Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra Page 4
After these peculiar pleasanteries were over Mahmoud suggested dinner at our hotel. It was possible to eat well there, he said, as long as one was with him. Socratis thought that I would prefer Monty’s bar at the Cecil, where the alcohol was more reliable, where there was wartime memorabilia of Desert Rats and where faded British grandeur might be more comforting in troubled times than the French kind.
Socratis was the victor. He said smilingly that he would choose the restaurant and Mahmoud would pay the bill. Mahmoud did not complain. These men had surely to be team players. Each man had some sort of connection to his hotel although neither seemed to work there or anywhere, or had yet asked specifically if I required his services or had said what this would cost. I did not press them. This is not journalism. There is no need for certainty or haste. The driver, cheerfully smirking again, was sent to bring round the car. The doors closed and we were out again past the green moon and the stone tornado, waiting at the place where the library’s great slope of glass slides into the street by the sea.
Eleven hours on, that all seems an age ago now. On the cloudless, windswept balcony of Room 114 it is almost morning. It has not been a good night in the hotel where, as the brass key fob boasts, ‘the temple of the great love of Cleopatra and Antonio was born’. I am staring drowsily at golden lights, a green tower, lines of red underscored by white neon. There is a deafening dawn chorus of musical cars and whinnying horses. But at least, inside this tall tube-like, golden-wallpapered room, the hours of poisoning are almost past.
Before dinner, as we sat in the Cecil bar, Socratis asked again why I was here, why I was spending winter weeks in Alexandria when other tourists, the seasonally knowing and the temporarily terrorised, were not. I told him the truth. If it were not for unseasonable Christmas snow over the British skies, I would not be here. I would be somewhere warmer and further away, toying perhaps with my Cleopatra story but, as before and so often, not seriously writing it. He seemed disappointed to hear that. He wanted me to want to be here (he said so several times) even though the assault on his fellow Copts meant that I had to be careful where I went. He very much wanted me to have a successful trip.
This was new information. Socratis is a Copt, a man of the world’s most ancient Christian church. Mahmoud is the man of Islam. Both like to stress continuity, differences that should not be exaggerated, a past that little changes.
My own knowledge of Egypt does not go back much before the conquest by Alexander the Great or forward beyond the last Romans. All I know about its religion is that in the unimaginably long pre-Alexandrian history of this country men worshipped dogs and kings among many gods, except for a brief revolution in the fourteenth century BC when there was just one. After the failure of these first one-god believers, all the many holy beasts rapidly returned, mingling with Persian and Greek gods when different conquerors came, multiplying for more than a millennium until the Jews and Christians again brought ‘one god’ to Alexandria and until the Muslims did the same.
In old Zaghloul’s idea of a modern Egypt, forged in prison and in power a hundred years ago, religious differences were not supposed to matter. Now they matter more, to foreigners as much as to the Egyptians themselves. British bishops, while patronising about primitive Coptic beliefs, have anguished over the bombs and persecutions. British politicians have supported President Mubarak, especially when he has hunted down Muslims of an equally primitive kind – and promised to keep the worst of them in jail.
The three of us sat down for our first course of oily squid and parsley. There was nameless fish and minced meat ahead. Socratis seemed content but quietly so. Mahmoud took charge although he looked as though he would much prefer to be elsewhere, sometimes as though most of him was elsewhere, leaving behind little more than a puritan stare above a menu.
When Mahmoud spoke it was as though from the standard handbooks of public relations. He blamed all reporters who threatened national solidarity and the tourist trade. Novelists and poets, he added, could be even worse. Too many artists came here when they would rather be in a different place, looking for something that had disappeared or never existed and then complaining when they could not find it.
He particularly deplored the Cecil Hotel bookshop which year after year promoted E.M. Forster’s First World War guidebook to Alexandria, ‘a work whose author would rather have been in India’ and who called his subject ‘the spurious east’. And there was always and everywhere Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, which, ‘for anyone who could finish it’, made the city out as a place of prostitutes, plutocrats, drunkards and primal religion. Of all the foreigners who had ruled Egypt, he said, ‘the English were forever the most foreign’. Socratis nodded sagely at that.
