Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (15 page)

Some of the greatest treasures of Alexandria’s library were also lists of names. They were catalogues of characters from Hesiod
and Homer, the oldest and wisest of the Greek poets, carefully managed by men such as Didymus Chalcenterus, master of the
scrolls in Cleopatra’s reign. Hesiod’s words were the older. In his
Theogony
he had written on the origins of the Gods, from Chaos to Zeus, incantating Night, Air, Day, Sky, Mountains, Sea, Memory,
Oceanus, Coeus, Crios, Theia, Rhea. Hesiod knew of the Nile – and of fifty water nymphs, Eukrante, Amphitrite and Sao, Eunice
of the rosy arms, laughter-loving Glaukonome.

There was a Trinity tutor who used to make us chant these names, a man called Raven, one of those peculiarly valuable teachers
who impart little knowledge. Instead he made us listen to lists – outside, on the summer lawns, when I was close to sleep
but awake in ways I did not then quite understand

Homer’s lists were of the ships that sailed to Troy, their captains and their countries, Boeotians, Minyans, Phoceans, Locrians,
Athenians. In Alexandria’s library the servants of the Ptolemies loved these ancient catalogues that they could command for
their own new catalogues, explaining, expanding, putting words to things, pinning the world and words together, bickering
about which came first. Priests might chant directly to the gods. Scholars had no less a role in divining the origins of sacred
texts. Priests were falling behind; practical reason was rising.

Homer’s
Odyssey
has a single scene set in Pharos itself. That was important. Everything in Homer had a message from the Greek past
to the Greek future. In the epics of how the ships and captains of the
Iliad
came home from Troy, this piece of land existed for the first time beyond itself. It became part of history.

Mahmoud dislikes nostalgia. But I am going to ask him to think back beyond sentiment to the absolute beginning, to a city
functionary in Cleopatra’s Alexandria (any one will do) who is reading about Pharos in the
Odyssey
. This city, as everyone has always known, was founded by Alexander the Great and built by the Ptolemies. But in Homer there
was a legitimacy much greater than that.

Pharos’s first named inhabitant was a god of the sea, a shape-shifting god called Proteus who kept a flock of seals on the
beach. In the fourth book of the poem Proteus meets two of the great names of Greece, Helen whose abduction sparked the Trojan
War and Menelaus, who lost her and won her back. When this part of the
Odyssey
begins, Proteus has captured Helen and her husband Menelaus on their way home and has himself to be captured before he will
let them leave.

This is a strange Homeric scene set in the borders between sleeping and waking, uppers and downers, sea and land, man and
sea creature. Menelaus’s men want to get out of Pharos. But the winds are against them and they are starving.

A nymph tells them that they have only one chance. They must hide their human bodies under sealskins, mingle with the sleeping
sea mammals and seize Proteus before he wakes from his afternoon nap. Despite the sea god’s wriggling transformation into
lion, snake and river, they must wrestle him to the ground, grip him hard until he tells them what they need to know. He has
to prophesy the fates of their friends and put the gods of the winds on their side.

This has never been an important part of Homer’s
work. Menelaus’s journey is a sideshow in a great epic poem. It is a minor odyssey within the major one, an interrogation
of an aged prophet that Odysseus himself will later repeat when, much more dramatically, he meets his dead friends from Troy
in the underworld. Odysseus learns in Hades how he will die. Menelaus learns his own fate at Pharos. But for most readers
this was – and is – a paler part of the
Odyssey
in every way, as Alexandria’s scholars could plainly see.

Perhaps it was by a lesser writer, a younger Homer. Perhaps the story of wriggling, wrestling Proteus and the men disguised
as seals was included in the larger epic to prepare the audience for the more powerful story to come. Yet a sideshow is sometimes
more satisfying than the show itself. For a librarian at Alexandria this episode had to be one of the great episodes. It set
Pharos island in the fixed history of the world, the history that Didymus and his fellow cataloguers here had only slowly,
in the reign of Cleopatra, begun to disentangle from myth.

Mahmoud eventually does arrive, not by the baby crocodile but at a different place, the tanks of tiny-bodied blue crabs. He
seems troubled and not at all threatening today. He has lost his bureaucratic poise. Today I am the calm one, he the one who
looks as though he is going to be sick.

