neck were golden fishes, their scales and tails shaped as crescent moons, their eyes in turquoise. Around her left wrist was a bracelet of charms, a silver cucumber and glass beads in the shape of Africa. Her feet were fixed on the wings of a purple gallinule.

  Certainly, she was a very privileged visitor. Paying tourists were kept away high on glass walkways. There was no sign of the attendant now. The singer seemed as relaxed and commanding as if she were at home, continuing to look out over our heads and back to where we had met.

  She sounded her note again. This time it echoed around both of the theatres, the new and the old, a bouncing syllable of an unknown song. Mahmoud looked at me expectantly. I was clearly expected to recognise what she was singing. Socratis produced a blue silk sheet and placed it over a low stone wall so that his mother could more easily lean back and project her notes into the outer air.

  She smiled like a cat. This was the woman who saw history as a single flat plate, a non-stop now, within which the big players lived simultaneously and for ever. This was the woman who wished that Jesus had never come to Alexandria, who thought, her son had said, that Cleopatra was still available for dinners. This was the witness to the aftermath of the New Year bombing, the mother whose grief had caused her son such concern and her son’s friend such suspicion.

  She did not seem in any way abnormal today, no madder than any woman would seem while singing an unknown aria into an empty archaeological site. She looked like a gracious, wealthy Egyptian with dark-set eyes, greeting one of her son’s friends who had travelled from afar. She stopped for breath. Socratis, much the more deranged of the two men, introduced us with a whisper. I began to commiserate with her about the carnage in the church but Mahmoud broke in to say that this was unimportant now.

  They knew that I had questions, he added. I was not sure what to say. It seemed an age since we had first failed to meet. She began quietly to speak in English. She hardly seemed a possessor of exotic beliefs. Had I not recognised her songs from Handel? Surely Handel had been from England? Did I not know his Giulio Caesare? That was the very best of parts for a Cleopatra.

  She trilled again into the outer theatre, triggering a long, metallic echo, like that of a bullet against a pack of distant tanks. But even this Cleopatra, she said, stopping suddenly in her song, was not as good as the one she had once played here long ago, forty years ago. She whispered the words as though her character were still breathing, a baby asleep, not yet to be woken. Cleopatra would always be in Alexandria, she said, when she was needed the most.

  Mahmoud and Socratis lowered their eyes. The whispering singer took no notice of them, looking only outwards and over the Odeon seats towards the marble heads from the sea. This time she did not sing. She spoke softly in Arabic in rhythmic, rasping beats. And then she recited in a language that was probably still Arabic but in syllables which were sour as though mingled with smoke. For the next five minutes the words grew wilder and the skin lightened under her eyes. It was as if she were younger and slighter, manically remembering.

  When she stopped, she sat down on the blue silk cloth. That was a wonderful speech, she said, ‘a Cleopatra with a happy ending’. She had played this part in this very theatre soon after it was found by the Poles. It was easy to play here then. This was the play that proved the ‘unconquerable power of Egypt’. Cleopatra was dead. That had been her death scene. In truth, the Romans were the ones defeated. It was easy, she said, to believe that then.

  Socratis began to speak. He looked as though he were about to shout, smoothing his hair in futile gestures. His mother motioned him to be quiet. She had been five years old, she said, when Egypt had had its last true victory over its enemies, when Nasser had taken back the Suez Canal, when Britain and France were humiliated by those they had occupied so long. It was the first event she could remember. Did I too remember it? How old had I been? Five too, I told her. After the triumph there had been constant celebrations. Under Nasser and Sadat there had always been celebrations.

  Had I been to Alexandria’s opera house? It had soft leather doors in purple and bronze; and there was an altar on the ceiling to all the great composers. She had never sung her Cleopatra there. She would have loved to do that. She was a singer but not a good enough singer. She would have loved to play her stage part there too. But she had only ever played it here. Soon Cleopatra would be at the opera house again. The Queen had never disappointed.

  Then slowly, as though instructed by some ghostly director, she rose from her silk-draped wall and walked out into the ancient rooms behind the stage. These were the caves of arches where she and her friends had kept their costumes, she said. Was there to be an encore? There was not. She walked out onto the flat sand with her son, past the smooth heads of the gods, past Mahmoud, pausing only to collect the plastic-wrapped chauffeur.

  Socratis looked at me. I had seen enough and should make of it what I could. Within minutes the attendant had returned to enforce the house rules of the Birds. Two French women were standing idly with Tutankhamun postcards in their hands.

  Bibliotheca Alexandrina

  I want to find the play I have just heard. Neither Mahmoud nor Socratis knows its name. To them it is just ‘the Cleopatra play’. I ask at the desk if anyone can help. After a few hours a small pile of books arrives.

  The topmost shabby volume is entitled Théatre de Notre Temps. It contains a surprise, or a possible joke, or a bizarre coincidence, certainly a shock. If Mahmoud and Socratis have organised this they are smarter than I see them.

