Madame Christina:
A place apart

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Madame Christina with Seif Wanli; Madame Christina with old-time waiter at her diner in Alexandria, Elite

The Elite, restaurant-bar-café, and its proprietor, Mme Elite, feature prominently on the imaginative map of cultural Alexandria. The place is real, and its owner continues to keep an eagle eye over her establishment. It is not quite the centrality of L'Elite, nor even its originality for that matter, that has for long made it a favourite rendez-vous for Alexandrians.

The magnetism of the place seems to emanate more from the personality of its proprietor of almost half a century now -- Mme Christina Constantinou, known to all simply as Mme Christina, to some even as Mme Elite. Come rain or shine, Mme Christina is to be found every day, sitting at her table commanding both sections of the Elite, the glassed-in terrace café and the inner section with the flight of steps leading to the restaurant proper.

Bespectacled, resplendent in caftans and bejewelled in string after string of semi-precious stones, she cuts a formidable figure. And she is probably Alexandria's most profiled woman since Cleopatra.

Born to a well-to-do Greek family in the Saba Pasha quarter, Mme Christina is a veteran Alexandrian -- to ask about her exact age would be a gaffe; but one can safely surmise that her life has spanned two kings, a revolution and three presidents. Her gift of the gab and knack for delivering the most humorous anecdotes in dead-pan manner make her eminently quotable. The Greeks, once the most prosperous "colony" in Alexandria, started dwindling in the 1950s, a process that continued with the sequestration of the early 1960s, until today there are a little over 1,000 Greeks in Alexandria.

But while sequestration put an end to cotton industries and Greek-owned factories and enterprises, they did not affect restaurants, and thus the Elite was spared. About Mme Christina is the unmistakable wealth of recollection that is the hallmark of those cosmopolitans who remain.

There is this and an absence of bitterness.

Over the years, Mme Christina has patiently remodelled her establishment. Originally the place was an open air café. In the 1940s it was owned by a Frenchman and a Greek, whose ham and cheese sandwiches were, according to Mme Christina, "popular with the troops during the war." Mme Christina bought the place in 1953, keeping the outdoor café, but adding an indoor restaurant. Later still, she acquired the first floor of the building, turning it into a night-club with a live bouzouki band which became a popular venue throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. ("Women passing in the street in front of the Elite in the evening couldn't help swaying to the music" comments one retired womaniser.) Eventually, Mme Christina found the upstairs night-club too much of a burden: "I had to close it; the taxes were too high, and it meant that I could never get away before 2 or 3am."

By then she had already converted the seasonal outdoor café into a glassed-in terrace -- thus giving the Elite its distinctive feature. "The carpenter charged with the task of closing this section used timber from a shipwreck," adds Mme Christina with relish. Whatever the provenance of the wood, the terrace has the feel of a slightly tilted prow of a ship, sailing serenely down Safia Zaghlul Street.

Keenly, discreetly, for about five decades, Mme Christina has observed the famous and the infamous who have graced her tables. With a little prompting, she will recite a litany of names, each followed by a short pause, then an anecdote concerning the idiosyncrasies or gastronomic preferences of the client in question. "Umm Kalthoum: she used to go to a corsetiere nearby and after her fittings would drop by for an ice-cream -- a charming, unpretentious woman, no make-up or jewellery, dressed simply in a skirt suit.

Edith Piaf: she once came here escorted by two handsome young men -- maybe they were her bodyguards; she was diminutive and wore big sunglasses. Dalida: she was cross-eyed, ugly and skinny, and she'd always order the cheapest dish on the menu, macaronis au four. Later, when she'd become a star, she revisited the Elite and asked if I remembered her, and of course I did, but how she had changed! Queen Farida: she always came here after the Wednesday special programme of films at the Metro and would order toast monseigneur and cappuccino -- a very modest person. Queen Nariman: she wore quite a lot of make-up and had presence. Jihan El-Sadat: she usually ordered Coupe Jacques; at my request, she gave me a signed photograph of hers; she also complimented me on my collection of paintings and posters."

