Loving Monsters

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  No I shan’t, Jayjay. You’re an impostor, remember?

  – Ah, but I’m a truthful impostor, you must never forget that. You’ll hear no lies from me. Just versions and the occasional omission. Anyway, looking back to that period now, the sheer weirdness of the life I was leading does strike me. For some of the time I was social climbing and being taken to parties or dinners or on excursions. Another part of the time I was successfully peddling very high-class pornography to a rather different set, although there was some overlapping. Then there were the English lessons I was still giving, very conscientiously, even down to setting and correcting homework. And finally there was me at home, living pretty frugally, quite content with baladi food from corner stalls in Sayyida Zeinab. I used to love that, especially at night when the stalls were lit by hurricane lamps or candles. Bread filled with ful, dark boiled beans dressed with olive oil and chillies, maybe a duck egg or two. Plus pickled turnips on the side: mauvy-pinkish lumps fished dripping from earthenware jars. Onions. Roots. Tubers. Garlic. It was peasant food, basically unchanged since the Pharaohs. The bread, especially, was wonderful. There were baker’s ovens every few streets and they never seemed to cool. Like brick or mud igloos they kept churning out a stream of round, greyish, flat loaves along the lines of Greek pitta bread but coarser and altogether more muscular. When eaten hot, filled with beans or tuna, they were all one wanted to eat for ever. It was a pleasure just watching the ovens being raked out and replenished with bundles of firewood and the sweating boys with flour smudges up their brown arms balancing cloth-covered trays of fresh khubs on their heads as they set off through the streets to hawk it. Then back to the oven for more.

  – I came to love everything about Cairo street life, even the stenches and filth, the shit and the noise and the cockroaches, the donkey-stale and the beggars and the children with glistening sores … Perhaps that sounds too much like scene-setting?

  No, Jayjay, just corny. La boue, you know. La photogenic boue.

  – Well, all right; but I really did want to immerse myself in it, no matter how corny it may be that I should have felt a need to scour off Eltham with a bit of Egyptian harshness. I spent hours squatting with people, drinking endless glasses of syrupy tea, listening, sniffing, practising my street Arabic. I came to understand the economy of giving: the cigarette here, the box of matches there, the lump of cheese I’d bought which I didn’t really need, a candle or a medicine bottle of paraffin. In return I received some lessons I never forgot, especially regarding the sanctity of food. Bread was a gift of God, and as such was sacred. If one ever saw a crust on the ground, no matter how dried and gritty and filthy, one picked it up and put it on a ledge somewhere, on a window sill or a wall. Anywhere so that the gift of God would not be trampled underfoot. All over Cairo, even in the centre, one saw pieces of practically fossilised bread tucked up on ledges beneath a drift of soot and dust. Eventually I actually felt what that meant, rather than noting it as an interesting social detail. Most of the denizens of Sayyida Zeinab had nothing. They were living pretty much on the daily edge of destitution. Yet the good humour and generosity were something I had never encountered before, least of all in Eltham. Mine was a very different angle, but I did begin to understand why old August was content to go on living down in the Sudanese back of beyond. Somewhere beneath us both lay a revulsion. At inherited gentility, perhaps? At being too out of touch with first and last things, the roots and tubers of it all?

  – Anyway, ‘genteel’ is not quite the word to describe an episode that occurred on a houseboat owned by a French aristocrat. I shan’t name him because he had an inelegant death and there seems no point in further distressing whatever descendants he has. Enough to say he was well known in certain Cairene circles, and far beyond. I shall call him Etienne. I’d reached him quite early on as a discerning buyer of August’s best films, though through an intermediary. But he obviously wanted to meet me in person because I now received a summons to his houseboat with a request to bring ‘anything new’ from August. Etienne’s houseboat was as famous as he was. It looked like a set Cecil B. DeMille might have dreamed up for Cleopatra’s barge. Not effeminate, mind you, just freakishly decadent. It was moored on the Imbaba side of the cut, almost level with the Gezira Club. It was blue and white and gold outside with lots of teak and brass and a sort of Saracen pavilion on deck that was taken down when the khamseen was blowing. Inside it was rigged as a thoroughgoing sin palace, all rugs and divans and muslin drapery. It smelt of patchouli and hashish. There was even a small marble pool that could be filled with wine or milk or rosewater, depending on the occasion. The night I was there it was full of brown youths.

