Cavafy was a member of the Greek diaspora, a poet who was born and died in Alexandria (1863-1933) and whose career spanned much of the Cosmopolitan Era from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. A deeply learned man in classical Greek, he integrated the demotic language of the streets into his verses. His themes were loneliness, the vertiginous passage of time, the quicksilver nature of love and the spiraling history of Alex, as its citizens affectionately called it, from its ancient gods to the young boys he brought home to his bed. In a city where the past was ever present and also an augur of the future, Cavafy had, in the words of critic and translator Daniel Mendelsohn, a perspective that “allowed him to see history with a lover’s eye, and desire with a historian’s eye.”
The Trianon today had a faded Art Deco interior, beige and brown walls, a stained wooden ceiling, four cobwebby chandeliers and a floor of scuffed grey linoleum. On the PA system, Louis Arm-strong sang “What a Wonderful World.” But I felt more in sync with Cavafy, who spent three decades of dreary employment in the Office of Public Works, plugging along in the Third Circle of Irrigation like a condemned soul out of Dante. Much as he might have yearned to travel to some other land, some other sea, he had no illusions of escaping. As one of his best known poems, “The City,” concluded: “Don’t bother to hope / for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist. / Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this / small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.”
Then the waitress brought my food and the soundtrack switched to Jim Morrison’s “Light My Fire.” The coffee was strong, the yoghurt and honey delicious, the chicken sandwich fortifying. My blood sugar and spirits soared. When the bill arrived, with each item an Egyptian pound or two more expensive than listed on the menu, I didn’t protest. Grateful to be feeling better, I paid at the cash register, where one fellow dug my change out of the drawer and a second handed it to me. In Egypt, there were never enough jobs to go around, yet everybody has a role to play.
Reinvigorated, I went in search of Cavafy’s apartment. Like his drab professional life, it offered little indication of its owner’s lyrical intelligence. Located on rue Lepsius, it used to have a brothel beneath it, prompting Cavafy to joke, “Where could I live better? Under me is a house of ill-repute, which caters to the needs of the flesh. Over there is a church, where sins are forgiven. And beyond is the hospital, where we die.”
Though I always visit writers’ houses, they strike me as melancholy places. They’re like locust shells. The fragile shape endures, but the guts are gone, along with any sense of the singing, the cyclical sleep and joyous flight, the long underground burial followed by a short burst of brilliance. Now a museum, Cavafy’s flat was spacious and bright, with two rooms decorated as he had left them. A friend of Cavafy’s wrote that the place “reminded me of a secondhand furniture store,” a hodgepodge of overstuffed chairs, Bokhara carpets and “tasteless turn-of-the-century vases.” The other rooms were filled with random memorabilia, photos and portraits of the author, two death masks and photocopies of his manuscripts and editions of his books in glass display cases. On a nonstop tape, a husky female voice recited his poems in Greek.
All that appeared to be missing was ... everything. Still, Cavafy’s apartment had none of the bogusness of Karen Blixen’s house in Nairobi, which is decorated with stage dressings and posters from the film version of Out of Africa. Nor was it thick with tourists and docents chatting about six-toed cats as is the Hemingway house in Key West. A guard let me in, locked the door behind me, and sagged into an upright chair in the hallway. After listening to Cavafy’s verses day after day, he might have learned them by heart, but they no longer kept him awake. He nodded off and I had the museum to myself for an hour.
Much of that time I spent at a window surveying the ochre-colored neighborhood, the ant colony of activity on the street below and in the car park across the way. The car park’s corrugated roof might have been a postmodern installation, a puckish exhibition of urban debris—broken plates, bald tires and cardboard boxes spattered with seagull shit.
I didn’t need to wrack my mind for a suitable quote to mark the end of my visit. Cavafy’s work lay under glass all around me, and a translation of “The God Abandons Anthony” provided today’s text:
Turn to the open window and look down To drink past all deceiving Your last dark rapture from the mystical throng And say farewell, farewell to Alexandria leaving.
Late that afternoon I made my way to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina for the lecture by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, one of Egypt’s foremost novelists. The setting struck me as fitting for a writer of his stature, and I welcomed the chance to meet him and visit this contemporary riff on Alexandria’s “Mother” Library, built by Ptolemy I in the third century BC.
The original library contained a vast compendium of the world‘s—that is, the Greek world’s—corpus of knowledge. With more than three quarters of a million volumes, it had been the greatest center of classical learning of its time. Under the auspices of the Mouseion, its umbrella institution, the library supplied resources to Archimedes and Euclid, who dedicated themselves to geometry and physics; Aristarchus, who discovered that the earth revolved around the sun; and Eratosthenes, who calculated the circumference of the globe.
But in literature, as Forster fumed, “The palace provided the funds and called the tune ... Victory odes, Funeral dirges, Marriage hymns, jokes, genealogical trees, medical prescriptions, mechanical toys, maps, engines of war: whatever the Palace required it had only to inform the Mouseion, and the subsidized staff set to work at once. The poets and scientists there did nothing that would annoy the Royal family and not much that would puzzle it, for they knew that if they failed to give satisfaction they would be expelled from the enchanted area, and have to find another patron or starve.”
Gradually, the glory that was Greek classicism dwindled in Alexandria to work that Forster judged “had no lofty aims. It was not interested in ultimate problems nor even in problems of behavior, and it attempted none of the higher problems of art. To be graceful or pathetic or learned or amusing or indecent, and in any case loyal—this sufficed.”
The decline continued into the fourth century AD, when Christians began to shove the Pagans aside. Appalled by what they considered to be the library’s licentious contents, the Christians destroyed the building, burned its books and constructed a monastery on the site.
It was doubtful that these cautionary events dimly occurred to the UNESCO fundraisers and Egyptian cultural mavens who in 1987 decided to reincarnate the “Mother” Library. They viewed their project as a move to put Alexandria back on the cultural map, with the Bibliotheca as “the world’s window on Egypt and Egypt’s window on the world.” An impressive structure of glass and metal, it was shaped to resemble a radiant half-sun shimmering behind an infinity pool. As I approached, a team of men sidestepped up its slanted facade, pushing floor polishers that buffed the library to a handsome gleam.
Inside, the brilliance dimmed, the air was chill and the stacks had curiously few books. It opened in 2002 with shelf space for eight million volumes, but it held just 540,000, most of them in Arabic or English. Only 10 percent were in other languages and none in Hebrew. There were, however, plenty of computer terminals. One local expatriate characterized the Bibliotheca as “just a big Internet café, bloody elitist and too expensive for locals to get in.”1
The conference room reserved for Ibrahim Abdel Meguid’s lecture looked out through blue-tinted glass to the greasy harbor and a crumble of biscuit-colored islands. It occurred to me that the metaphor about the library’s being a window on the world and vice versa was unfortunate. Whether you turned outward or inward, there wasn’t much to see.
Justin Siberell, the U.S. consul and director of the American Center, welcomed me to Alex and introduced me to Dr. Sahar Hamouda, deputy director of the Alexandria Mediterranean Center. She invited me to return to the library in two days to talk with her about the city’s Cosmopolitan Era. Then I joined a dozen people sitting at a varnished table, all of them Americans in Egypt on a lightning-like