Listening to Fado where it's Sung

Web exclusive  2011-07-26 As the fat lady sings for the Euro zone, the Portuguese are doing what they've done for more than a century when things turn south: seeking refuge in the melancholic strains of fado, Iberia's signature species of torch music.

It’s midnight at Clube de Fado, a hothouse for Lisbon’s inimitable musical form, and the original crowd of a couple hundred or so has receded to a few dozen hardcore enthusiasts. Guitarist and fado great Mario Pacheco is about to open the final set of a two-hour performance, and he begins by introducing a red-haired songstress in a black dress with lace at the shoulders and her hair tied back in a bun. She is Dutch, a native of Holland, though she has adopted fado and all its Iberian angst. Maria Fernandez, as she is introduced, is clearly nervous – this is her debut performance at the club – though the audience is sympathetic and eager to be wooed.

Pacheco, tall and distinguished with a patrician brow and tightly clipped moustache, deploys some light banter to keep Fernandez’s stage freight at bay before they ease into the first number, a spirited ballad in three-quarter time. As the piece builds, he and his two bandmates – one on rhythm guitar, the other on bass fiddle – exchange wry glances as if sharing a private joke. Her inhibition vanquished, Fernandez warms to the beat and deftly nails the high notes. When the set ends twenty minutes later, she owns the room.

Romance and redemption is a staple offering in the fado bars of Lisbon, and no one serves it better than Pacheco, the 57-year-old fadista who is widely acknowledged as a master of the genre. He first picked up a guitar at 14, a relative latecomer, and within a few years was good enough to accompany his father, himself a classically trained musician. At 17 he attended a local conservatory, where he studied the guitar and the violin, and by his early thirties he was writing his own compositions. At 36, as one of Lisbon’s top classical guitarists, he switched to the Portuguese guitarra, a flat-backed, oval instrument that looks more like a mandolin than its conventional, hour-glass shaped counterpart. He’s been playing fado ever since.

“My father and my friends said they were losing a great classical guitarist and gaining a bad Portuguese guitarist,” Pacheco says with a grin. “That was my best motivation to learn fado.”

Often compared to the blues, fado – literally “fate” – identifies with the Portuguese concept of saudade, a yearning for what has been lost and what has never been attained. It evolved more than a century ago from the Alfama casbah and, like the blues, has remained true to is roots. “The tradition of fado runs deep,” Pacheco says between sets. “It is a timeless form of expression and its importance is increasing.”

Indeed, as Portugal packages itself into a high-end tourist draw, fado is evolving into a national brand. Young musicians throughout Europe are coming to Lisbon to learn the art, says Pacheco, and business at fado clubs has never been better. As if to reinforce the point, club impresario Louis Vaz de Camos, who keeps his eye on the crowd through a peephole in the wall that separates the bar from the stage, arrives to hustle Pacheco to start the next set.

Will success spoil fado? Unlikely, says Pacheco. Fans of the music are too devoted, too romantic, to over-commercialize such a national treasure. “Fado is not for the masses,” he says. “No matter how many people are in a room listening, they’re always seated. That’s how much respect they have for the music.”

Romancing Alexandria

Web site exclusive June 2011 The fish auction begins with the close of 4 a.m. prayers, after the fleet of green-prowled fishing boats dock and unload their catch. Dozens of hawkers barter over wooden crates filled with eels, prawns, crabs, sardines, mullets, and sea bass so recent from the sea their scales glisten and their gills quiver. The stone floor is worn and gleaming from a century of use. Exposed light bulbs dangle from a cat’s cradle of electrical wire below an arched ceiling and the clerestory of a church nave.

I am in a sacred place: the fish market of Alexandria, Egypt’s oldest city and the fountainhead of some of the best seafood in the eastern Mediterranean.

“It’s a good day’s catch,” says Wagih Yusef, who weighs each buyer’s haul from the market’s cast-iron scale. “There’s been strong winds lately and that churns up the fish.”

Wagih has to bellow to make himself heard above the clamor of the bidding and his eyes never deviate from the square counterweight that hovers above the scale. He appears to be in his mid-30s and, like most of the men in the fish market, has been working here his entire life.

A few blocks north is Kadura, a café on the demand side of Alexandria’s most ancient industry. Patrons choose from the day’s catch from ice-filled cartons in a tiled stall no bigger than a walk-in closet. There is al fresco seating on sunny days, with butcher paper for tablecloth and small dishes of the house’s own chili powder. Save for the occasional clang and whir of a tram car passing along Al Ghorfa al Tiganiya Street, Kadura is a primitive but quiet refuge.

