The Alexandrian

The apartment in Alexandria where the poet Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933) lived the last years of his life is in a run-down building in the center of the city, on a street that was called Lepsius when the neighborhood was inhabited by Greeks and Italians and is now called Charrn-el-Sheik. Some Greeks are still in the area, to judge by a few signs in Hellenic script, but what predominates everywhere is Arabic. The neighborhood has deteriorated and is full of cramped alleyways, houses in ruins, and potholed paths, and-a typical sign of poor neighborhoods in Egypt-the residents have turned the roofs into stinking garbage dumps. But the beautiful little rthodox church that the faithful attended in Cavafy's time is still there, and the graceful mosque, too, and the hospital, although the brothel that operated on the ground floor of his building has disappeared.
    The apartment is a small museum in the care of the Greek consulate, and it must not get many visitors, to judge by the sleepy boy who opened the door for us and stared at us as if we were Martians. Cavafy is practically unknown in the city immortalized by his poems, which are, along with the celebrated library burned to the ground in antiquity and Cleopatra's love affairs, the best thing that has happened to it since it was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C. No streets are named after him and no statues memorialize him. Or if they exist, they don't appear in the guidebooks and no one knows where to find them. The apartment is dark, with high ceilings and gloomy hallways, and it is furnished as circumspectly as it must have been when Cavafy set up house here with his brother Peter in 1907. The latter lived with him for just a year, then left for Paris. From that moment on, Constantine lived here alone; and, it seems, with unfaltering sobriety, so long as he remained within his apartment's thick walls.
    This is one of the settings for the less interesting of Cavafy's lives, one that leaves no impression on his poetry and is difficult for us to imagine when we read about it: the life of an immaculately attired and unassuming bourgeois who was a broker on the cotton exchange and worked for thirty years as a model bureaucrat in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works, where, as a result of his punctuality and efficiency, he rose to the rank of deputy manager. The photographs on the walls pay testimony to this civic prototype: the thick tortoiseshell spectacles, the stiff collars, the tightly knotted tie, the little handkerchief in the top pocket of the jacket, the vest with its watch chain, and the cuff links in the white shirt cuffs. Clean-shaven and well groomed, he gazes seriously at the camera, like the very incarnation of the man without qualities. This is the same Cavafy who died of cancer of the larynx and is buried in the Greek Orthodox cemetery of Alexandria, among ostentatious mausoleums, in a small rectangle marked by marble tombstones, which he shares with the bones of two or three relatives.
    In the small museum there is not a single one of the famous broadsheets on which he published his first poems and which, in insignificant printings-of thirty or forty copies-s-he parsimoniously distributed to a few chosen readers. Nor are there any of the pamphlets-there were fifty copies of the first, seventy of the second-in which on two occasions he gathered a handful of poems, his only works published in anything approaching book form in his lifetime. The secrecy in which this august poet shrouded the writing of poetry didn't only have to do with his homosexuality, a shameful failing in a public functionary and petit bourgeois of that time and place who in his poems expounded with such surprising freedom on his sexual predilections; it had also, and perhaps especially, to do with his fascination with the clandestine, the underground, the marginal and maudit life that he slipped into from time to time and that he lauded with unparalleled elegance. Poetry, for Cavafy, like pleasure and beauty, could not be brought publicly to. light, nor were such things within everyone's reach: they were available only to those daring enough to seek them out and cultivate them as forbidden fruits, in dangerous territory.
    Of this Cavafy there is only a fleeting trace in the museum, in a few undated little drawings scrawled in a school notebook, the pages of which have been pulled out and stuck up on the walls without any kind of protection: boys, or maybe the same boy in different positions, showing their Apollonian silhouettes and erect phalluses. This Cavafy I can imagine very well, and have imagined ever since I read him for the first time in the translation of his poems by Marguerite Yourcenar: the sensual and decadent Cavafy, whom E. M. Forster discreetly hinted at in his 1926 essay and who became a mythic figure in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Here, in his city, the cafés and tavernas of his poems are still thronged, and, as in the poems, there are almost no women or heterosexual couples, I don't know this for a fact, but I am sure that staged in them still, amid the crowds of men-the air dense with the smell of Turkish coffee and the clouds of smoke expelled by showy hookah smokers-are ardent meetings, first encounters, and the monetary exchanges that precede the fevered couplings of lovers of convenience in cheap rooms, their sordidness and filth setting off the allure of exquisite bodies. I'd even venture to say that I've witnessed it, on the terraces of The Corniche or in the smoky hovels that surround the textile market: a gentleman with a small sniffing nose, eager lips, and lustful little eyes, at nightfall in the warm glow of the first stars and the sea breeze, spying on the strapping young men who stroll with their buttocks cocked, in search of clients.
