Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (14 page)

The young queen knew much about Egyptians that Caesar did not know. From the contents of her library she could tell her lover
tales from the mysterious book of the Greek historian, Manetho, the man who first described the Egypt of the Pharaohs to the
creators of Alexandria. It was Manetho who first set out for foreigners the astonishing chronology of the country, the sweeping
millennia between the many men who built the pyramids, the length of the reign of the first king who called himself the Sun
and the rules by which women reigned in Egypt before Rome was ever imagined.

Cleopatra could talk of the pyramids that women rulers had built for themselves. She could argue with Caesar whether these
edifices were idle nonsense, worth less than mines and aqueducts and other Roman things. Or were they a potent Egyptian proof
that, when a ruler has everything, he or she can build anything? She could read and note, with outrage or not, that carvings
of the female sexual organs denoted cowardice and those of the male meant bravery. She could argue, as we do now, about how
the Egyptian histories helped or hindered the arguments of the Jews for their own ancient past.

There are also things we know about her world that she did not. She was unaware how much bigger the great pyramids had been
before their lower parts were covered by sand. Nor did she know that there was once a great sphinx with them, the greatest
Sphinx, as we know it now. In Cleopatra’s reign it was mostly, maybe wholly, buried.

During the day Caesar fought and directed his men. At night he dined, conversed in Greek and slept with Cleopatra. Together
they
were fighting an inventive and resourceful enemy that knew Alexandria well, how its water systems could be polluted and which
of its inhabitants could most readily be turned from one side to the other.

Socratis’s quiet comparison between ancient queen and modern president was surprising but not outrageous. To the Alexandrian
bureaucracy, military and priesthood, Cleopatra was a Roman stooge, the daughter of a bigger Roman stooge, and in league with
a Roman tax-collector, extortionist and maybe even an occupier. To Caesar she was a necessary ally in his aim of controlling
Egypt and using its treasure to pay his legions.

Cleopatra herself was only a spectator at most events. She played no part in the battle beside the Pharos lighthouse or Caesar’s
heroic swim through the harbour, his state papers held one-handed above the waves. She did not join in Caesar’s ruthless burning
of ships that he could neither man himself nor risk being manned by Ptolemy. The naval fire spread to some books of the Alexandrian
library, a large or small number depending on who came to be the storyteller. But in advising on the volatile peoples of Alexandria,
the rich, the poor, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Jews, she would have been a useful agent.

She may not have warned Caesar how unpopular she was herself with the mob. To do so – or to do so too early – would have been
unwise. But she could tell him much about the character and appeal of her siblings and how, when dealing with this royal family,
it was wise to keep an open mind about which side each member might be on. A brother might as likely murder his sister as
marry her. Often he would do both. There must have been some strange palace meetings before Arsinoe escaped to the Egyptian
forces and had their commander murdered, replacing him with her own choice.

Ptolemy then left too to join his sister. Some said that Caesar deliberately allowed that escape. The result was certainly
favourable to him. The Egyptian ranks, divided in loyalty between brother and sister, suddenly had also to face two armies
of Egypt’s neighbours, from Judaea and from Pergamon. Caesar’s despatches had produced a prompt response.

Socratis was right about the Jewish support for Cleopatra’s cause – but wrong to belittle its importance. Jews throughout
the region had reason to join the friends of Caesar, the conqueror of Pompey, the Roman whom they hated most for his casual
defilement of their temple in Jerusalem fifteen years before and the dismembering of their state. The king of Pergamon was
a longer-time ally of Caesar who hoped for territorial gains from the success of his bet on the winning side.

In March 47, their two forces together marched on Alexandria. The Egyptians prepared – but failed – to counter-attack before
Caesar and his allied rescuers combined. In a single battle by the Nile, this Alexandrine War, one of the stranger conflicts
of Caesar’s career, came to its end. Away from the twisted streets and houses, his experience in open battle was decisive.

Ptolemy was drowned and his golden armour dredged from the mud lest any worshipper of kings as gods should have a doubt about
his death. His head and body would have been better proof but those were gone to the crocodiles and hippos.

Arsinoe was taken prisoner and sent to Rome so that she could march in Caesar’s triumph and face whatever plans he might have
for her after that. The Gabinians, once heroes for restoring the Fluteplayer, were never heard of again.

Cleopatra could safely now remarry under Egyptian rites, this time
to the younger brother known as Ptolemy XIV on the rare occasions when he has been noted at all. To the surprise of the victorious
Roman forces and the disbelief of the politicians at Rome, she then escorted Caesar on a short cruise down the Nile, past
pyramids they could not properly see, past a Sphinx they could not see at all, partly for rest and recreation, it was said,
but also to show the country who its rulers now were.