As we ate and drank, I was sympathetic to Mahmoud – or tried to be – denying the slightest ambition to bewail a city of dreams that had somehow died. I have no nostalgia for the sexual invention and cosmopolitan beauty that Lawrence Durrell and E.M. Forster so longingly describe. I have not arrived with half-admitted hopes of the city being what it used to be at some other time or something or somewhere other than it is. I am not looking for souls of poets dead and gone. I may try to imagine the colonnaded streets of Alexander the Great’s successors but that does not mean I yearn for them or despair of what came next.
Afterwards Socratis took us upstairs to ‘after dinner at Monty’s bar’. Vodka arrived. Socratis and I drank it. Mahmoud, a dutiful man of his faith, did not. On the other side of the dark-wood, low-ceilinged room, a group of tropically dressed military men, Australians, Americans and a Spaniard, were more seriously enjoying their alcohol. There was not a woman in sight. We were running out of things to say.
Suddenly, sensing a failure of hospitality, Socratis took over responsibility for the night. He pushed down, as ever vainly, on his bouncing curls. He said all would have been much better if his mother had been with us. He blurted this out, as though this had been his secret all along. His mother was the one who knew about Cleopatra. She had talked about her often when he was a child. She knew all about Alexandria’s leaders, King Fuad, King Farouk, Colonel Nasser, Anwar Sadat and everyone.
To his mother these were ‘all good men’, just as Mahmoud had said. She knew about the great Alexander of Macedon, who had been here so short a time, and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, whose short reign as a conqueror of Alexandria is sometimes forgotten, as well as Queen Cleopatra whose life and death are remembered so well.
Mahmoud looked anxious – as though he had heard this all before and knew we were heading for bad places. After a third round of toasts, Socratis, fatter faced and softer eyed, seemed to be mocking his absent mother. Or was he repeating dutifully her views of rulers’ virtues? If only, he said, she had been able to meet me and speak for herself. If only she were not still so upset by the bombing of her church.
Her church? So it was her own church that had been bombed? Had she been inside with the doomed New Year celebrants of St Mark and St Peter of the Seal? Well, no, Socratis admitted. But she had heard the blast. She had said so, and her son believed her. She had immediately visited the scene. Or maybe not. She had claimed to have done so. Socratis was doubtful. It hardly mattered. The old lady, he said, had vivid descriptions, ‘gnarled green cars and blood-sprayed walls, bodies wrapped in newspaper, women who could not piece together their husbands, fathers scrabbling for each lost limb of a child’, and other horrors that she would not and could not relate. And she had questions? What happened to the souls of people who when they died were not whole people? It was ‘a curse on Alexandria. If only Jesus had never come here.’
Mahmoud and I stared at each other across a plate of sagging biscuits. The balance of our talk had changed. The teams had changed. The conversation was becoming ridiculous. I said carefully that I would like to have met Socratis’s mother. I would have liked it very much, more than to have heard this peculiar version from her son. That was when I first felt the grip of poison, indigestible words and foods together.
Mahmoud’s reaction was, as ever, to blame the newspapers and television reporters, those who had made her see what she had not seen. The media was the message, he said proudly. My own best effort was to say, with due hesitance, that I did not know of Jesus ever visiting Alexandria. The Saviour had come here in his ‘missing years’, Socratis replied, not quite meeting my eyes and flicking shreds of olive towards the portrait of General Montgomery on the Monty’s wall. ‘Where else would he have come than to the greatest city there had ever been?’
Mahmoud sagged again. He circled a forefinger around his ear to signal a mockery of this madness. He pulled air from his mouth in a silent blah-di-blah. All this Jesus and Cleopatra was the sound of the mother speaking through the son and Mahmoud had heard it too often before. ‘And HE is still here,’ Socratis added with capital emphasis. If Jesus is still here, I asked, does your mother think that Cleopatra and King Farouk are here too? He showed no sign of taking offence. ‘The monarchs are only sometimes here’, he replied firmly, ‘but they never go away far.’