    Unlike the men-or, perhaps more accurately, adolescents who love each other with serenity and ease in Cavafy's poems, and enjoy sexual pleasure with the clear conscience of pagan gods, Cavafy surely found these loves extremely difficult and troubling, suffused at times with terror and always with frustrated hopes. The astounding thing about his erotic poetry is that these episodes-which must have been few and experienced under the terrible strain of one who always kept up the appearance of respectability in his public life and evaded scandal in any way he could-are transformed into a kind of utopia: a supreme way of living and relishing life, of escaping the bounds of the human condition and achieving a superior form of existence, of attaining a kind of secular spiritual state. In this state, through the pleasure of the senses and perceptions and the appreciation of physical beauty, a human being ascends, like the mystics in their divine trances, to the height of the gods, becoming a god himself. Cavafy's erotic poems burn with an unbridled sexuality, but despite that and their romantic trappings of decadence and perdition, they are curiously cold, maintaining the rational distance of an intelligence that governs the outpouring of passion and the feasting of the instincts. At the same time that he represents this ardor in verse, he observes it, studies it, and, with form as his tool, perfects and eternalizes it.
    His themes and his sexual inclinations are infiltrated with nineteenth-century romanticism-excess and transgression, aristocratic individualism-but at the moment he takes up his pen and sits down to write, a classicist surges from the depths of his being and seizes the reins of his spirit, obsessed with harmony of form and clarity of expression, a poet convinced that deft craftsmanship, clarity, discipline, and the proper use of memory are preferable to improvisation and disorderly inspiration in reaching absolute artistic perfection. He achieved that perfection: as a result, his poetry is capable of resisting the test of translation-a test that almost always vanquishes the work of other poets-so that it makes our blood run cold in all its different versions, astounding even those of us who can't read it in the demotic Greek and the Greek of the diaspora in which it was written. (By the way, the most beautiful translation into Spanish I've read of Cavafy's work is that of twenty-five poems by the Spaniard Joan Ferrate. It was published by Lumen in 1970, in a handsome edition illustrated with photographs, and, unfortunately, so far as I know, it hasn't been reissued.)
    This is the third Cavafy of the indissoluble trinity: the one outside time who, on the wings of fantasy and history, lived simultaneously under the yoke of contemporary Britain and twenty centuries in the past, in a Roman province of Levantine Greeks, industrious Jews, and merchants from all over the world, or a few hundred years later, when the paths of Christians and pagans crossed and recrossed in a heterogeneous society where virtues and vices proliferated and divine beings and humans were almost impossible to tell apart. The Hellenic Cavafy, the Roman, the Byzantine, the Jew, leaps from one century to the next, from one civilization to another, with the ease and grace of a dancer, always maintaining the coherence and continuity of his movements. His world is not erudite at all, although traces of his characters, settings, battles, and courtly intrigues may be picked up in history books. Erudition sets a glacial barrier of facts, explications, and references between information and reality, and Cavafy's world has the freshness and intensity of life itself, not life as it is lived in nature, but the enriched and deliberate life-achieved without giving lip living-of the work of art.
    Alexandria is always present in his dazzling poems, because it is there that the events they evoke take place, or because it is from the city's perspective that the deeds of the Greeks, Romans, and Christians are glimpsed or remembered or yearned for, or because the poet who invents and declaims is from there and wouldn't have wanted to be from anywhere else. He was a singular Alexandrian and a man of the periphery, a Greek of the diaspora who did more for his cultural homeland-for its language and ancient mythology-than any other writer since classical times. But how can a poet so thoroughly of the Middle East-so identified with the smells, tastes, myths, and past of his country of exile, that cultural and geographic crossroads where Asia and Africa meet and are absorbed into each other as so many other Mediterranean civilizations, races, and religions have been absorbed into it-be so easily assimilated into the history of modern European Greek literature?
    All of those civilizations left traces on the world created by Cavafy, a poet who was able to make another, different world of all that rich historical and cultural material, one that is revived and renewed each time we read him. Modern-day Alexandrians don't read his poetry, and the vast majority don't even know his name. But when we come here, the most real and tangible Alexandria for those of us who have read him is not the beautiful beach, or the curve of the seaside promenade, not the wandering clouds, the yellow trams, or the amphitheater built with granite brought from Aswan, or even the archaeological marvels of the museum. It is Cavafy's Alexandria, the city where sophists discuss and impart their doctrines, where philosophers meditate on the lessons of Thermopylae and the symbolism of Ulysses's voyage to Ithaca, where curious neighbors come out of their houses to watch Cleopatra's children-Caesarion, Alexander, and Ptolemy-on their way to the Gymnasium, where the streets reek of wine and incense when Bacchus passes by with his entourage just after the mournful funeral rites of a grammarian, where love is a thing between men, and where suddenly panic swells, because a rumor has spread that the barbarians will soon be at the gates.

Alexandria, February 2000

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