Kadura was opened in 1955 by Kadura Abdel Salem. He passed away a little over three years ago, and his sons Mohammed, 25, and Kader, are now running things. They tell the story about how one day, when their father was very young, he and their grandfather went out on a boat that wasn’t much different from the trawlers that bob in the harbor today, though without the diesel-powered engines, electronic navigation devices and power winches. There was a huge storm and the boat almost capsized and when they finally returned safely to shore, Abdel Salam was forbidden by his father from ever fishing again.

Instead, when he was 19 years old, Abdel Salem opened a café with some tables and wicker chairs he had bought for 8 piasters each. Soon, he was hosting Alexandria’s governor and his aides for lunch and during the summer the ministers came from Cairo for Kadura’s signature calamari. Within a few years he opened a restaurant that fronted the sea until the municipality reclaimed a strip of land along the coastline.

Back then, say Alexandrians old enough to remember, the fisherman would tether their boats to the windowpanes of apartment buildings.

* * *

On a recent visit to the city, I met Dr. Galal Araf, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Alexandria, while he was summering with his family at their bungalow at Montazah, a gated beach resort and a former royal compound of the Egyptian monarchy. Dr. Araf, a proud, self-contained man, was seated razor-straight in pleated gabardine trousers and a pressed short-sleeved shirt as he watched his children and grandchildren chat and frolic in the briny Mediterranean air. I asked him about the old days, the twilight time of Alexandria as a City of the World.

“Alexandria,” he told me, his eyes suddenly alight, “was filled with Greeks and Maltese, Italians and Jews. There was a quarter of the city where residents spoke only Greek. People from all over came to Alexandria to see the latest fashions from Europe. Even then, we were rivals to Paris, London, and Rome.”

It’s true that “Alex,” as she is known among her many admirers, has been showing her age. She hasn’t yet recovered from the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian president who in the 1950s nationalized the economy and drove out the Jews and the foreigners. But there is always the harbor, a crescent-shaped setting for a village founded by Alexander the Great and destined to become a pearl. It was the harbor that lured the young Macedonian here in 332 BC, and its bounty has sustained Alexandrians through a turbulent history. Most Middle Eastern cities have gone to seed over the last few generations, but few have slid from such sublimity and none with such grace. Once a flamboyant cosmopolitan with a strong Greek accent, Alex is now Muslim and staid. But even veiled, the old girl can still turn heads.

And in fact, the city is enjoying a mini-renaissance. The library has been reopened as a state-of-the-art temple of multi-media learning and on any given day is filled with student groups, including American ones. Western tourists are rediscovering Alex and some of the old villas, inns, and café’s are getting long-overdue makeovers. Hotels, including the new Four Seasons, are doing a brisk trade hosting international conferences – a testament to the city’s position as an enclave of stability in an otherwise dodgy neighborhood.

Take the Cecil Hotel, for example. Immortalized in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet as the haunt of libertine expatriates and host to such giants as Somerset Maugham, Henry Moore, and Josephine Baker, the 89-room Cecil has been completely restored. The lobby is an Edwardian rapture, with high ceilings, extravagant crown molding, granite floors polished to the highest sheen, and stately chandeliers. The original elevators, with their intricately tiled parquet floors, have been rehabilitated. Le Jardin, the hotel coffee shop, is the de rigueur spot for lunching ladies and power-espresso breaks; from a window table you can enjoy a languid, if somewhat pricey, lunch in the reflection of a sparkling sea and the city’s iconic horse-drawn carriages clopping along the corniche.

From a perch like that, it’s easy to see how Alexandrians can cling to the conceit that they are more cultivated and urbane than their counterparts in noisy, congested Cairo. As Mountolive, Alexandria Quartet’s debonair but ill-fated diplomat remarks, “Alexandria is still Europe, not the Egypt of rags and sores.”

* * *

An Alexandrian patisserie

I first visited Alexandria nearly a decade ago to write about the re-opening of its famous library, the centerpiece of its restoration drive. But it was the city’s crumbling beauty that hooked me. If Alexandria was Norma Desmond, the aging screen goddess in Sunset Boulevard, I was Joe Gillis, the frustrated writer (minus, sadly, William Holden’s rakish smile and heroically cleft chin) who succumbs to her charms. It was the renowned Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, one of Alexandria’s most distinguished residents, who wrote of Alexandria as a jewel, “however much smaller it’s become.” Strolling along Alex’s corniche, you can almost hear her reply with a riff off Norma’s classic rejoinder:

I’m STILL big. It’s civilization that got small.