  Neatly marked with a library card is Mort ou Amour, an Egyptian dialogue, a French translation, in which an historian in an Alexandrian hotel room is struggling to write a book about Cleopatra. The dramatic hero does most of the things that I have done here since I arrived, ruefully recalling past efforts, weighing fact against fiction, realism against romance, ‘la politique ou le coeur’ as motivation for peace and war. He complains that ‘le nom de Cleopatra m’a suivi toute ma vie’. He admits that the name has often haunted him more than the Queen herself. He remembers hangovers and nights of ‘insomnies’.

  Troubled by past and future cancers, he talks for three acts about his life to a visiting friend called Cleopatra. This woman knows the story only from the film that she last saw as a sixteen-year-old. The two argue about the Elizabeth Taylor version – ‘une femme splendide’ – and what should and should not have been in it. She smokes; he drinks. There are more sleepless nights. He argue
s that ancient and modern history are the same, that his two Cleopatras are the same. The historian is not quite deranged but neither is he quite himself.

  This is almost a threat – or a fortunate escape. If I had known earlier of Tawfik al-Hakim’s Mort ou Amour I could hardly have written this year what I already have. But I do not want to read any more of it. I have already read more than is good for me. It is not a joke. It is a coincidence. But sometimes the two can seem the same.

  Mort ou Amour is also not what I have been looking for. This oddity from the catalogue cannot be the iconic hit that Socratis’s mother performed, the one whose ‘happy ending’ I have just watched from the Roman villa. The only good omen from Tawfik al-Hakim is that at the beginning of Act Three his historian has completed 200 pages, his muse is encouraging – ‘Deux cent pages en un mois? Pas mal’ – and the end is in sight.

  The second work in the library pile is The Downfall of Cleopatra by Ahmed Shawqi, a book from a rather more distinguished figure, a politician as well as a writer, an ally of Mr Zaghloul against British rule in Egypt. Shawqi wrote it in 1927, the same year in which he was hailed as the Prince of Poets, a laureate of Arab aspiration. The text is in English although the translation here is no triumph of rhyme: ‘the great are concerned in many ways/about how they are destined to end their days’.

  As in Mort ou Amour there is little action. But this earlier play is written in salon verse not bedroom prose. It is set in 31 BC instead of the present and has a high patriotic tone. The louche Alexandrias of Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Victorian erotic are all equally far away.

  The first scene begins in the private royal part of the Library where gloomy young scholars listen to cheers in the street outside for the victory at Actium. The celebrants cry that Alexandria’s monarch, like its lighthouse, is queen of the seas. But this, the scholars know, is a trick. The fleet has returned by night so that its broken masts and sails can be repaired by morning. The mob is like a parrot; its mind is in its ears. Their heroes are traitors, whose crown is a wine goblet and whose throne is a bed of lust.

  Shawqi’s Cleopatra blames others for spreading the falsehoods and false hopes. She must accept that Actium had not been a victory. But neither had it been a defeat. It was an opportunity to let the two Roman sides destroy themselves, leaving Egypt to become the big victor in the end. Shawqi’s Antony is a useless sot while this Cleopatra is a cunning Egyptian liberator, a national unifier who ruthlessly betrays her lover in the better interests of her country.

  After lengthy acts of partying and prophecy, the Queen recognises that she herself is doomed. Death by snakebite must ensue. But in the long run she knows that Rome is the more doomed. She has no interest in an afterlife with Antony. She cares only for the future of Egypt. Its enslavers will be enslaved. The invader has opened for itself a grave. One bad rhyme after another: better in Arabic perhaps. After the uprisings of the 1920s it was a national call to arms.

  Shawqi’s play had many revivals in the 1960s and was a popular staple for concert performances in Alexandria and Cairo. After the military disasters and deceptions for Egypt that followed, it seems, quite reasonably, to have fallen out of favour. Perhaps Socratis’s mother was merely reviving her own youth. Perhaps she saw some imminent chance of a new revival.

  I was not going to find out more. Some parts of a story can be neatly tied. Others cannot. Ahmed Shawqi himself, after writing six plays on historical themes and a comedy set in a harem, died in 1932, a respected rebel comrade of the even more celebrated Mr Zaghloul, whose high statue tonight is guarded closely.

  20.1.11

  Place Saad Zaghloul

  So what did happen to Cleopatra in the end? Maurice was asking the question. It was June 2010 and we were back in the Blue Lion, the first time we had been there together for twenty-five years, the first since the night of Drakkar Noir and Andrew Faulds MP. The place had changed according to the pattern of the intervening time, more salad-eaters, fewer beer-drinkers, more pistachios, fewer peanuts, lagers from implausible Dutch towns, light and heavy wines in small and large glasses.

  It seemed easy and natural to be back. We were continuing to slip in and out of each other’s lives as we had for all of our lives, noting the progress of his marriage (initially good, latterly poor), his boyfriends (the best of them away east of Suez), his sons (one of them at Trinity), the peculiarities of different cancers, the curability of some, the inexorability of others, including the one that was beginning to bring Maurice’s life to an end.

