Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (5 page)

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.

Her grandmother, for example, was some sort of concubine, a royal mistress, someone else’s wife, sister or mistress, possibly
another Macedonian Greek who traced her lineage to one of Alexander’s camp-followers. Or maybe, as hopeful African–American
scholars have suggested, she was an Egyptian, even a very black Egyptian from the Nubian parts of the country that are now
Sudan.

If Cleopatra’s parents were brother and sister, she would have had only one set of grandparents, an idea that has attracted
psychoanalytic writers as much as genealogical ones. But, from the surviving rough-book evidence here, it seems as though
my Cleopatra the Second was
on course to avoid such literary perils – either through teenage ignorance or an early developing journalist’s sense of when
a topic induces sleep.

There follow teenaged scribbles on Alexandria as it was when Cleopatra was born. I may have chosen this as some kind of classroom
project. I have no surviving best-book evidence or memory. I can now see these pages only as in a direct line from the faces
of Essex clay.

This first description of Alexandria was respectable, certainly no disgrace. Being five thousand miles from the city in the
1960s did not make it impossibly harder than being inside the city now in 2011. Alexandria in the modern age is not like Athens
or Rome: almost none of its ancient buildings survive as monuments or memorials for others. There is little easy tourism.
The sites are mostly invisible. Its palaces, libraries and lighthouse are wrecked beneath sand and water. Its best known relics,
the needles named after Cleopatra, which once stood where the Metropole stands now, have decorated London and New York for
more than a century. To be a dissatisfied tourist is easy. To an optimist the neat lines of the ancient street map are not
so much a show of what has disappeared but of a city still waiting to be found.

Alexandria is never far away wherever we are. Useful ideas were its best exports – the universal library, straight streets
with addresses and post codes, astronomy and gastronomy, Greek columnar architecture in forms that people could live in rather
than merely worship or admire, ‘the pen’ and ‘the wine-press’, new names that still survive for newly identified parts of
the brain, and one of the greatest of all human dramas, the story of Ptolemy XII’s second daughter herself. From Alexandria
came also poetry as experiment, surprise as a virtue,
word pictures of painted pictures, style for style’s sake, so much adaptation from classical Greece which, without this city,
would have died. Without the Alexandria of the Ptolemies, there would have been a very different Virgil, Tennyson and Coleridge,
to begin only with the restricted contents of my Dorset Avenue library.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

I am back at my polished modern desk, reluctantly for my ambitions but successfully for my health. It is good to be out of
Le Metropole. The hotel on the site where ‘the great love of Cleopatra and her Antonio was born’ makes no boast of hygiene.
It luxuriates in its old dust and glory. It seemed a nauseous place when I arrived, its staircase lit by a stained-glass French
garden, yellows, reds and greens stirred with grey. Last night’s poisoning has passed – but is not quite forgotten. So on
this sunless day, the third of the year, I am back in the glassy, grey successor to the first great library of the world.

This Bibliotheca Alexandrina is clean enough to be a hospital, one of those Middle Eastern hospitals of the rich where there
are the finest operating theatres and very few patients. It is tasteful, broad and low. Its roof is a tilted sundial. Its
terraces are filled with sculpture. Its rows of desks cascade down towards the sea. It is like an elaborate ornament to a
garden. It does not contain many books. It may not be much of a library at all.

A subversive thought: if the New Year bomb had exploded here instead of in Socratis’s mother’s church, the needles of glass
and granite would have been a splendid sight. There would have been fewer deaths and a beach of shining fragments from here
to the sea. Letters
would litter the pavements. On the walls and windows are imprints from hundreds of different scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphics
and Celtic runes, Minoan Greek and Times New Roman, Arabic, Turkish and Chinese. Once the blast had blown, there would have
been alphas and abjeds, diphthongs and digammas everywhere. Investigators could have spent their days dividing Linear B from
Latvian, Old High German from Apache. Every syllabary would find its semi-vowel.

There would have been louder international outrage. This library cost $250 million to build. More than a thousand architects
competed to design it. Greek ship-owners and Arab sheikhs all paid their part. This wonder of the modern world is especially
loved by President Mubarak and his wife. Or so Mahmoud told me. So it might be unwise even to speculate on its transformation
into a seaside sky of letters, glittering in the bomb blast of a New Year night.

Is it even polite to contemplate such destruction? No, it is not. Not even in light-headed revenge for having been so sick.
Or I should shroud my contemplation in code. But I do not have a code. Maurice used to have one. He liked to mix letters and
numbers for the schoolboy thoughts and hopes that in schooldays needed disguise. And he continued doing so well into his Oxford
days, maybe beyond.

Just before my old friend died last year he tried to explain his code to me. There were a few bits of script left but he was
weak by then and we did not make any progress. I read him his account of the Red Tents and he smiled at the memory of Cleopatra’s
mermaids. That bit had survived because I had written it down from his dictation. But he could no more understand his juvenile
school jottings than can scholars understand so many scratches on old walls, pots and plates.