The Elite has often been likened to an art gallery -- and, in fact, has doubled as an art gallery on more than one occasion. Of the exhibitions held at the Elite, Mme Christina remembers with greatest fondness that of works by her close friend and downstairs neighbour, the celebrated Alexandrian painter Seif Wanli, in 1964. "This was the phase when he used to paint on the lids of cigarette boxes [such as the Coutarelli brand...].The exhibition was a great success and not one of his paintings remained. Seif was a gentle, charming man," reminisces Mme Christina.

Although both Seif and his brother, Adham, are known to have painted the Elite, Mme Christina's own collection of their works comprises their Degas-like dancers. These she keeps at home, but as a token of her connection with the late brothers Wanli, she has placed a portrait of Seif, by his wife Ihsan Mukhtar, in the dining room of the Elite. The mural painting and the one on the ceiling in the dining room are reproductions of Picasso's Minotaures and Braque's Oiseaux, done by the Alexandrian Greek painter Michael Vafiadis. The ceiling nearby also displays Alexandrian painter Ahmed Mustafa's Horoscope (1968), a gift from the artist to the Elite: "I remember he brought a ladder and worked fast and non-stop for a long time, without any sketches," comments Mme Christina. The wall of the glassed- in terrace is adorned with posters of exhibitions from Manchester to Marseilles, but predominantly from Paris, supplied by her son who lives there. Her daughter lives in Rome.

But of all the eccentrics whom Mme Christina has entertained, the most marked cases seem to have been among her waiters, whose foibles, however, have generally worked in the Elite's favour.

There was the lithe, music-humming waiter, Manolis, who inadvertently furnished the name for an Elite speciality. It must have been in the late 1950s or early 1960s when Mme Christina was concocting a new ice-cream, finally deciding it was ready to be launched. Suddenly realising that her creation still had no name, she turned to Manolis for suggestions, but found him humming a rock-n-roll tune and decided, then and there, that that would be the name of the new addition to the menu. The aberrations of another waiter, while no less entertaining, were on a grander scale. Stelio Koumoutsos' obsessive forays into amateur archaeology, in search of Alexander the Great's tomb, often obstructed the traffic. About five digs later and knee-deep in debt "Koumoutsos was deported, naturally. You couldn't allow someone too hazardous to be at large. But I must say I liked the fact that he had a dream, an ideal. He even called his son Alexander," comments his one-time employer. Koumoutsos died in Greece a few years ago.

But of all Mme Christina's familiars, perhaps the most haunting figure is that of the Alexandrian-Greek poet Constantine P Cavafy (1863-1933). Though Cavafy died two decades before the Elite came into existence, Mme Christina has her own vague recollections of him, and has heard those of others, which, over time, she has assimilated and made her own. She was probably a very young girl when she glimpsed him walking to or from the (now demolished) Billiards Palace. As she speaks of Cavafy, there is in her tone, at times, the awe of the young girl beholding a much-gossiped-about, enigmatic poet; at other moments, she speaks of him as one contemporary would of another: she is as old now as he was when she first laid eyes on him. When that happens, she speaks of him as of a distant cousin who, though at times erring, has done us proud after all.

She will tell you of how mystifying it was to come upon this "pensive" man, pacing the streets; of his slight misanthropy: "If he met an acquaintance in the street, he would inquire which way he was going, and generally say that, regretfully, he was heading in the opposite direction." She will also proffer the Cavafy bon mot about his flat on the disreputable downtown street, Lepsius (now Sharm El-Sheikh): "Where could I live better? Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church which forgives sin [the Greek Orthodox Church, St Saba]. And there is the [Greek] hospital where we die." It is likely that she first heard the quotation by hearsay, long before it found its way into the biographies and guidebooks. And she also preserves the parochial sense that Cavafy is a figure of the Greek community in Alexandria, rather than a, by now, poet of international renown -- hence the attempts to exonerate his lifestyle to outsiders.

But if Mme Christina has any regrets, they are likely to centre on the unfortunate time warp that has meant that Cavafy was never a client of hers. Had they been contemporaries, Cavafy would almost certainly have placed the Elite on his list of haunts. But the connections remain. One of her regular visitors was Singopoulo, a close friend of the poet's who gave her a few Cavafy manuscripts.

In the past half century of steering her establishment, Mme Elite has acquired the status of a local Mnemosyne: she is the custodian of a certain half-lost Alexandria, of the legends and lore that went into the making of an urbane, convivial city, graciously embracing the marginal.

Profile by Hala Halim