Alexandria: The Last Night of Cleopatra (29 page)

The picture has been in a palace of British kings and queens since
it was purchased by Charles II. It might be thought an odd subject for any but the merriest monarch, the extravagance of a
doomed queen of dubious reputation who ground down a pearl worth fifteen cities. Before coming to Hampton Court, it hung in
the Queen’s Drawing Room at Windsor for two hundred years.

The models were the painter’s parents, a mother who was wealthy, impetuous maybe, and a father from whom the young Jan was
trying to break away. His brothers and sisters played the parts of the little Moon and Sun, of Caesarion, and their extended
family and retainers. The Sun is querulous, the Moon is pleased to be allowed up late. The painter himself takes the part
of Plancus, the axe-man who will decide the winner and who protects the second earring from a similar destruction.

No one knows precisely how this part of Cleopatra’s story matched the life of the De Brays, Catholic stalwarts of Haarlem,
pillars of the painters’ guild of St Luke’s, courtly collectors of Turkish carpets, peacocks, gold, glass, Delft-ware and
devoted servants. The family members were surely more than mere models for a classical scene. This is a story set truthfully
in two ages, two places, two worlds.

Seventeen years after its completion, everyone in the picture except the painter and two of his siblings would be dead – from
the plague that ravaged Haarlem as it ravaged London at around the same time before the Great Fire. Jan de Bray later painted
the whole scene again as a theatrical tableau on an even grander scale, adding his own first wife who had also died. The story
of Antony and Cleopatra was a play in which his family twice could star, filmed for posterity in roles of curiosity and wonder
which, however anyone judged the original subjects, had survived for almost seventeen centuries. If Cleopatra could define
and intertwine with the good burghers of Haarlem, she could fit almost anywhere.

What then were Lew’s other postcards, the result of that half-hearted picture research for the
Big Oil Times
? Some of them were traditional court portraits, the type more routinely to Charles II’s taste, available aristocratic wives
with pearls and snakes painted by lesser-known Italians. The model with the black stare to match her stockings and the marble
matron looking down on her tiny tuft of pubic hair? She was the subject for a southern German classicist called Georg Scholz,
working somewhat later in 1927. It is one of his best-known works.

For the titillators of the Restoration the heroes of ancient history enliven and promote the present. For other artists they
show how dead is the past. Scholz preferred flesh to marble, his now to his then. Picture research produces sometimes peculiar
results. His model did not represent Cleopatra at all – except in the sense that the most sensual opposition to Roman virtue
always has.

It is late at night in the room above the garage, time for some more traditional ancient history, for Actium, the name for
one of those battles deemed decisive in the history of the world, September, 31
BC
, on a sandy outcrop on the eastern shore of Greece, East vs West. Antony and Cleopatra vs Octavian and Rome, one truth vs
another.

I will start with Dellius, Antony’s pimp historian. It was he who betrayed the battle plans. Dellius and Cleopatra had quarrelled
over wine. Her officers at Actium, he jibed, had been reduced to drinking vinegar, vintages fit only for destroying jewellery.
Octavian’s men meanwhile had the best of everything. So Dellius had no option but to change sides. Plancus had been right.
The sailors with the best wine would surely prevail.

All the auguries and odds were switching fast. That was only too true. Agrippa, Octavian’s admiral, had seized so many ports
so very quickly that the Romans could now land their troops almost anywhere. Antony’s massive forces meanwhile were penned
up, hemmed in by sand and shallows, suffering from plague and bad alcohol.

Canidius wanted to lead the army back inland and lure Octavian to follow. A land battle would still have been Antony’s best
chance if Cleopatra had permitted it. Antony was still the more experienced commander on open ground, while Agrippa was proving
himself an ever more potent master at sea.

But Cleopatra said no. The navy was hers. Her treasury was held by her navy. If they were to retreat to fight another day,
it would be safer to escape by sea to Alexandria. Canidius could be left behind in Greece with their miserable, complaining
army to prove that he was as good as he had always claimed. Those were her orders, the final orders.

So Dellius’s defection was a fact. But it did not matter. Cleopatra’s orders were simple: as soon as the Egyptian captains
saw an opening in the Roman lines, they were to burst through and sail away home. It was not much of a plan to betray. Octavian
must have worked out most of it for himself. But it was all that Dellius had.

