Cavafy received communion in his dying hours, as he succumbed in silence to throat cancer at the age of 70. His final act was to draw a circle on a blank piece of paper, and then put a period in the center. An inner eye. A life circled and rounded to a close. Eternity.
It is also the astronomical symbol for the sun. Is it too fanciful, perhaps, to recall another Greek Egyptian, the last pharaoh in a deteriorating Roman province, whose final act was to die by the asp, a creature sacred to Ra? In so doing, Cleopatra sent a message that would have been recognizable to any Egyptian in the streets: She was going directly to the Sun God. Cavafy, that unique Egyptian-Greek hybrid, would undoubtedly have known the story.
A half-hour walk away in the Chatby district, across a very noisy boulevard, past the cafes where the young men smoke cigarettes and the older ones, in turbans, suck their shishas with almost comic concentration, one finds another crowded municipality: the Greek cemetery, whose white marble monuments, encircled by a high white wall, appear to be the outlines of a miniature city within a city. We have arrived at Cavafy's final residence. Not the sun, after all, but a rectangular white slab, with the simple words, beneath a cross, in Greek letters:
CONSTANTINE CAVAFY
POET
But perhaps, in the end, his final resting place is not beneath this cold rectangular slab either. The Greek word "poet" on the white marble reminds us that his current home is identical with his lifetime residence and that particular address was neither 4 Sharm el Sheikh nor Alexandria itself but rather the mysterious and abiding Greek language. That home, at least, is not subject to rent hikes, dispersion by heirs, legal restrictions or the budget priorities of a nation.
Always you will arrive in this city. Do not hope for any other--
There is no shop for you, there is no road.
As you have destroyed your life here
in this little corner, you have ruined it in the entire world.