For a few days in Oxford, I made progress with my fourth Cleopatra. It was easy then. My simple idea was that I should write
down what I knew, shape it into a neat narrative, improving on Elizabeth Taylor, meeting some of the ambitions of V for a
more modern, feminist, sixties style – and have a great success.

Thus, by that account, in May and June of 47
BC
Cleopatra could be pregnant and cruising peacefully down the Nile, or at least as peacefully as any cruise could be within
an armed flotilla of river boats, between soldiers marching along the banks and priests waiting to worship their goddess queen
at every stop. For Caesar this was a chance to see for the first time what, even 2000 years ago, were tourist sites, the ancient
temples made of columns ten times the size of any in Rome or Greece, the towns older than Troy and the new temples and towns
built by the Ptolemies in the style of the old. For Cleopatra it was an opportunity to show off the miles of cornfields that
stretched out on either side, the food which, whether eaten or merely taxed, was life for foreign armies.

There was a complete break from Roman politics. There were tame crocodiles to feed and wild ones to avoid but there were no
letters, nothing from Caesar’s expectant friends, no reports of the surviving followers of Pompey, unchastened by the death
of their
leader, who were gathering in Tunisia to continue the war. Caesar had appointed his young friend Mark Antony to be his representative
in Rome until he returned. There was no fixed time for that return.

In a month’s slow river travel the Egyptian barges had reached the edge of their civilisation and were heading deeper into
Africa. Either because of Caesar’s sudden impatience for politics, or the impending birth of Cleopatra’s child, or the nervousness
of their accompanying troops, the great cedar-and-ivory ships turned and slowly returned to Alexandria. When they arrived,
there had been pleasing progress in the construction of the massive temple that would be called the Caesareum, the columns
and colonnades on what is now the site of the Metropole Hotel.

Pharos

Maurice was at first barely tolerant of my efforts. The project was in every way much too dull. Here we were, far from Rothmans
and Brentwood, surrounded by living characters, bearded aristocrats, pallid masters of pin-ball machines, beautiful boys in
dresses, glossy women who wanted us to join the Italian Society. And there was I, struggling with the identity of the dead.

A week later, just as decisively, and just as characteristically, he changed his mind. My Cleopatra was suddenly the key to
his future. We sat together at the window end of our high room overlooking the dead lime trees and he set out his plan. In
the yellow spotlight of a dim lamp and a sherry decanter, he told me that he had an idea. It was going to be a ‘big idea’.
Cleopatra and her Romans were, in every important respect, the same, the same person, the same thing, the same ‘entity’. This
was what I had not yet understood.

We stared at each other. We each tried to outstare the other. It was like a return to the playground, to the schoolboy who
had always been there at the edges of running track and rugby field, and whose fate in the dormitories of Brentwood had so
worried V. He was still smooth-faced, short-haired and mushroom-cheeked while I (as I liked to think) had moved on to a much
hairier, sixties self. On that damp autumn night, he was dressed in velvet, a casual impersonation of a fop, fashionable in
the way that was beginning to be possible by careful
shopping at Marks & Spencer. My own style was that of suburban protest, a Fair Isle sweater, knitted by my mother from a photograph
of Paul McCartney, beneath a pony-skin coat, newly purchased in Chelmsford market, which stood stiffly like an Indian tent
when it was not covering my back.

We had already discovered that we barely knew each other. Maurice to me was little more than a memory of jokes and parties
and my mother’s aspirations that we be better friends. He was a dimly recalled comic turn on the Brentwood stage, a ghostly
wing three-quarter who occasionally stood against me on a fog-shrouded field while our parents took colour slides of third-team
matches.

When I had lived at the centre of the red clay estate, he had lived beyond its borders. His father was a bank manager not
a plane-spotter, his sister had ridden her own ponies and their impossibly large house had parquet flooring – more like a
lake than a floor, an icy lake, acres and acres of tempting polished wood. At birthday parties we could carefully slide on
tasselled cushions around silver photo-frames and slender-legged cabinets of china.

On the wooden lake floor we could float, or sail, or fly, or be whatever was in our minds. There were games where all the
players had labels on their backs, Robin, Hood, Maid, Marian, Miss, Leake, Bill, Ben. The losers were those last to find their
partners. Maurice wanted to win. He wanted to be witty and sophisticated and, inasmuch as a child can be either, he was often
both. His parents had taken me with him once to the smartest, emptiest beaches of the North Sea, to a London theatre and a
restaurant, to the Planetarium and its magic dome of stars.