Things Greek – the food, the empire, Cavafy’s verses – and Alexandria’s golden age inhabit one another like old lovers. From its founding until only a few decades ago, Alexandria was a Greek city. Half its population was Greek and Greeks dominated the economy and culture. And while greatly diminished in size, those that remain are defiantly holding on. They congregate each night at the Greek Club on the community’s vast compound of neo-classical schools, community centers, gymnasium, and theatres. The buildings, radiant in faded pastels, date back to the late 19th century and the grounds are immaculately groomed with date palms, citrus trees, and hedgerows. The club itself is unexceptional – just a dozen tables and a bar tended by the Greek-Armenian Aliko, who quietly fills members’ glasses from their personal bottles of scotch that are kept at the bar. Johnny Walker Red is the preferred brand, and single-liter bottles of it, their owners’ identified by names jotted on paste-it notes, line the bar shelves like prizes at a shooting gallery. The music – Aliko also spins disks – alternates between Greek pop and old jazz standards.

It is here where I met Maroun Ayac, a Lebanese optician and restaurant owner whose family came to Alexandria from Beirut in 1898. His short-sleeve shirt is opened at the abdomen and his sunglasses are perched high on his head. He is tanned, with several days growth of grizzled beard. In Alexandria, even eye doctors look like old salts.

At 50, Maroun is young enough to remember Alexandria when it sizzled. He rattles off the names of the dozens of nightclubs, all of them now closed, that used to swing until dawn. Sunbathers on Alexandria’s beaches used to rival those of the French Riviera for daring, he says. Today, women and girls swim in their clothes for fear of offending religious conservatives.

There is nothing fin de siècle about the Greek Club, however. “We are the last of the Greek way,” Maroun says. “But we stick together and we know how to live.”

Aliko brings us olives, Greek salad, spanakotyropitakia – small pastries filled with cheese and spinach – and Armenian pastrami. He refills my glass with scotch just as Rosemary Clooney slinks into Come On-A My House.

* * *

Alexandria has been ardently romanced throughout her 1,200 years. After Alexander came Ptolemy, whose lighthouse was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte turned Egypt into a French vassal, only to lose it to the British in an epic sea battle off the Alexandrian coast. (There is as much to see beneath the Alexandrian port as there is above it, with its trove of sunken Greek ceramics and sculpture, the ruins of the lighthouse – it was destroyed by an earthquake in the 14th century – and the remains of Bonaparte’s fleet.) Less than a decade later, an Albanian foot soldier named Muhammad Ali emerged as the Ottoman empire’s viceroy in Egypt, and under his brutal but shrewd administration the city became the entrepot of the global cotton industry. The city’s commodities exchange was one of the world’s most heavily traded.

For the next century, Alexandria reigned as the Mediterranean’s most multicultural city. Vibrant diasporas plied the cotton trade and invigorated the place with related commerce – textiles, garments, finance – to complement the city’s eternal communion with the sea. The Greeks ran the restaurants and cafés, the British the bureaucracy (naturally, as they were Egypt’s occupying power until 1945), the Swiss administered the hospitals and nursing facilities, the Armenians owned the gold shops, the Italians designed the buildings, the French ran the bakeries and patisseries, and the Maltese – as Britain’s Ghurkas of the Mediterranean – patrolled the streets.

Alexandria provided sanctuary, and sometimes exile, for royals and heads of state. Egyptian kings, first Fuad and then his son, Faruk, summered in Alexandria’s palatial villas, along with their ministers. Writers and poets like Cavafy, Durrell, and E.M. Forrester thrived off Alex’s Levantine romance and intrigue. Artists, musicians, and couturiers drew inspiration from its kaleidoscope of cultures and mores.

Ahmed Nasser was there. He is 87 and, with the help of his son Yacoub, is still owner and proprietor of Athineos, one of Alexandria’s oldest and most popular cafes. At the age of 14, he left his small village to come to Alex. “Every summer,” he told me, “living in Alexandria was like attending a wedding. The king and his cabinet ministers would come here and we’d all be working together, we Muslims, Jews, and Christians, and no one wanted to leave because of the weather and the smell of the sea.”