He stares at the sky. Heavy rains and storm winds are coming, he says. There might be lightning and Pharos is dangerous when
there is lightning. A sealskin, he says, used to be a good protector. Pharos was once famous for its seals. The greatest emperors
used to keep sealskins for good luck. Socratis’s mad mother has a sealskin. But no one else has one any more.

He is not in the mood to discuss Pharos in history any further. He
pushes me out towards the causeway, leading me away past the pedlars, past the holidaying men keen for anything to quieten
their children and the women listening intently to the conch shells to hear if the sound is the same as the sound of the sea.

Church of St Mark and St Peter

This is the site of the New Year bombing. The blood on the blasted pavements has been washed away. The dead have been removed
for reconstruction and identification. Even the carcasses of the cars are gone. It is raining lightly. There is a smell of
wet paint and a quiet in the afternoon that is rare in this city. Mahmoud was worried at first about bringing me from Pharos
to the bomb site, torn, I think, between a simultaneous need to defend his optimism about the city’s safety and to ensure
that I genuinely was safe here. It feels fine. There is an almost empty cafe, an almost silent street, and I will be content
here until evening – probably till tomorrow too.

I said to Mahmoud that I would see him later, after I had moved on with Cleopatra’s story, past the birth of her son, past
Caesar’s death and its deadly aftermath. He was not quite satisfied. Would I have wanted to be at the Two Saints church if
there had not been a bombing? I said I would. The St Peter to whom the church is dedicated was a particularly significant
St Peter, not the ‘rock’ on whom Christ said he would build his church but a Christian martyr from Egypt.

Alexandria had long been a dangerous place for Christians, I added. Mahmoud waved that I should be quiet. This was not the
moment for putting martyrdom in proportion or for joking. Was I making an
English joke? He was not sure. I should stop anyway. And was it wise that I should sit here writing about Julius Caesar? It
was much better not to write about dictators who met violent ends. Socratis was right about the agitation of the police. I
might easily be misunderstood.

Mahmoud looked suspiciously at the sheets of plain white paper with their smudged carbon-copied type from forty years ago.
He was sorry he had been late this morning. He had had to go to the doctor. He had eaten last night in front of an open window
and something had upset his stomach.

Four days after giving me his instructions, Maurice was anxious about how his play was ‘coming on’. He gave the words a menacing
twist. He was no easier to please than V had been. Both of my school friends knew what they wanted from a Cleopatra story
that neither of them wanted to write. I did not know what I wanted from the story even though I wanted to write it. Thanks
to Professor Rame, Mr G, Mr W, V and now Maurice, I was strongly committed. I was bound fast by separate links from the past
that had formed a chain.

I took a sip of sherry from a glass by our window seat and described to him how, soon after the end of her cruise with Caesar,
Cleopatra was in sole charge of Egypt – and a mother for the first time, of a son she called Ptolemy Caesarion. Maurice took
a gulp from his own larger glass and heard how Caesar himself had not played the devoted father for long, if at all. He had
immediately left to fight unfinished wars against other Eastern kings and other supporters of Pompey. Cleopatra’s next decision,
or his, would be whether, where and when the two might meet again.

Caesar’s priority was in the furthest western territory in Mediterranean Africa, Mauretania, modern Morocco, whose king was
enthusiastically welcoming the survivors of Pharsalus. Cleopatra’s main concern was domestic diplomacy, revenue-raising, river-management,
the survival of her child, the normal duties of a ruling Ptolemy.

‘Fine’, said Maurice, puffing himself somewhat haughtily in our window seat as though he were already playing all his chosen
characters, all of them already combined, none of them lacking in haughtiness. So Cleopatra and Caesar are separated. That
is a good start. Then they are going to come together. That will be perfect.

And then he sighed. He wanted to get back to the texts, his texts, his parts. When would we start picking lines from Shakespeare?
We had been talking too much about Elizabeth Taylor. The Cuppers judges were not going to be impressed, or find anything very
Marowitzian, in a one-man version of a movie. We had somehow to get beyond that. There were the two big plays,
Antony and Cleopatra
itself and
Julius Caesar
. How should we start? He had them both already. He pulled out two white paperbacks and a page of scribbled notes.

