to the contents page.)I wallow in the wineshops and the brothels of Beirut. I didn't want to stay in Alexandria. Tamides ditched me, went off with the Eparch's son to get himself a villa on the Nile, a city mansion. I didn't like to stay in Alexandria. - I wallow in the wine-shops and the brothels of Beirut. My squalid days are sunk in sordid drunkenness. The only thing that saves me, like unfading beauty, like a fragrance that has fixed upon my flesh, is that for two years he was mine, that perfect boy Tamides, mine not for a house or for a villa on the Nile.
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