Then came Gamal Nasser, the Prometheus to Alexandria’s Mt. Olympus, who stole its pyre of light. It was Nasser, they say, who cast the Jews out from Egypt during the Arab-Israeli wars and then seized foreign-owned businesses. Ahmed, a Muslim, bought Athineos in 1968 from the widow of its founder Constantin Athineos after she’d finally had enough and returned to Greece.

Out of respect for Athineos’s founder, Nasser kept the name. In tribute to the past, he and Yacoub have carefully preserved the café as it was the day they bought it 41 years ago, with its grand white columns, polished granite floors, dark-wood wainscoting, and an authentic French patisserie. They’ve even opened a Greek bar in the hopes of luring back the Greeks.

That way, when the world returns for a table with a sea view, it will be as if no one ever left.

 

 

Brothers Unburdened

As paranoics inside Washington’s Beltway agonize over the prospects of a strong showing by Islamists in Egypt’s upcoming elections, a very different reality is cohering on the streets of Cairo: the Muslim Brotherhood - historically the country’s most powerful and disciplined Islamist movement - appears to be breaking up. The Brotherhood’s youth league has launched its own party with a progressive charter that is less about religious outreach and devotion than it is about social justice. A senior leader of the Ikhwan, as the Brotherhood is known in Arabic, who has long endorsed engagement with Egypt’s secular and non-Muslim constituencies, is running for president without the group’s official blessing. A debate within the Ikhwan about its core identity, muffled for survival’s sake under despots who suppressed free thinking of any kind, is ventilating subversively in the oxygen-rich air of the post-Mubarak era.

I was recently given an insightful tour through the Brotherhood’s molten political terrain by Mohammed Al Gebba, a young Ikhwanist who joined the group two decades ago as a high school student. A native of the coastal city of Damietta but for years an urbane Cairene, Al Gabba has evolved from ardent fundamentalist to Islamist humanist. It is a not uncommon journey in a political movement that, like its secular rivals, is scrambling to find its place in Egypt’s second republic.

“Politics and outreach are not reconcilable,” Al Gabba told me in Café Cilantro, a secularists enclave just off Tharir Square, the epicenter of the revolution that consumed the world for eighteen days ending February 11. “One compromises the other. What is needed is dialogue, and there is no dialogue in the Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Ikhwan is balkanized, according to Al Gabba, along ideological as well as demographic lines. Though he sympathizes with its youthful renegades, he chose to remain in the Brotherhood as a cadre to its relatively liberal wing despite the leadership’s rightward lurch in elections last year. It is the former, rather than the latter, he says, that is most faithful to the vision of Hasan Al Banna, the revivalist imam who founded the Ikhwan in 1926. “Our principals were his principals,” he said. “They are values of tolerance and dialogue.”

Al Gabba was deeply involved in the clashes between the confederation of secularists and Islamists, Christians and Muslims, and Communists and Capitalists against repeated onslaughts by regime loyalists to clear Tharir square. Having outlasted Mubarak and his hangers on, the revolution is now under threat by the proxies of foreign powers - not Israel and America, the usual suspects trotted out by demagogues of the ancién regime - but Iran and Saudi Arabia, tactical allies against the Arab world’s liberal awakening. “This is the one thing they can agree on,” says Al Gabba. “Their objective is to create chaos, to provoke the Egyptian army into oppression, to destroy the revolution.”

Conspiracy theories are as intrinsic to Egyptian politics as parsley is to Tabouleh, if for no other reason that so many of them have turned out to be more truth that fantasy. As proof of Saudi-Iranian perfidy, Al Gabba cites a seminar, to be held on July 1, on the salience and inevitability of sharia law in Egypt. A prominent Salafi sheik, he says, has declared the event to be the inspiration of Saudi Wahhabists working in tandem with remnants of Mubarak’s security apparatus.

If such intrigues do exist, according to Al Gabba, they will backfire. After nearly six decades of authoritarian rule, he told me, Egyptians will settle for nothing less than a secular republic. Candidates fielded by the Muslim Brotherhood in the coming election may do well, he allowed, but they are unlikely to capture more than a quarter of parliamentary seats. He predicts that in the next national ballot five years from now, Ikhwan members will campaign as independents whose loyalty to the state and devotion to faith are secularly distinct from each other.

Otherwise, he said, “the Brotherhood will bring itself down. It will ease to exist as we know it.”