5 - 11 July 2001
Issue No.541
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 5 - 11 July 2001 Issue No.541 |
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A place in the sun
Summer, sadly, does not become Simon Bolivar, adrift on his plinth in what one must suppose was once a rather pleasant square but is now really no more than the backbend of the Semiramis Intercontinental. The setting is less than inspiring -- the back door into a hotel shopping centre. The plinth is a varnished reconstituted stone patio kind of affair, a tad too suburban for the founder of a modern nation. And the traffic fumes, never a light-hearted phenomenon, seem to weigh just a little bit heavier come July. But the real problem is the cloak. A dramatic, swashbuckling affair, this. No half-hearted cape for Simon, but something much fuller, almost floor length. It is the kind of outfit that screams costume drama, and costume drama of the Ruritanian variety. Swash swash buckle buckle, it really isn't the sort of thing anyone can have the energy to do in the heat of July, and certainly not in a full length, heavily draped, positively operatic cloak. Just contemplating him in this get up is enough to make one feel faint.
But then that's summer for you. Everything becomes just that little bit harder. Going to sleep, waking up, eating, it can all suddenly come to seem far more effort than its worth.
Yet if heroic old Simon Bolivar looks uncomfortable, that is nothing to the travails of the poor man in the street. True, the surface of the roads has yet to turn squishy -- that particular treat is generally reserved for mid-August -- but the inevitable summer sag is well and truly upon us. Crowds populate the bridges at night, in search of a little night air. Shutters are opened and closed with alarming regularity in a desperate attempt at internal temperature control. Wardrobes are ransacked for that elusive item, the perfect summer garment, and it certainly will not be a cloak. And tempers, by mid-afternoon at least, are a trifle short among those forced onto the streets.
One seldom noted but foolproof harbinger of the Cairene summer wafts headily through the marmoreal foyers of the city's five star hotels. Lift your nose to the flows of conditioned air and it is unmistakable, a heavy, cedarish odour with a hint, perhaps, of cinnamon. A little investigation, a few discreet inquiries by your intrepid reporter, and that heady scent can be named. It is called Oud, and it is expensive. It appears to be made almost exclusively for the Saudi market and is, reputedly, distilled from some kind of tree bark. Its presence in the foyers of the smarter hotels means that customers from the Gulf cannot be far away: as the lark heralds spring in 19th century England, so Oud heralds summer in central Cairo. Even for someone who is not a perfume person, the scent is beguiling, and certainly far more attractive than the petrol fumes with which Simon Bolivar must make do.
Other harbingers: should you be fortunate enough to have a Nile view last month will have been punctuated by the regular appearance of the night heron, flying north over the river in small groups. I know it is the night heron because an ornithologically inclined friend told me so, and in matters ornithological I am in no position to disagree with anyone who can summon the slightest hint of authority in either tone or demeanour. There are, too, the bats, which seem far more numerous in the summer, and far larger. Huge things, they live in the tree opposite my bedroom and occasionally make a sortie through the French windows to fly a circuit of the sitting room before departing in search of mosquitoes, or whatever else they eat. These, I am told, by another friend with a propensity for wildlife, are fruit bats, though this makes little sense to me since there are no fruit trees, apart from a couple of mangos, in the vicinity. But fruit bats, I am told in belaboured tones, don't just eat fruit. Nor do night herons, I suppose, fly exclusively at night.
None of which, of course, matters a hoot to Simon Bolivar (pictured inset, without cloak, but as Ruritanian as ever) who remains oblivious to the niceties of taxonomic distinctions. He is, in his Cairo incarnation, a slightly larger than life statue presented, I believe, to Cairo by the government of Bolivia.
Things could be worse. Think of poor Ibrahim Pasha, stuck forever on his horse in Opera Square, sweltering in full Albanian cavalry uniform, or whatever it is. Whatever it is, it is certainly a big hat for July. If summer does not become Simon Bolivar, it is even less sympathetic to Ibrahim Pasha. All that leaden detailing, all those buckles and other bits and pieces of uniform accessories, lovingly replicated in Cairo's only equestrian statue, trussing the great man atop his horse as if he were, for all the world, an enormous chicken.
There is so little relief from the heat on the streets that sometimes one cannot help but feel it would be kinder to allow the distinguished personages celebrated in the streets, in squares and at steaming intersections, to don a summer garb, to cover all those pleats and folds and cascading drapery with some cool, white, and preferably billowing cotton, to place enormous straw hats on the heads of the statues to shade the bronze faces from the sun. It might even lend a festive note to the half-baked dourness of the summer streets.
Such a strategy, I well understand, is unlikely to enhance the dignity of the great and the good so commemorated, but then for the merely human dignity is hardly a foremost consideration when the heat is on, and the challenge is to stay cool. Herons may fly over the river at night, and bats flit flit endlessly, but for the less nocturnal, for those who must perforce emerge in daylight hours in order to earn an honest living, such an exclusively night time existence is hardly an option. And no one, no matter what they have done, no matter how many modern nation states they have founded, no matter how many victorious battles they have won, can look dignified with sweat trickling over their brow.
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