After we arrived together in Brentwood in the same junior school winter of 1962, his life was spent in ice-bound boarding
houses while
mine passed by on buses so cold that the cigarette smoke froze. He soon disappeared still further behind the barriers and
distinctions of life at that time. While I was a runner, he was an actor, a specialist in drunken porters and butlers. He
was a historian not a classicist, and his only connection to our classics classes had been his peculiar antipathy to Frog,
whose expertise in vivisection and dying gladiators most of us were able to ignore.

Our knowledge of each other was almost wholly an illusion. Our friendship was still in the future. But at Trinity some of
the larger sets of rooms had to be shared. Two newcomers from the same school seemed, to the adjudicating authorities, to
be the ideal people to share them. Frog’s Oxford application, we learnt with pleasure, had been rejected.

Maurice, I soon learnt, had a very specific aim in uniting the characters of Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra. He wanted to be
all these characters himself, to play them all in the chief theatrical event of the first term, the inter-college competition
for short plays known as Cuppers. This was the casting session for the bigger university productions in which he hoped to
play a part.

On his first day in Oxford he had met a new friend, not a student but a trainee director at the New Theatre down by the station.
This boy was a fanatic for the then fashionable American manipulator of Shakespeare, Charles Marowitz. The
Marowitz Hamlet
, Maurice began to argue, was ‘a masterpiece of compression, comprehension, rhythmic bonding’, everything that was good. Could
we not produce some sort of equivalent
Cleopatra
, cutting and combining whatever scenes would make the audience’s ‘heart beat as one with the player’s’ or, if I had not quite
taken his meaning, give him the biggest opportunity to make an impression? Only a single scene was necessary, in
which the three characters would have an inner dialogue, revealing their essential single identity. I would write it. He would
be it. Triumph would follow.

At a time when life seemed compressed as never before and when cultural shocks came every day, the request did not seem as
ridiculous as it does now. Surely an ensemble could become a single being and a single being could stand for everything that
the ensemble once was? Why not? Amusing? Maurice liked to amuse but not this time. He looked disdainfully at the afro-curls
of my hair above the astrakhan dust of my coat. He was horribly serious as only a soft-jacketed student with ambition and
a big cravat can be.

I looked at him, and out across the long lawn to the college gates that were to be reopened only when a Stuart was restored
to the English throne. He looked at me, and down to the parts of the golden-stoned quadrangle that Sir Christopher Wren had
built, and sideways to those that he had not. He stared hard and straight into my eyes. We would need the text in a week.

It did not seem a good idea to make him angry. We were, perforce but not reluctantly, at the beginning of another bit of life
together. I was the one who knew about Cleopatra. What part of the story did he want? He stamped impatiently, already well
into the sherry-hour. It was easiest to describe the possibilities through the scenes of the film. He knew of other versions
too but Elizabeth Taylor and William Shakespeare were already slightly Marowitzed in his mind.

To clear our heads before dinner he said that we should climb up to the top of the clock tower, a place where I had not yet
been. Nor had I seen anyone else there. It was out of bounds, he said, but he knew the hours when it was unlocked. A charming
young porter had told
him. We strode out past the office of the college doctor and the room where monks had once brewed Holy Trinity beer. After
a tricky climb through a black door, a corridor of black gowns and a bare winding staircase, we emerged into the evening air,
he exultant, I merely nervous, among stone statues of Theology, Astronomy, Geometry and Medicine, the college gods surveying
circles of sickly sodium light.

Maurice stood up as though we were on school parade. He gently kicked the larger of the two bells and scanned the lawns and
trees. Then he began whispering into the sky. He mouthed lists of names – butterflies, birds, underground stations, film actors.
After each Cabbage White, Sparrow Hawk, Golders Green or Olivier, he clapped his hand twice, crack, crack, before moving on
to the next one in his mind, Red Admiral, Robin, Leicester Square, Harvey.

The whispers quickly became shouts. I had watched Maurice play this game before, sitting round in circles in our room, chanting
lists, clapping hands until someone in the ring failed to remember a fresh bird or train station and became a loser. I had
also played it myself, very badly, not realising how much rehearsal took place among the winners. Maurice often won. High
in the tower he looked as confident as I had ever seen him, like a fifth stone statue, Pleasure perhaps or Celebrity. He gave
the mossy face of Medicine a kiss and shouted out more names towards the street.

