Papyrus

The city of pleasures and books
1

The young and bored merchant’s wife sleeps alone. It’s been ten months since her husband set sail for Egypt from the Mediterranean island of Cos, and not a single letter has arrived from the country of the Nile since then. She is seventeen years old, hasn’t yet given birth, and can’t bear the monotony of her cloistered life in the gynaeceum, waiting for something to happen, staying inside to avoid wagging tongues. There isn’t much to do. It seemed amusing at first to tyrannize the slaves, but this isn’t enough to fill her days, so it makes her happy to receive visits from other women. It doesn’t matter who comes to the door, she desperately needs distraction to lighten the leaden hours as they drag on.

A slave announces the arrival of the elderly Gyllis. The merchant’s wife is guaranteed to be entertained for a while: her old wet nurse Gyllis is a foulmouthed woman who curses with flair.

“Mother Gyllis! It’s months since you’ve been to my house.”

“You know how far away I live, my child, and these days I am weaker than a fly.”

“Come now,” says the merchant’s wife. “You’re still strong enough for the occasional frolic.”

“Go ahead and mock me,” Gyllis answers. “I leave that to the youngsters.”

With a wicked smile and a crafty prelude, the old woman eventually reveals what she has come to say. A strong and handsome young man, who has twice won the Olympic wrestling prize, has set his sights on the merchant’s wife, is aflame with desire, and wishes to be her lover.
“Now do not be angry, and hear what he has to say. The thorn of passion has dug deep into his flesh. Allow yourself to find joy with him. Or are you going to stay here, keeping that chair warm?” Gyllis asks, tempting the young woman. “You will be withered before you know it, all your youth and beauty snuffed out by ashes.”

“Hush, hush . . .”

“And what is your husband up to in Egypt? He writes you no letters, he has forgotten you. He must have wet his lips on another cup by now.”

To conquer the girl’s last shred of resistance, Gyllis describes with her silver tongue all that Egypt, and especially Alexandria, has to offer a distant, ungrateful husband: fabulous riches, the delights of a constantly warm and sensual climate, gymnasiums, spectacles, troupes of philosophers, books, gold, wine, youths, and as many alluring women as there are stars in the sky.

I have loosely translated the opening of a short Greek play, written in the third century BC, that conveys a strong flavor of the daily life of the period. No doubt minor works such as this were not performed, except perhaps at some kind of dramatic reading. Humorous and sometimes picaresque, they open windows onto a forbidden world of mistreated slaves and cruel masters, procuresses, mothers driven to their wits’ end by their teenage children, and sex-­starved women. Gyllis is one of the earliest celestinas in literary history, a professional go-­between who knows the secrets of her trade and takes aim at her victims’ weakest defenses: the universal fear of growing old. Yet despite her cruel talent, this time Gyllis fails. The conversation ends with the girl calling Gyllis affectionate names. The merchant’s wife remains faithful to her absent husband, or perhaps would prefer not to run the terrible risk of adultery. Have you gone soft in the head? she asks Gyllis, while also consoling her with a sip of wine.

Along with its humor and fresh style, the play conveys an illuminating picture of how ordinary people viewed Alexandria in its heyday: the city of pleasures and books; the capital of sex and language.

2

The legend of Alexandria grew and grew. Two centuries after the play about Gyllis and the young woman she tempts was written, Alexandria was the scene of one of the greatest erotic myths of all time: the love story of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

By that time, Rome had become the center of the greatest Mediterranean empire, but when Mark Antony set foot in Alexandria for the first time, the city he left behind was still a labyrinth of dark, winding, and muddy streets. He found himself transported to an intoxicating place whose palaces, temples, wide avenues, and monuments radiated grandeur. The Romans felt sure of their military power and were convinced that the future was theirs, but they couldn’t possibly compete with the seduction of such a golden past and such decadent luxury. Through a combination of excitement, pride, and tactical calculations, this powerful general and the last queen of Egypt formed a political and sexual alliance that scandalized traditional Romans. To their even greater displeasure, it was said that Mark Antony was going to transfer the capital of the empire to Alexandria. Had the couple won the battle for control of the Roman Empire, perhaps today’s tourists would flock to Egypt to have their picture taken in the Eternal City, with its coliseum and its forums.