I looked away. I feared I was going to laugh. Mahmoud began to reply but stopped and decided to settle the bill instead, looking mournfully at the vodka tax, the expensive vice of others. I offered to pay but was dismissed with a sweep of hands from both men. Mahmoud did not drink a drop of spirit but at that moment he looked drunk, a reluctant debauchee, whose last act at the table was to light up a Cleopatra. He asked if I would have preferred him not to smoke? No. Mahmoud picked up his credit card receipt, inhaled deeply and followed his friend from the room.
This was all over by ten o’clock. Since then I have had two hours’ sleep. Perhaps the cause of the food-poisoning was a particularly damp bread roll, a slice of mollusc cooked too little or too long ago. The conversation did not help. Whatever the cause, a peculiar lightness of stomach or the perpetual lights of trams and cars, the prospect of further wakefulness seems assured. On the narrow strip of carpet between the bottom of the bed and the thin French desk lie accusing scraps of Cleopatras from the past.
3.1.11
Hotel Metropole, Place Saad Zaghloul
It is 6.17 a.m. on the electronic clock, too early for the Metropole breakfast. I have had a coffee and a sugar cake outside. For the second time this week, this year, I have completed my early morning round of the seaside square, slowly down the red staircase, quicker through the lurid stained-glass light of the hall, out away past dozily guarded doors and tall pots for sand and cigarettes.
This time there was no more news of bombs. There was only the constant roar of cars and drivers on the walk down to the open grey water, an easy circle back among the horse-drawn traps, and a dash across the road to the closest cafe, once part of the Metropole itself, probably the best part, with darkened windows opening directly onto the widest pavements. Now I am back inside the hotel again, past the security men who do not register my existence in any way. The thin-lipped receptionist welcomes me with a smile to the hotel of ‘Antonio and his Queen’.
In Room 114 the first page of Cleopatra the Second is waiting on the freshly smoothed counterpane. I pick it up and, for the first time in more than forty years, begin carefully to read.
CLEOPATRA THE SECOND
The main street of her city was mapped in a long, low cross. Between the Gate of the Sun and the Gate of the Moon stretched the Canopic Way, lined with columns connecting the two heavenly protectors of the city. The much shorter vertical axis was called Body Street and ran from the last mass of Nile marsh before the sea to the causeway that led to the world’s greatest lighthouse, the world’s tallest building, on what had once been an island. On one side of Body Street was the theatre, the temples for torch-lit processions and the first true library and on the other the city of the dead. Along the shining white harbour front stood palaces and military encampments and behind them …
These opening lines are on pages from a school rough-book. No one uses paper like that now. It is lined like a ploughed field and only a little smoother. It is beige tinged with pinks and blue as though any coloured dye would do. But it has survived well enough. Although in 1963 ‘best books’ were intended for the best work, ‘rough’ did not need to mean ‘second best’. A rough-book at my second school was more than merely a cheap thing made from the barely processed bark of bristling bushes and held together with staples. It was a pupil’s own private book, a place for rough work, for mistakes, guesses, imagined things that might be pornography (often) or poetry (less often), or maps copied dutifully from other books, anything that need never be seen by anyone else.
This first passage of street directions seems to owe something to Mahmoud’s bête noire, E.M. Forster, who researched his Alexandria guide during the First World War when he was enjoying his first homosexual affair, cataloguing the wounded of the Dardanelles campaign and wishing he were in India. The fat bulk of Forster’s Pharos and Pharillon is still in the Cecil shop, annoying local sensitivities. But I am sure I never saw it in my rough-book days.
I could flatter myself to think that the torch-lit temples and celestial gates came from Achilles Tatius, an Alexandrian novelist of the second century AD who vividly thus described them. But his romantic description of Alexandria, embedded in fantastic tales of tortures and sexual yearning, is deep in Leucippe and Cleitophon, Chapter Five, an unlikely destination for a teenaged boy. At the beginning of the 1960s I was newly arrived at a 500-year-old school, red-bricked, golden-gated, darkly grassed, where fluency in Greek was valued almost as much as Association Football. But I knew nothing yet of the Greek novel.