  – In case you’re wondering, there was a strong vein of tolerant sophistication about such things. Most of the older British residents in Cairo prided themselves on being unshockable, which is unsurprising seeing that Cairo offered things unavailable in Surrey and Hampshire that were largely the reason why they were residents in the first place. The very oldest could remember the series of scandals that had shocked Germany at the beginning of the century when the Kaiser’s own friend and adviser, Prince zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld, as well as several other high-ranking individuals like Count von Moltke, were accused of being homosexual and charged under Article 175 of the German penal code. This would be about ten years after the Wilde case in England. When the news reached Cairo it was treated with shouts of mirth. ‘My God, if they had 175 here they’d have to prosecute half this city,’ the old boys said. ‘The streets would be empty. The Government and the Court would practically vanish overnight.’ In the Automobile Club a motion was proposed that only applicants who could be charged under Article 175 should be deemed fit for election to its exclusive membership. Thirty years on, nothing much had changed where Cairo’s tolerant habits were concerned. The city’s highly visible police chief, Russell Pasha, had more important things to worry about than endemic buggery. There was the drugs trade, for one. He was making excellent headway there but it was uphill work and needed constant vigilance, as I myself knew from Suez. Then there were always the nationalists and their student supporters like the Moslem Brotherhood and Ahmed Hussein’s Young Egypt. They would take to the streets and riot at the least provocation. I well remember seeing Russell Pasha on his massive white horse at one of those riots, completely unprotected and quite cool in his red fez and black uniform, marshalling his police with the stock of a riding whip, pointing here, pointing there. No, he had enough on his plate without worrying about the erotic follies of his fellow-Europeans. Besides, there were always the widespread rumours that his own private life was pretty well stocked with mistresses. Cairo was not a city in which pots bothered to call kettles black.

  – One way and another the spirit of live and let live was broad and buoyant, and on it floated many a dahabiya, including Etienne’s sin palace. Some houseboats were owned by successful belly dancers and some by King Faroukh’s courtiers and they all had in common the more or less elegant pursuit of pleasure. That night Etienne’s pleasure was audible from dry land. I turned out to be the youngest of his guests but nowhere near the youngest person aboard. Even as the bawab saluted me across the gangplank I could hear children’s giggles from the stern. Etienne was tall, thin, thirty-fiveish, with a neat moustache. He had a good deal of charm, certainly enough to make you think his slight divergent squint must be part of it. He looked me over appraisingly, plucked eyebrows indicating surprise. ‘If I may say so, you don’t fit the conventional picture of a man in your line of business. But then, of course, had you done so I would scarcely have invited you here. The dear Raffalovitches did say you were presentable, but I hadn’t expected someone who would fit quite so well into my preferred ambience.’

  – And with that graceful compliment the revels began. It was a highly peculiar evening. Just keep Eltham firmly fixed in your mind because only then will you appreciate quite how baroque it was to be served dinner by naked boys with wreaths in their hair. Imagine Eltham Congreg
ational Church on a wet Sunday when I tell you that light was provided by nude children upside down on the floor, each with a candle plunged in his rectum. I think this was in imitation of one of the Marquis de Sade’s more harmless fantasies and to be honest it wasn’t a great success. Every so often one of the boys would cough or shift his very uncomfortable position and the effort would expel the candle with a plop, the light would go out and the child squawk as hot wax spilled across his bottom. I think there were five of us dining: Etienne and I and three others? Something like that. I remember everyone laughing a good deal as each child was coaxed into becoming a candlestick again. Now and again I would glance down and see a little convulsed face peering stoically up from the depths of a cushion. I don’t think they were unduly put upon, and eventually they were all given a piece of fruit before scampering off somewhere towards the stern to peel the wax off their scrotums. In fact they looked considerably better fed and incomparably cleaner than their coevals in Sayyida Zeinab. I presumed it was them I’d heard giggling when I arrived. They were probably rehearsing being candlesticks.