  When we were last on the Gray’s Inn Road the Editor of The Times was dying of cancer. Maurice reminded me (as though I needed reminding) that ten years ago, when I was editing The Times myself, and in my eighth year of the job, I too was told that a rapid cancer death lay ahead for me. What kind of cancer had I had? It was pancreatic, like Maurice’s, but a different pancreatic, the neuro-endocrine variety, sometimes the kinder sort. He knew that. He just wanted me to say it again. But if the topic is the wrong kind of cancer, it is hard to sustain an honest optimistic conversation for long. Maurice had given up alcohol. And he did not speak of that for long either.

  Within minutes we were back in the past, I recalling the sherry decanters of Oxford and he the Red Tents, the higher life, the champagne and pills that produced better sex with mermaids. The tents had been his finest creation. Okay, yes, it had been a development of others’ efforts. But the gauze, the gods, the questions in Greek, those were wholly his own. Dear Frog, the flying suicide, would never have had the inspiration. The sea-creatures in the inner sancta had almost always been men (no, always, all of them). Did I know that until the late Middle ages the ‘mermaids’ of art and poetry had been mermen to a man?

  He smiled. I wanted to press him more but did not. I avoided V’s employment as a statue. I recalled instead his Nubian teacher in the red dress. We looked, too, at his later life. Maurice used his money now to help anonymous addicts in need. He had long ago given up advertising and finance.

  His eyes were still bright. His hair and skin were not. What was this peculiar organ called the pancreas? It was a tiny fish-tailed thing, ‘an inner mermaid’, he mocked. Why in different ways had it bitten us both? Had we shared something nasty in the Essex water, some rays from the Moscow-watching radars of the Rothmans estate, or a blight in the Oxford sherry? It was hard to be light, although Maurice liked, when he could, to make light of everything.

  So what did happen to Cleopatra in the end? He asked the question again. I was feeling defensive. It was absurd that I had never finished my book. I began a defence of how Big Oil, Mrs Thatcher, the 1986 print revolution for the press, the editing of The Times and The Times Literary Supplement (now, oddly, back in the same office opposite the Blue Lion where The Times had once been), and other books about Tony Blair and Spartacus, had all found a higher priority.

  No, he said. What had happened to the real Cleopatra? That was what he suddenly wanted to know. It was as though we were back in our shared set of rooms, dressed from Marks & Spencer and Chelmsford Market, planning to plagiarise Charles Marowitz to the sound of a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

  After Antony’s death Octavian wanted Cleopatra stripped immediately of her treasure. It was too easy to destroy an army’s wages by fire. Metals might be melted into different shapes and saved; but ivory, pearls and precious stones would be dust. Cleopatra could not be allowed to immolate herself like an oriental martyr. Paying the victorious soldiers was the victor’s immediate priority. Nothing mattered more than that.

  Octavian sent Rome’s most glamorous poet and soldier, Cornelius Gallus, to be his envoy. Gallus was that most Alexandrian of Romans, literary innovator, glorious elitist, lover of Antony’s own favourite actress in Rome and commander now of Antony’s four African legions. While Gallus distracted the Queen with art and gossip, a junior officer was tasked with climbing up to the back window of her mausoleum, to burst in from behind and take her captive.

  The manoeuvre succeeded perfectly.
After that there was only the lesser, but still significant, question of Cleopatra’s personal fate. Octavian allowed her request to leave and prepare Antony’s body for burial. She beat herself almost to death, feverish, refusing food, but relieved to learn that her Caesarion was still free and on his way east and south. Most of Cleopatra’s remaining interest was in the fate of her children.

  Maurice nodded, pouring a little water on the wound on his wrist through which the chemotherapy came.

  Octavian then came to see Cleopatra himself. He found her either as a feverish captive or an unbowed queen, depending on which of the main ancient versions we prefer.

  As always when there was doubt in the air, Maurice began to look combative. Perhaps I would like to make up my mind, he suggested sourly, turning over a dirty ashtray.

  The dignified and unbowed was the better of the two pictures, the one from Plutarch’s Life of Mark Antony, the main source for Shakespeare, the one that Shawqi hoped to contradict. One of Plutarch’s best sources was Cleopatra’s doctor. At times Plutarch, masterly observer of eclipses, writes like a doctor himself.

  Octavian was uncertain what end for Cleopatra would suit him best. He wanted the option of taking her to Rome in his triumph. But there was the memory of her sister, Arsinoe, in Caesar’s parade. The Romans had wept for little Arsinoe. It was impossible to be certain of how a queen might be seen by the people.

  Cleopatra herself had clearer requests. She wanted the best life for Ptolemy Caesarion, for Alexander the Sun and Cleopatra the Moon. She wanted guarantees for them and the option of suicide for herself, but on her own terms, when and how she wanted to make it happen.