Perhaps I was copying a comic book, or a romantic novel written by someone who themselves had read Forster or Achilles Tatius. No master at this Brentwood School would ever have checked in a rough-book for plagiarism, or studied in any way these Cleopatra pages which, fifty years on, show an unchanged surface of flakes and furrows and dried, inky pools. With royal-blue Quink and a fat pen and nib from the Parker Company, my second Cleopatra story began. On the back of the first page are trial workings for maths problems, as insolvable then as now. On the front is the beginning of an imagined journey, a list of street names with an ancient map, followed by ‘the birth of Cleopatra in 69 BC, the second daughter of the man who at that time called himself King Ptolemy of Egypt’. His other names, I wrote, were the New Dionysus and the Fluteplayer and all of his rights and titles were owed originally to Alexander the Great, the man who gave the city its name and whose body gave its name to Body Street.
It is a modest start. All the letters are large even for a rough-book in which small letters were always likely to become an ink smudge. The name, the date, the phrases ‘second daughter’ and ‘called himself King Ptolemy’ are larger still. To place a birth so early in a book seems a simple act of a teenager seeking something he could securely and truthfully say, a reminder now of the peculiar desire of biographers, until we are trained out of the habit, of beginning with what we cannot possibly know or what we are likely to know of least.
It would have been better and simpler in 1963 to have continued with the map and described the road from the shores of Lake Mareotis into the city, passing by the Dead Fountain cafe on Rue Nebi Danial, as Body Street is now called, and turning right, halfway to the sea, to the Floral Clock, once the eastern gate of the city, known then as the Gate of the Sun. But perhaps information was scant. Today there are guidebooks and a broad agreement among their writers about where the ancient city stood. In Brentwood in the sixties, the last Essex suburb before London began, my Alexandrian street directions, copied from who knows where, did not perhaps convince me even when I was copying them.
The date of birth, 69 BC or maybe late 70 BC, is still the best that anyone has. It is based on the assurance of Plutarch, the biographer of Cleopatra’s last lover, Mark Antony, that she was thirty-nine when she died and that she and he shared the same birth month. But the scepticism of my rough-book phrase ‘who called himself King’ is excessive. Although Ptolemy XII was a bastard, a
successful pretender and bankrupt who had made himself wholly dependent for this throne on the military power of Rome, he did not merely ‘call himself king’.
Or, at least, he was not alone in doing so. The Romans called him King Ptolemy, as did the neighbouring descendants of Alexander’s other generals, even when they were trying to add bits of his kingdom to their own. So did the people of Alexandria, almost always known by later writers as ‘the mob’, who either accepted his unusual desire to be the Greek god ‘Dionysus’ or abused him as the ‘fluteplayer’ or ‘massage parlour musak man’. He was an autocrat. His subjects’ choice of name for him probably depended on whether he was listening.
Ptolemy XII was a fat bastard in every commonly used sense today. But, at the time of Cleopatra’s birth, the Romans could call him ‘our fat bastard’ and so, more or less cynically, could almost everyone else. He was the latest in the twisted line of succession from Alexander’s general Ptolemy, an artful conqueror who had taken the throne of the Pharaohs some 250 years before and imposed his Greek rule on people who, even then, were ‘the ancient Egyptians’. Every Macedonian king of Egypt, however disputed his descent, was called Ptolemy.
This Ptolemy XII had at least five children whose names are known. The phrase ‘second daughter’ also represents a reasonable rough-book effort, a likely truth, although my Cleopatra may have been Ptolemy’s third female heir. Failure to mention a mother may have shown some appreciation of the uncertainty about who precisely the mother was. Most probably she was the king’s wife and sister, also called Cleopatra. The Greek Ptolemies were enthusiastic adopters of the incestuous practices of the Pharaohs. Every honest book on this subject has drowned its readers in a gene pool of Ptolemaic doubt.