  – After dinner there was a film show. We lay around on cushions while Etienne showed us reels from his extensive library of films, including several of August’s. Meanwhile some rather older boys, early to mid teens, had crept in like shadows and sprawled among us. Under the influence of the films a good deal of fondling and caressing went on, leading quickly to rather more. By the light of the projector one could catch all sorts of gleams in the darkness, anatomical details with glistening highlights. At first I found it difficult to get into the spirit of the occasion because all the while a very distinguished-looking old retainer in a white robe was doing the rounds with a brass tray, serving us cardamom-flavoured coffee. He would bend over each guest and wait respectfully until the man had a free hand, then gravely serve him a little cup. Afterwards he did the same with Turkish delight and hashish rolled into little balls the size of peas. I was disconcerted for him, quite pointlessly as it turned out because I gathered later that although he might have looked venerable he had behind him a good half-century of seamless wickedness of his own.

  – The rest of the evening was pure orgy, with Etienne as an attentive host in between being pleasured by a very young Delta peasant kid who was already hung like a mule. The boy was from Tanta, I remember, and had barely turned twelve, but he put us adults to shame. I was excited by the whole thing, it being the first orgy I’d ever been to. I suppose that helped; but there was something else that appealed to me in all that tense brown flesh with cardamom on its breath, in the thick rugs and cushions, in the semi-darkness glowing with an occasional cigarette end and the silent images pouring on to the screen. Voluptuousness was the part of me Eltham had denied, having conspired to pretend it was not an item of luggage needed by my immortal soul on its one-way journey. Strictly ‘Not wanted on voyage.’ Yet even as a child I’d glimpsed a quite different voyage for myself through quite other landscapes. Once, I’d wormed my way into a privet hedge full of poisonous dark-green light, an erotic cathedral of difficult traceries which expanded so I could live in it, unknown to passers-by, not a boy in a hedge but the pilot of a celestial vehicle on his own trajectory. Then there was a cut in the narrative, a fadeup like one of August’s, and suddenly there I was at an orgy floating on the Nile, feeding a dusty cushion of Turkish delight to a naked boy with a face straight off a temple frieze at Karnak. Yet it was unmistakably a section of the same dreamed journey. The child in the Eltham hedge was the very man on a Cairo houseboat, unseen by passers-by. But alone, that’s what I’m saying. Alone and trying to catch up. Alone and needing details as a defence against the future. We splashed in the marble pool into which the old servant had sprinkled jasmine oil. I think I was drunk or drugged by then, although everything was so clear I can smell the jasmine to this day. And by the light of a poolside lantern I could see we’d been joined by one or two of the older candlestick boys. Seal-like rompings ensued. I remember noting that small boys’ orgasms are briefer in duration than adults’, though immediately repeatable. Also, that before they fully reach puberty boys’ ejaculate tends at first to be grey rather than white, hardly slimy and not at all flocculent. Droplets lay on a maroon rug like three or four seed pearls. –

  Did they really, Jayjay? I wonder what Captain W. E. Johns would have to say about that. Do you think your boyhood hero would have approved of this writer’s eye of yours?

  I find myself torn between exasperation and a need to record these details in a scientific spirit. As well be accurate about juvenile sperm as about bees, I suppose. Still, this particular snippet, even though culled from the rarefied world of a pre-war orgy, can hardly be arcane knowledge given that half the world’s population has either passed, or will be passing, through boyhood. So what is all this selective blurt? He must know I can’t be shocked. I want to pick him up, I will pick him up, on that word ‘alone’.

  ‘Alone and trying to catch up’, you said.

  – Did I? –

  Yes. What did you mean by ‘trying to catch up’? With what? With whom?