Khat Rashid

The wooden clock in this depot for armed men and carrot-sellers records 4.00 a.m. Dawn is fast approaching while the night
stays sleepless and charcoal black. From the flat lands between here and the city the closest light comes from patches of
faraway neon, the whiteness of invading stars. The advertisement hoardings are under repair. Across each square, from corner
to corner, crawl small black figures, electricians jerking like tiny frogs, painful to look at too long. Posters would normally
protect our eyes. But this is the hidden part of an advertising display, the glare that we are not supposed to see.

These bare fluorescent tubes ought to be behind invitations to buy a Coca-Cola or to vote for the son of the President. But
on this nineteenth night of the new decade there is reduced demand to tell Alexandrians or their visitors what new delights
they can have for their money. The election is over. The Mubarak family has won everything again. There has been a bombing.
Egypt, the President claims, needs support for its fight against terrorists. There is the uncertainty of empty space.

Meanwhile, preparing for better economic times, the neon-tube repair men are in harness, in sticky-footed shoes, scrambling
slowly across screens that are impossibly white. These hoardings will soon be wrapped in new posters, ‘buy-me’ pictures, buy
my cigarettes, buy my
bathroom furniture, buy my houses by the sea. But on this night the empty neon taunts the eyes. Look too long and the screens
become columns of giant type, seven across a newspaper page, occasional dark spaces, a pair of broken bulbs that need to be
replaced, a tablet where once there was a picture of an apartment or a politician.

Look harder, till the eyes hurt. In the vacant dark the site of the sometime lighthouse is shining too, many miles and two
thousand years away. The sky is the colour of bruises, a punched cheek, a prayer-beaten forehead, an eye becoming black. This
is not where I wanted to spend the night. But it is a fine place to look back at Alexandria and consider the last hours of
Mark Antony, the time when he knew he had lost, when he was abandoned by the city’s gods. Any biography of Cleopatra is now
in its final phase.

The problem for the queen after Actium was to write the story of what had happened before her enemies wrote it. The parties
to celebrate her success had to begin in Alexandria even before the killings did. Both celebrations and assassinations were
essential. Actium had been only a skirmish. The danger was that it might be seen as a defeat. It was for her and her alone
to define what a battle was – and when or if it had taken place.

Actium had absolutely not been a defeat. Her supporters understood that. It was barely even a setback, and only a diplomatic
setback at that. There had never been a battle of Actium. For so many reasons it was no shame to have left Canidius and his
army to win on land, to do what he had wanted to do from the start.

Yes, a land campaign had seemed unattractive at first. To leave the coast would have meant leaving her ships and her treasure
and any possibility, even in victory, of returning quickly to Egypt. But she had
not betrayed Canidius. She had allowed him his chance as soon as it had seemed impossible to win at sea. This was going to
be a long game. Nothing had been decided yet.

Yes, there was some small risk now that Alexandrian opponents (there were always a few) would present her strategic retreat
as a rout. The best retort to that would be to invite them to parties, to cull their numbers, to take their property and to
plan the next phase of the war as soon as Antony could rejoin her in the city.

As a precaution she would slaughter some of the prisoners taken in Antony’s Persian campaigns. No one in that war, indeed
in most wars, could agree what had definitely been a battle and what had not. This time she was the one who would draw the
lines. She would kill the Persian survivors now so as to make her own distinctions a little clearer.

Then she would kill some of her less reliable Alexandrian friends. With the money from their confiscated estates she would
move some of her fleet south and overland to the Red Sea. A ship could move across the desert on rollers as easily as her
granite pillars from Aswan. If she or her Caesarion, or the Sun and Moon twins needed to open a new front against Octavian,
she could deepen her retreat as far as India or widen it to Spain, always as long as her treasure, the world’s greatest concentration
of wealth, went with her.

Socratis has sent a messenger. His driver in the yellow suit, for the first time cleansed of mud, asks if I mind being here
for the rest of the morning. It is good, he mumbles, that I have stayed here. The news is confusing. There are all sorts of
troubles coming. He hopes that I have been able to spend the time well. Before I can nod my head in assent he turns away and
is gone.

Optimism did not last long in Alexandria after Canidius returned, reporting the story of Actium as it had been told to Antony’s
army, of how the legions had been ruthlessly betrayed, sailors preferred to soldiers for Cleopatra’s sake alone. Plancus had
moved fast, telling Antony’s Greek allies that while they should have already changed sides they were still free to do so.
The men of Ephesus had followed his advice. Others too. Canidius’s army had surrendered – and it too had been allowed to join
Octavian. Canidius himself, Octavian claimed with persuasive effect, was a traitor to Rome.

Cleopatra’s response was to declare Caesarion to be Egypt’s male ruler. The Sun and Moon were rising by his side.

