Marina Warner - Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir

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Esmond and Ilia

An Unreliable Memoir

MARINA WARNER

WITH VIGNETTES BY SOPHIE HERXHEIMER

New York Review Books

New York

This is a New York Review Book

published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright 2021 by Marina Warner

Original artwork copyright by Sophie Herxheimer

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Sophie Herxheimer

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Warner, Marina, 1946- author.

Title: Esmond and Ilia : an unreliable memoir / by Marina Warner.

Description: New York City : New York Review Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021049774 (print) | LCCN 2021049775 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681376448 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681376455 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Warner, Esmond, 19071982. | Warner, Ilia Terzulli. | BritishEgyptCairoBiography. | BooksellersEgyptCairo Biography. | SpousesEgyptCairoBiography. | Cairo (Egypt) Social life and customs20th century. | War bridesGreat BritainBiography. | W.H. Smith & SonEmployeesBiography. | Cairo (Egypt)Biography.

Classification: LCC DT107.2.W37 W37 2021 (print) | LCC DT107.2.W37 (ebook) | DDC 962.05/3092 [B]dc23/eng/20211015

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049774

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049775

ISBN 978-1-68137-645-5

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com.

To Maggie S, dear friend over the years To Hartley and Jack, in hope for the time to come

Ilia and Marina. Cairo, 1949.

Here I am you shall say when you are summoned at any time, to do all the work that is to be done in the necropolis, in order to make the fields grow, irrigate the channels, ferry the sands of the east to the west and west to east. Now indeed when you face these tasks, you shall say, Here I am.

Shabti spell, The Book of the Dead

La lingua va dove il dente duole

(The tongue goes where the tooth aches)

Esmond with his sister and mother. About 1910.

Ilia (far left) with her sisters. Bari, Apulia, Italy, c. 1927.

You are somewhere you know very well and a door appears; when you open it you find yourself in a backstage area youve never entered before. Youre following those you have lost: theyre lingering in obscure recesses, shadowy as the interior of a confessional box when you were a child and you knelt down on the foam-cushioned prie-dieu and leant in towards the battered colander screen and the priest concealed on the other side lifted the half curtain and appeared, a blurred outline through pinpricks of light, and in awe you whispered very low:

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have had unkind thoughts. I have lied. I have said bad things. I stole some of Annies sweets from her drawer.

The verdict when it came was a relief, spoken in an undertone so that the waiting queue could not overhear:

My child, for your penance, say three Hail Marys.

Your sins would grow in seriousness, later, and also in embarrassment.

When you find that place backstage there will be an exit it might take the form of a trapdoor leading down to a disused coal-hole or an area under glass bricks laid in the York stone pavement. At other times, access lies through a picket gate with a broken catch; you bend to adjust it to let yourself through; or a lift might beckon, the shaft rising against the exterior wall, as on tall SoHo buildings from the time they were sweatshops, before conversion into lofts. Pass on, and you will meet the lost there, too, murmuring.

Some time ago I thought Id set this unreliable memoir in a City of the Dead no, not a dream underworld like Hades, but in the City of the Dead in Cairo, where dusty piles of once grand ornate and crumbling tombs stretch beside the elevated motorway that runs alongside the old Mameluk aqueduct; its peaked stone arches are now ruinous, cadenced rhythmically like pages of a book turning as the car I was travelling in grumbled along in the notorious choked traffic of Cairo. Such a cemetery offers cold storage for stories: find a copper ring in the stone flag under a layer of grimy sand and lift it, and then the chambers and corridors snake through the darkness this way and that, with a half-frozen prince moaning or a hexed sister pinned down by the magic of her brothers shirt that she put on to disguise herself when she ran away with him.

If your loved one has been ill for a time, it comes as a relief to go over to the other side, and to enter this place which you learn, from the angel who comes up to you to take your name, is the holding area of memory, where all details will be registered, the story hoard rummaged, and the account of a life entered in the archive. Then you realise that this chamber stretches infinitely on all sides; you now see you are in a glazed capsule, as if you were a ship and the room a bottle, and all around, multiplied as far as you can see, as if in mirrors set at slight angles to one another, more presences are thronging. You realise the glazed vessel is humming: those who have come through before you are passing on information to one another. Its a memory palace the figures evoked in these testimonies cast a shadow on the floorboards or leave a hollow in a bed theyve just quitted; a door will close quietly, footsteps begin to move away, as voices rise and fall from rooms on the other side of the glass. The stories need a stenographer because that was what such a recording angel was called in the period when this inventory was made. Now, she might be using a small handheld device or an app on a phone.