What is resumed in the word Alexandria? In a flash of my mind’s eyes shows me a thousand dust-tormented streets. Flies and beggars own it today- and those who enjoy an intermediate existence between either.
Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour 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. You would never mistake it for a happy place.
-Justine, Book I of the Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell
I went to Alexandria from Cairo several times that year, always expecting to find a different city from what it had become under Nasser. No longer the Greek city of Palladas and Callimachus, or the Greco-Roman city of Forster in the first world war, or the mixed-up, cosmopolitan fin de siecle-feeling place of Durrell in the second, or the caved-in shell of its former self as it weighed upon Cavafy. By the time I was there, long before anyone thought of reviving its glory days by building the Bibliotheca Alexandrina as a pan-Mediterranean faux cultural capital and is now just another UN funded boondoggle, it had already been Egyptianized through and through.
I did go to the beach at Muntazah once, where women could still comfortably swim in a two piece suit, I was invited to someone’s private cabana but the sand was dirty and it smelled like raw sewage. I always liked the antique-looking street cars that turned around at Ramleh Station, and I especially liked the Gran Trianon with the screened-off area for men only, with the mural behind the bar of what I now half-remember as half-naked nymphs cavorting with satyrs, but probably I am mistaken and the scene was in fact entirely chaste.
Callimachus was an epigrammist and scribe in the Alexandria library. He liked Alexandria’s care-free life and liberties. Like Durrell, he appreciated the city’s five sexes but I do not think he was particularly happy there, even though no doubt he thought it superior to his birthplace in a Libyan backwater. He wrote the epitaph of Timon of Athens- “I, Timon, hater of men, inhabit here; but go thou by; Curse me as thou will, but go.”
Alexandria did not make me feel quite as bad as that, but I was happy not to go back when I finally realized it was not worth the trouble of getting there, even though the train ride was relatively nice and it is always nice to leave Cairo.