Much like her city, Cleopatra embodies that unique fusion of culture and sensuality. Plutarch writes that Cleopatra was in fact no great beauty. People didn’t stop in their tracks to stare at her in the street. What she had in abundance was magnetism and intelligence and a silver tongue. The timbre of her voice had such sweetness that it transfixed everyone who heard it. And her speech, he continues, could adapt to any language she chose, like a many-­stringed instrument.
She could converse with Ethiopians, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes, and Parthians without the aid of an interpreter. Astute and well-­informed, she won several rounds in the struggle for power both within and beyond her country, though in the end she lost the decisive battle. Her problem is that she has been spoken of only from the point of view of her enemies.

Books play an important role in this tempestuous story, too. When Mark Antony believed he was on the cusp of ruling the world, he wanted to dazzle Cleopatra with an extraordinary gift. He was well aware that gold, jewels, and banquets would fail to light the spark of amazement in his lover’s eyes, since she was accustomed to squandering them daily. On one occasion, in the haze of an alcoholic dawn, she performed the provocative and ostentatious gesture of dissolving a fabulously oversized pearl in vinegar and drinking it. So Mark Antony chose a gift that Cleopatra could not possibly scorn with a bored expression: he laid two hundred thousand volumes for the Great Library at her feet. In Alexandria, books served as fuel for passion.

Two authors who died in the twentieth century have become our guides to the city’s hidden corners, adding layers of patina to the myth of Alexandria. Constantine Cavafy was a bureaucrat of Greek origin who toiled without promotion in an obscure position at the Irrigation Service of the British-­run Ministry of Public Works. By night he dove into a universe of pleasure, full of cosmopolitan characters and international iniquity. He knew the labyrinth of Alexandria’s brothels like the back of his hand. They provided the only refuge for his homosexuality, “forbidden and strictly condemned by all,” as he himself wrote. Cavafy was a passionate reader of the classics and a poet who kept his work almost secret.

In what today are his best-­known poems, real and fictitious characters from Ithaca, Troy, Athens, and Byzantium are brought back to life. Other, apparently more personal, poems delve, sometimes with irony, sometimes with sorrow, into the poet’s own experience of maturity: nostalgia for his youth, his initiation into pleasure, and anguish at the passage of time. Yet categorizing them by subject matter is a superficial exercise. Cavafy was as thrilled by the past he read and imagined as he was by his own memories. As he slunk around Alexandria, he saw the pulse of the absent city beating beneath the real one that had replaced it. Although the Great Library had disappeared, its echoes, whispers, and murmurs kept trembling in the atmosphere. For Cavafy, this great fellowship of ghosts made the cold streets, where the lonely and tormented living would wander, easier to inhabit.

The characters in The Alexandria Quartet—­Justine, Darley, and especially Balthazar, who claims to have met him—­often remember Cavafy as “the old poet of the city.” These four novels by Lawrence Durrell, an Englishman suffocated by his country’s austerity and climate, also broaden the erotic and literary resonances of the Alexandrian myth. Durrell got to know the city during the turbulent years of the Second World War, when Egypt was occupied by British troops and was a hotbed of espionage, conspiracies, and, as always, pleasures. No one has described more accurately the colors and physical sensations that Alexandria awakened. The oppressive silence and the vast summer sky. The scorching days. The dazzling blue of the sea, the breakwaters, the yellow shoreline. Inland, Lake Mariout, sometimes as hazy as a mirage. Between the waters of the port and those of the lake are endless streets teeming with beggars and flies circling in clouds of dust. Palm trees, luxury hotels, hashish, and dissipation. The parched air charged with electricity. Lemon and violet sunsets. Five languages, five races, a dozen religions, five fleets reflected in the oily water. In Alexandria, writes Durrell, the flesh awakens, pressing upon prison bars.

The Second World War devastated the city. In the final novel of the Quartet, Clea describes a landscape of melancholy. Tanks run aground on the beaches like dinosaur skeletons, great cannons like fallen trees from a petrified forest, stray Bedouins wandering among the land mines. The city, which was always perverse, now has the air of a huge public urinal, she concludes. After 1952, Lawrence Durrell never returned to Alexandria. The age-­old Jewish and Greek communities fled in the wake of the Suez Crisis, the end of an era in the Middle East. Returning travelers tell me the cosmopolitan, sensual city has migrated into the memory of books.