No one looked up. One Oxford rule which we had quickly learnt was that it was fine to make outrageous displays but not fine
to fuss over the displays of others. In homage to
Brideshead Revisited
it was not uncommon for inebriated aesthetes to declaim from high places, sometimes from
The Waste Land
, sometimes from symbolist masterpieces of their own. This was only a little different from that: Names of … Clap! Clap! Railway
Stations! Clap! Clap!
Waterloo! Clap! Clap! Westerham! Clap! Clap! Warley East! Clap! Clap! These were lists paraded as a kind of art, all very
Alexandrian in its own way.

After a few minutes Maurice sat down at the feet of Astronomy and grunted in half-formed sentences as though still playing
one of his drunken butlers on the Brentwood stage. He was flying. He had new views. The ‘dreaming spires’ were an idea for
outsiders, those who were stuck down on the ground and barely more than tourists. He was not on the ground any more. He was
up high. Cleopatra was going to be the next step higher. Could I just remind him of the story again, the version that everyone
would know?

In 48
BC
, we gently recalled, Julius Caesar has just defeated Pompey’s armies at the battle of Pharsalus while Pompey himself, as
Canidius reports when the film begins, has escaped to Alexandria. I made the dumb messenger’s beard sign to remind him of
the scene. He made the same sign back. This became a code between us: it meant that Cleopatra was on our minds.

Why were they fighting? Maurice seemed genuinely to want to know the answer. The film had not been very clear.

Pride, I said. That was the main reason. He seemed to sober up. He looked surprised and pleased.

The civil war did not have to happen, I added in an effort of profundity. Two proud men made political miscalculations. Pompey
made a military miscalculation too. Then Caesar made a mistake. Then Mark Antony did. Just one fuck-up after another, or history
as it is sometimes called.

Maurice took a notebook from his velvet pocket and started to write what looked like a shopping list.

‘So for all of them life was good as long as it lasted?’

‘Yes, you could say that,’ I replied cautiously.

‘Then what is the main difference between Julius Caesar and Mark Antony? What will be the hardest part of bringing them together?’

‘Antony enjoyed his drink,’ I said. ‘Caesar did not.’

I paused, and leant back heavily against Theology.

‘In fact, Antony was not even ashamed of his reputation as a drunk. He revelled in it.’

‘Excellent,’ said Maurice. ‘Let’s have more Antony then.’

The clock began chiming seven o’clock. We covered our ears. Maurice would need his text in a week – a one-entity show, short,
complete and comprehensive – so that rehearsals could begin.

I have been at Pharos for three hours, remembering Oxford among the fishermen, the fairground roundabouts and the market stalls.
Mahmoud said he would meet me for ‘a late breakfast by the crocodile’.

What crocodile? The Nile used to be famous for crocodile gods. Not now. Monotheism stopped the gods and the Aswan Dam stopped
the crocs. There is no adult specimen in this dusty aquarium beside the site of the ancient lighthouse, only a single fifteen-inch
baby, with glowing slit-eyes, nose upturned and tiny toes outspread, the sole representative of the species.

The creature’s modest tank is crowded, however, by admirers. This is a marine theatre where rival attractions are few. Every
young visitor has a notebook. Each one is writing short words in Arabic, one above the other. Maybe these are sentences but
I do not think so. They are lists of things they have seen, long lines of water creatures or things they want to buy. In the
whole history of writing are there more lists than sentences? Probably.

Cleopatra, for all the scholars at her command, had no more idea of the origins of the Greek language than for two thousand
years after her did we. Only in the early 1950s did an English architect called Michael Ventris decipher the language of some
baked clay tablets found in the oldest towns of Greece, relics of the heroic age from the places where Homer’s heroes were
remembered – and where some of them may have lived.

These writings were not in the letters that we now know as Greek but they were in a language that was suddenly revealed as
the most ancient of ancient Greek. Scholars hoped that we might soon possess the earliest Greek poems, or find other new clues
to the birth of literature. But there was no poetry on the Linear B tablets. There were names scratched in the clay but they
were random names, lists that had accidentally been burnt hard by fires, lists of food and farm equipment, livestock and taxes,
animals, birds and fishes.

Mahmoud must have meant a very late breakfast. He has still not yet arrived. There is a growing lunchtime throng here now,
a bazaar of wood-carvers, pebble-painters and aquarium-goers where the
Ptolemies built their lighthouse. But no one interferes with me – and my companion will be here in his own time.