In a sense, he said portentously, these were Parts One and Two of the same play; Cleopatra is a living presence but not a
character in
Julius Caesar
; Julius Caesar is a dead presence but not a character in
Antony and Cleopatra
. He slumped slightly after this. The clock in the tower struck seven. Dinner was in fifteen minutes. Could we just get ahead
a bit?

I was irritated. But that was nothing new. Ours was a story of two people who had long irritated each other. I also liked
the idea of writing this play, of being a playwright. I was in a hurry. We were both in a hurry. An idea of a play made from
words already written by someone else appealed to me even more than to him, nothing to be
proud of but true. So yes, I said. We could get ahead. But he would have to concentrate – and keep away from the decanter
till we had finished.

Two years after the Nile cruise and the birth of her son, Cleopatra was back in Rome. As a child she and her father had been
Pompey’s guests, reliant upon him for their royalty and their lives. As an adult, she was now the royal mistress of Pompey’s
conqueror, installed in Caesar’s garden palace in the area known as ‘the other side of the Tiber’. Her new husband and one
surviving brother, Ptolemy XIV, was with her too, a safer as well as more respectable option than leaving any senior family
member at home.

In February of 44
BC
Caesar accepted the office of dictator for the fourth time. On the first occasion, five years earlier, he had taken the honour
for eleven days, the second time for a year, the third for ten years and now his one-man rule was to last the rest of his
life. He had already celebrated four of the greatest triumphs that Romans had ever seen, one of them over Egypt, a parade
graced by a model of the Pharos, a statue of the Nile and by Arsinoe in chains. Afterwards, because of the sympathy shown
to Cleopatra’s sister by the Roman crowd, she was handed to the priests of Ephesus for a decorous exile instead of being strangled.

Soon afterwards Caesar began marshalling forces for the campaign that he hoped would earn him the greatest triumph of all,
a new eastern assault on the Persians that would open the way to India and finally match the achievements of Alexander the
Great. Cleopatra was with him while he did so, observing the military costs that her wealth would help to bear. She may have
made a brief return trip to Alexandria to ensure that all was well. She was close by, but not
immediately beside him, when he went to the senate for the last time on the Ides of March.

An hour later, after Trinity dinner, Maurice stretched again for the decanter, the only object that offered any link between
the minor-middle-class life we had abandoned and the decadence to which we were beginning to aspire. He was suddenly renewed,
not quite shouting as he had among the stone college statues but almost as rhythmic and insistent.

He strode around the room as though it were more cage than stage. The truth would come from a random rearrangement of words,
a ‘mobile metaphor’. First, I should forget the facts. Secondly, I should forget the factual story. Thirdly, there was no
need for any story. We needed to take elements from both the plays over the whole span of time, but we should be surprising,
novel, avoiding purple-sailed barges and ‘et tu Brute’ and asps and all the bits that anyone might recognise.

We should reconfigure the truth from all the parts that no one usually noticed, that the audience would hardly know, beginning
early in the story, yes, when she was a presence not a character (that was perfect: I should not forget that point) and then
we would reconnect the hidden nerves and tissues to make a being that was instantly recognisable and wholly new. Fine, I said
nervously and for the third time. I would think about what he had said.

It seemed best that we come back to the subject a few days later. Oxford study was already proving harder than I had hoped.
I had a guilty secret, an ability in my last years at school to see a text when it was no longer there, not just a good memory
but a photographic memory, a skill I barely recognised as unusual until I lost it. Neither the ability to memorise nor my
previously remembered texts survived
my eighteenth birthday – and when they faded there was the awkward task of maintaining such intellectual reputation as they
had earned me.

There were also other problems. I wanted other women than Cleopatra, ideally a girlfriend, living women. There were different
opportunities for writing too. Despite missing the
Daily Telegraph
prize for film criticism (or for my similarly V-inspired rock review of Jimi Hendrix), I had won in the less competitive
jazz category. It had brought me an expensive lunch at the top of the newly opened Post Office Tower and as many records as
I could play. There was much to be said for journalism. I was wondering whether I could do more.