Low in the pale-blue sky the neon patches have turned to fading stars, a constellation connected by a low-flying plane in
a continuous line of white air. A few minutes after 7.00 a.m. the first bus stopped by the petrol pumps. No one stepped off
or on until a second followed and then a third. Five black-hooded crows, dancing around the dusty ground, scattered only when
the first feet of the soldiers kicked out of the doors. From the second bus streamed a rabble of schoolboys. The third disgorged
three mechanics, four women with fruit baskets and Mahmoud, screwing his eyes against the lights and limping. Every new bus
– eleven of them now – has brought only soldiers until there is nothing but the grey of metal and uniform in every direction.

For all her stratagems, Cleopatra could do little more than kill. Plans to sail a fleet across the desert to the Red Sea were
foiled by the unforgiving tribesmen whose bitumen business she had disrupted in better times. She succeeded only in sending
Caesarion away with his tutor on the route to India. She sent messages to Octavian, embassies and bribes, gold to pay his
armies in exchange for guarantees that her children could rule in Egypt after she had gone. Octavian responded with silence,
threats and the sending of his own emissary, a poet whose charm and eloquence with the Queen pushed Antony into depression
without achieving any other purpose.

Their parties took on a new tone. In the past they had created a club called the ‘inimitable livers’. Now they called themselves
by a new name, ‘those who would die together’. Cleopatra built herself a mausoleum into which she brought her treasure of
emeralds, pearls and gold. Inexorably the news came that Octavian was advancing on Alexandria.

Antony roused himself for a cavalry charge which won a modest and much celebrated victory. But that was his last success.
Alexandrians later described the following night as the one in which the gods of Greece led a procession out of Alexandria.
This was when Antony was abandoned by his protective deities. Dionysus led Isis away into Octavian’s camp.

Antony’s response was to bluster and bribe, challenging Octavian to single combat as though they were heroes at Troy, offering
money to
Octavian’s troops to change sides as though he were a captain of mercenaries. He sent a fleet to meet Octavian, the ships
of both sides shadowing their armies along the coast. Then suddenly the Egyptian navy defected to Octavian, just as everyone
and everything else was defecting.

It is now 9.00 a.m. in the troop depot that was once a service station. There is a clock at a table beside a coin-operated
roundabout of camels. Mahmoud did not approach me immediately. We had not spoken since he climbed into the back of a black
car at the Montaza Palace, saying that we would meet again on his return from Athens. He limped towards the metal shelters
full of officers. After ten minutes he emerged smiling, waving his glasses. He was still walking awkwardly like a much older
man.

He did not stay long. He did not mention Athens. He did not explain why he was here. He did seem pleased to see me. He said
only that he and Socratis had a surprise which they were sure I would like. He asked politely about my literary progress.
I said that it had almost ceased. Then he left on the same local bus that had brought him, the sole passenger now that the
mechanics and basket carriers had reached the end of their journey.

I am suddenly more sleepless and confused than at any time since I arrived in this city. Uncertainty now seems as normal as
exhaustion. The ancient story tumbles into a chaos of its own. Antony accuses Cleopatra of ordering her fleet to betray him.
She flees to her mausoleum. He thinks she is dead and tries to kill himself with a sword. In fact (inasmuch as there any facts
here), she is not dead and he is hauled up to her for a bloody reconciliation, and then a lengthy process of
dying. Many years of scholarship and literary invention have been since deployed in establishing – or not – who was betraying
whom.

Sharia Yousef

I am back now in the city. The three of us were to meet again at 4.00 p.m. at the Roman Theatre, in the archaeological gardens
on the other side of Nebi Danial Street from the Dead Fountain cafe. That was the driver’s first instruction when he collected
me at Khat Rashid and his last before he left me at the hotel. Socratis was going to bring his mother. This was to be a great
privilege, a rare appearance. So I had to be punctual, and to be waiting precisely when requested on the steps in front of
the ancient heads.

Mahmoud was the first to arrive, just after 4.30, still limping, stroking fondly the smooth surface of the eyeless granite
as though for comfort. Socratis himself appeared next, without either his mother or his driver, arriving suddenly from a hut
beside the wall to the barracks. He looked past us toward the tourist gate, smiling first at Mahmoud and then at me. The absence
of his driver seemed to be a good sign that his mother too might be with us soon.

No one spoke. Mahmoud seemed lightly dazed. The peace was like the moment before the firing of a gun. Behind us were the stone
goddesses in their drapery, rows of silent survivors of so many saltwater centuries.

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.