Between Terror and Tourism. Michael Mewshaw
Alexandrina. Ibrahim Abdel Meguid—I’m sure you know his novels—is speaking to a group from the States. If you’d like to attend, please feel free.”
I told her I’d be there and tried to get back to sleep. But the lullaby of the sea had been supplanted by the hotel’s grumbling to life, groaning and creaking as guests flushed toilets, showered and rode the lumbering caged elevators down to breakfast. I didn’t join them at the buffet. I was eager to explore the city.
Durrell had poetically evoked it, preserved it so lovingly in the sweet aspic of his purple prose, that droves of undergraduates still prowled the streets toting the Quartet as their guide. As a twenty-year-old I had read the four novels—Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea-and liberally cadged lines for letters I sent to impressionable coeds. Rereading Justine recently, I was stunned by the number of paragraphs that had remained lodged in my memory after forty-five years:
“Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbor bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion ... Alexandria was the great winepress of love.
“Long sequences of tempura. Light filtered through the essence of lemons. An air full of brick-dust—sweet-smelling brick-dust and the odor of hot pavements slaked with water.”
Passing through the hotel’s metal detector and out the revolving door, I had no illusion that a winepress of love awaited me. Durrell’s Alexandria didn’t exist even in his day. As he described the place in a letter to his friend Henry Miller, it was a “steaming humid ftatness—not a hill or mound anywhere—choking to the bursting point with bones and the crummy deposits of wiped out cultures. Then this smashed up broken down shabby Neapolitan town with its Levantine mounds of houses peeling in the sun ... no music, no art, no real gaiety. A saturated middle European boredom laced with drink and Packards and beach cabins. No Subject of Conversation Except Money.”
Three decades earlier, E.M. Forster had written even more dismissively of the contemporary city. In a preface to the 1922 edition of his Alexandria: A History and a Guide, he characterized the thousand years of the Arab Period as “of no importance.” As for his own day, “the ‘sights’ of Alexandria are in themselves not interesting, but they fascinate when we approach them through the past. Alas! The modern city calls for no enthusiastic comment.”
This made me want to defend Alexandria, to love it as a cockroach loves its ugly offspring. Seediness, shabbiness, loud crowds and pandemonium can have their appeal. The world would be poorer if every corner of the globe aped the orderliness of the United States and Europe. So what if the city’s legendary past had disappeared under asphalt and broken bricks? You had to admire its survival instincts. Didn’t you?
I was too preoccupied with my own survival to consider the question. On the Corniche, the coastal road and its waterfront walkway, I confronted eight lanes of hurtling, horn-blowing traffic. Billboards proclaimed Alexandria the CULTURAL CAPITAL OF THE ARAB WORLD IN 2008, and Durrell had written of “horse-drawn cabs (‘carriages of love’) which dawdled up and down the sea.” But these days dawdling lovers would be crushed or asphyxiated by carbon monoxide.
According to urban legend four people are killed every day on this curving east-west drag strip. I could believe it. Crowds lined the curb in both directions, poised like hurdlers prepared to dart out and leap over fenders and bumpers whenever the cars and trucks and buses and taxis choked to a stop.
I made it to the median strip, bucked up my courage, then plunged on to the far side. The walkway was thick with pedestrians happy, like me, to have pulled through alive. But we had to watch where we stepped. The pavement had disintegrated into a checkerboard of cracked tiles, gravel pits, drains without grills and open ditches snaking with wires and pipes.
The wind and sea that Forster wrote were “as pure as when Menelaus ... landed here 3,000 years ago,” smelled now of sewers and rotting fish. Out in the harbor, under the gentle chocolate waves, lay the ruins of a metropolis designed by Alexander the Great and nourished to full glory by the Ptolemaic kings and queens. But seismic cataclysms had consigned that city to the deep in AD 365. This coast, like the rest of the littoral between Alexandria and Tangier, had always been a geological shatter zone, a landscape riven by fault lines and grinding tectonic plates. Over the millennia, earthquakes and tsunamis destroyed entire civilizations—and the remaking and unmaking of the region has continued to this day. Every so often, Atlas shrugged, mountains moved, and the sea reestablished itself where it pleased.
The Pharos, a lighthouse more than four hundred feet high and one of the Seven Wonders of the World, had served for seventeen centuries as the symbol of Alexandria and as a beacon for ships approaching the treacherous shores of Africa. It, too, had crumbled in stages, and now existed as shards on the seabed and as building blocks incorporated into the fifteenth-century Qait Bey fortress.
Two French archeologists, Jean-Yves Empereur and Franck Goddio, had vied in mapping and photographing a great trove of underwater treasures. Busts, statues, sphinxes and obelisks were dredged up and displayed. Entrepreneurial fishermen offered boat trips and diving expeditions to this ancient royal quarter and to what some scholars claim was Cleopatra’s castle. But I wasn’t tempted. I stayed on land and watched a team of brown fishermen in brown underpants drag empty nets out of the brown water. From what I’d read, harbor divers have to be disinfected to ward off skin diseases.
Braving the Corniche stampede again, I roved through neighborhoods where the clocks appeared to have stopped decades ago and the residents had regressed to village life in the dense mesh of the vast metropolis. In cafes, men without women smoked sheesha and played dominoes. In back lane shops women without men went about their daily rounds dressed in hijabs, or headscarves. Some wore the niqab, a veil that covered the face except for slits at the eyes. Children, dogs, cats and blowing plastic bags eddied around their feet.
On every corner a heap of rubble as high as a man’s head blocked the street. I had my choice of scrambling over it or crawling across the hoods of parked cars. Usually I climbed the rubble. The cars were blisteringly hot and scalded my palms. Also, I found the piles fascinating as archeological middens, layered with stucco and filigree, bits of balustrades and iron balconies that had snapped off of buildings. It was a rare facade that hadn’t shed its fretwork or patches of masonry, exposing raw bricks and spider webs of wiring. I now understood why Hollywood’s version of Justine had been filmed in Tunis.
Alexandria differs from Italy, where the view generally improves the higher you raise your eyes. Looking up in Rome, for example, you’ll catch glimpses of campaniles, graceful domes and palazzo ceilings that blaze with gold leaf angels gliding over famous mosaics. But in Alexandria, it was dangerous not to watch where you were going. You never knew when the sidewalk would yawn wide and swallow your shoe in a pothole or an uncovered sewer. Smart Egyptians sauntered down the center of the street where the footing was safer and there was nothing to dodge but traffic. I soon followed their example.
The unwritten rule-well, sometimes it’s written prescriptively by book reviewers-is that travel writers must never sound disappointed. They must remain resolutely upbeat. Negativity, any hint of whininess, must be suppressed. Unless, of course, the Bad Trip is presented humorously. The British are best at this. Lose a leg to an alligator, stagger through the jungle bled white by leeches, starve to the brink of death in the desert, and all is well as long as you leave everybody laughing.
Yet I’ll be honest. My first brush with Alexandria left me depressed. While I never expected to discover the sensual dream Durrell described, I had resisted the cynicism of a journalist friend who spoke of it as “strictly a twenty-four-hour town.” Now I wondered how I’d last there for the week I had reserved at the Cecil. Maybe longer if the Libyans didn’t hurry and grant me a visa.
At noon, men unscrolled carpets on the sidewalk, crouched and murmured their midday prayers. Careful not to step on their fingers, I backtracked to Midan Saad Zaghloul and traipsed past exhaust-spewing buses, taxis