  – Oh. You know … Something like making up for lost time? That’s it. Eltham again, naturally. I felt I’d fallen behind. I was in pursuit of the unwrapped. Anyway, the only point of my telling you all this scurrilous stuff is merely to illustrate how at that time I kept my various pursuits quite separate. That must surely be an impostor’s gift, to live on several tacks at once, each of them interesting to me. But I was also open to anything else that might come along, and what came along was the Second World War. Before that happened, though, I went to Alexandria. And that is the beginning of the roundabout answer to the question of how it is I come to be living here at ‘Il Ghibli’. –

  But I still can’t guess the weight of ‘alone’. He’s concealing something here. Yet if he can be frank about paederastic orgies it’s indeed hard to imagine what he might jib at revealing.

  *

  Suddenly such matters (as well as Jayjay and his entire story) will have to wait for a while. A phone call arrives from a distant capital, from another precinct of my life. Although I answer it on a bright Tuscan afternoon it comes from the dead of night. ‘The General has agreed to see you, but his son is trying to dissuade him. Now is the time to jump in, James.’

  So jump I must, thousands of miles, on the off chance that a retired multi-millionaire will keep his word. Just before my friend hangs up I distinctly hear a dog bark in the background eight thousand miles away and at once that landscape rushes in at me from over the planet’s curve. Jayjay and his Egypt drop from sight and in their place I see Southeast Asia. I am in a familiar book-lined room with windows opened on the tropic night beyond the mosquito screens, the dogs loping in the compound beyond, the whirling haloes of insects around the security lamps. On my last visit I probably passed a remark to the very hound I have just overheard. Why should the chance barking of a dog be more potent than the voice of a friend in summoning a distant land into being? Suddenly the place is here again like a phantom limb that aches with the memory of its former life, insistent in its solidity. From nowhere comes the thought of how James Ellroy summarised the philosophy of the Kennedy era: Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. I reflect how equally well that could apply to the despised and defunct regime of the country to which I have been recalled. Kennedy, though, is revered, his own nation being major-league ass-kickers with the power to do a Kremlin job on history. My damned beloved useless country whose dogs can be heard down phone lines eight thousand miles away lacks the power to whitewash history. On the other hand it will remain forever forgiven. I have to think my life is strange.

  ‘The General has agreed to see you’, but the dog is the clincher. Later, I throw things into a bag then fail to sleep. After all, Jayjay pretty much fell on me like an overripe mango, whereas I have been hoping and scheming for the last three years to get this ex-general, ex-minister, to talk. Yes, jump.

  *

  The next day Jayjay affects not
to be put out in any way when I explain the urgency of my departure. He essays graciousness, fails. ‘It’ll all be the same in a hundred years,’ he says lugubriously.

  * Cecil Alport, One Hour of Justice (Dorothy Crisp, London,?1947), p. 53.

  10

  Sunset. A familiar strand of coral chips. The sun has just sunk between clouds like torn-off wings, down through parakeet colours into blood. A few fishing boats drawn up beyond the high tide mark. One or two being painted or overhauled are rolled up on palm boles, leaning on an outrigger, keel clear of the ground. Their interiors are heaped with crisped fronds to protect them from the daytime glare. Others, readied for a night’s fishing, are being carried down to where the flaccid water barely lolls against the shore. Several are already out in the bay, low dark splinters with an oar rising and dipping against the crimson lightfall, each bow tipped with the spark of an oil lamp.

  A great advantage in being a jobbing writer is the variety offered by having more than one job on hand. This evening Italy, Jayjay and his ongoing Egyptian saga occupy a space unrelated to distance, far away on the yonder side of tonight’s chromatic horizon. The planet rolling over in its sleep will soon disclose this same cinnabar doorstep behind which a new day is even now preparing to yawn open on Tuscan hills and light up a small row of beehives overlooking a broad valley. My bees: checked and given a reluctant farewell dusting of oxytetracycline powder mixed with icing sugar against Foul Brood. They are already in another universe. Jayjay is elsewhere still, frozen on the brink of the Second World War where his narrative has been abruptly snapped off to enable me to fly away and talk to the carefully assembled monsters and heroes of a more modern age. This is contract work; Jayjay’s is still a gentleman’s agreement. So I have abandoned him in 1938 and returned to the world’s other side, to the little village I know best where I greet old friends and acclimatise myself before going to the capital to begin fact-gathering.