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anywhere else again.
    For some time, the life he lived there was, as he later described it to his friend Timos Malanos, a “double life.” The poet had probably had his first homosexual affair around the age of twenty, with a cousin, during his family’s stay in Constantinople; there is no question that he continued to act on the desires that were awakened at that time once he returned to Alexandria. By day, when he was in his middle and late twenties, he was his corpulent mother’s dutiful son (he called her, in English, “the Fat One”), working gratis as a clerk at the Irrigation Officeof the Ministry of Public Works in the hopes of obtaining a salaried position there. (This he eventually did, in 1892, remaining at the office with the famously Dantesque name—the “Third Circle of Irrigation”—until his retirement, thirty years later.) From seven-thirty to ten in the evening he was expected to dine with the exigent and neurotic Haricleia. Afterward, he would escape to the city’s louche quarters. One friend recalled that he kept a room in a brothel on the Rue Mosquée Attarine; another, that he would return from his exploits and write, in large letters on a piece of paper, “I swear I won’t do it again.” Like many bourgeois homosexual men of his era and culture (and indeed later ones) he seems to have enjoyed the favors, and company, of lower-class youths: another acquaintance would recall Cavafy telling him that he’d once worked briefly as a dishwasher in a restaurant in order to save the job of one such friend, who’d been taken ill. About the youths and men he slept with we know little. We do know, from an extraordinary series of secret notes that he kept about his habitual masturbation, that the amusing Alexandrian nickname for that activity—“39,” because it was thought to be thirty-nine times more exhausting than any other sexual activity—was not entirely unjustified:
    And yet I see clearly the harm and confusion that my actions produce upon my organism. I must, inflexibly, impose a limit on myself till 1 April, otherwise I shan’t be able to travel. I shall fall ill and how am I to cross the sea, and if I’m ill!, how am I to enjoy my journey? Last January I managed to control myself. My health got right at once, I had no more throbbing. 6 March 1897.
    At about the same time he’d settled in his rather dreary job, he began to write and publish seriously. (He had been writing verse, in English and French as well as in Greek, since at least the age of fourteen; and the family’s flight to Constantinople in 1882 inspired a journal that the nineteen-year-old Cavafy, already in love with literature, called
Constantinopoliad: An Epic,
which he soon abandoned.) Apart from that, the life he led, as he got older, wasn’t noticeably different from that of many a midlevel provincial functionary. He enjoyed gambling, in moderation;he played the stock market, not without success. Apart from his constant and extensive reading of ancient and modern historians in a variety of languages, his tastes in literature were hardly remarkable. His library of about three hundred volumes contained a quantity of what his younger Alexandrian friend, the botanist J. A. Sareyannis, later recalled, with a palpable shudder, as “unmentionable novels by unknown and forgotten writers.” An exception was Proust, the second volume of whose
Le Côté de Guermantes
he borrowed from a friend not long after its publication. “The grandmother’s death!” he exclaimed to Sareyannis. “What a masterpiece! Proust is a great writer! A very great writer!” (Interestingly, he was less enthusiastic about the opening of
Sodome et Gomorrhe,
which he dismissed as “pre-war.”) He particularly enjoyed detective novels. Simenon was a favorite in his last years.
    At the turn of the century, when he was in his early forties, he took a few trips to Athens, a city that was largely indifferent to him—as he, an Alexandrian, a devotee