Doctor Criminale

by Malcolm Bradbury

  As Criminale did his priestly work, Sepulchra would go scurrying round after him. ‘Dearling, you will be very tired,’ she would say. ‘Not at all, please, please,’ he would answer, ‘Don’t you see, I am in the most stimulating company possible, how could I possibly be tired?’ ‘Up late,’ said Sepulchra, ‘Working too hard.’ ‘Don’t fuss, Sepulchra, but by the way, better to take those notes you made and lock them in our suitcase,’ he would say, ‘You know the old saying: thought is free, but even wise men are thieves.’ This was somehow insulting, but it offended no one, just as his absences offended no one. Criminale had permission; he lived by edgy irony. So the delegates would crowd round, reporting like happy children on the deeds they had so bravely performed in the congress sessions. And on anything, everything, they discussed Criminale had an opinion, a judgement. Constantly he summed matters up with some aphorism so wise it completely excused his absence. It was somehow generally acknowledged that what it took duller minds three hours to deliberate, Criminale, Mr Thought, could sort out and settle in a matter of seconds.

  *

  ‘Ah, what a minda!’ cried Monza on the first day, grasping my arm through his, as we stood there holding pre-lunch drinks on the cold terrace, ‘A minda like quicksilver!’ ‘Yes, he’s impressive,’ I said, ‘It’s a pity we didn’t have him to talk in this morning’s session when Tatyana Tulipova . . .’ ‘But you know such a man is too busy,’ said Monza. ‘Is he?’ I asked. ‘Of coursa!’ cried Monza, ‘He has publishing affairsa! Financial affairsa! Political affairsa! Everyone asksa for him!’ Suddenly there was a stir, as blue-coated servants rushed outside and began meticulously tidying the terrace. A moment later, Mrs Valeria Magno swept grandly through the doorway, and appeared amongst us on the terrace. The chatter stopped, and we all turned to look. The great padrona had arrived.

  There is no doubt she was an impressive sight. She wore some low, loose, splendid Italian designer creation – I suspected that this purchase was what had kept her late the night before, while we all sat waiting for her arrival at the banquet – and had one of those perfect timeless, transcendental faces that between them surgeons and beauticians have somehow secured in perpetuity. I immediately saw from her manner – the way her eyes slid across me and many others and then turned quickly away – that, like most celebrities, she was looking round for some topshot company. ‘Scusi, the padrona,’ said Monza, leaving me immediately, and rushing over to kiss her hand. Mrs Magno glanced at him, then pushed him aside. She had found what she was looking for. ‘Hey man!’ she cried, throwing her arms wide, ‘How are you, buddy?’

  ‘Hey there, my dear lady,’ said Bazlo Criminale, the object of this attention, walking over to enjoy an embrace and a round of kisses. ‘You know I wouldn’t have come if it hadn’t been for you, honey,’ said Mrs Magno, ‘So how’s it buzz­ing? Good congress?’ ‘Believe me, Valeria, quite excellent,’ said Criminale, ‘Our Monza has surpassed himself. Talent is everywhere, wisdom abounds.’ ‘My God,’ said Mrs Magno, ‘Listen, I’m not going to eat a thing unless you sit beside me, okay?’ ‘Okay, of course,’ said Criminale. ‘And how’s Madame Criminale,’ asked Mrs Magno, turning to Sepulchra. ‘So-so,’ said Sepulchra, ‘Maybe I miss lunch. I am putting it on.’ And so when lunch was served a little later, Mrs Magno and Criminale, padrona and protégé, the American cosmopolite and the big gun of culture, sat side by side, their warm chatter, smiles and laughter delighting the entire international gathering. Ildiko had cut morning session, but now she appeared. ‘Oh, aren’t they happy!’ she cried, looking at them, ‘And they even got rid of Sepulchra!’

  That afternoon I slipped down to the village to call Lavinia. ‘Darling, I went to the most wonderful marriage last night,’ she said. ‘Who got married?’ I asked. ‘Figaro, of course, marvellous production,’ said Lavinia, ‘What’s happening, Francis, you’ve been suspiciously quiet.’ I told her about the charming atmos­phere of Barolo, the connubial bliss of the Criminale menage. ‘Francis, Francis, connubial bliss is no good at all,’ she said, ‘This is television. May I remind you of your magnificent treatment, I managed to read it the other day: “Criminale is evidently a man of gargantuan appetites and great lust for life, indeed lust for everything. Political contradictions and secrets litter his path.”’ ‘Yes, I know,’ I said uncomfortably, ‘I was younger then.’ ‘Better get after it, Francis,’ said Lavinia, ‘Remember, plot, crisis, difficulty. You’re not on holiday. You’re an investigator. This is all a façade.’ ‘So what do I do?’ I asked. ‘Penetrate it,’ said Lavinia, ‘Search his room. Make something happen.’

  But the first few days of the congress passed in the same peaceful way. For the season, the weather was remarkably good. The mornings began clear; then, after lunch, there came as if under contract a sudden sharp downpour of rain. The long, well-lit classical views down the lake would close in, and become enclosed gloomy romantic views. The mists shut out the further mountains, the nearer ones would huddle in closer, the cypresses grew darker, the rocks above us blacker. The rain fell in fecund sheets, sweeping through the grounds, overflowing the drains and watercourses. The green grottoes dripped, the spewing fountains ejaculated uselessly against the downpour. The lake bounced, lightning flashed in a great display of daytime fireworks, perhaps revealing a villa no one had noticed creased into a hillside, or a sudden glimpse of some mountaintop monastery far away. Then the rain stopped, the lake settled, the mountains cleared, the birds resumed. ‘God is a gardener,’ the waiters in their Italian wisdom would explain at dinner in the evening, as the writers and politicians ate pasta and drank wine by candlelight and grew, every day, in every way, closer to each other.

  Then each new morning, at least for the first four days, another fine day would show again, shyly, like a maiden. Or shyly the way maidens must once have been, before they all became accountants, heads of hi-tech corporations, or Euro-executives, like the severe Cosima Bruckner. I had not spoken to her again, but each day I saw her there, inspecting me, closely, suspiciously, across the congress room or else the dinner table. She seemed to be watching me, just as much as I was watching Criminale. For, never moving too close, never staying too far away, I was coming ever nearer to Bazlo. And the nearer I got, the more I started suspecting, not him, but my own suspicions, born in Ros’s little house behind Liverpool Street station. They were formed by Codicil’s book, but I now knew it was unreliable, so unreliable it wasn’t even by Codicil at all. Yes, there was a mystery to Criminale, but not the one I’d been looking for.

  Maybe, I thought, the real mystery of Criminale was not political deceits, strange loves, celebrity follies. Maybe it was simply the kind of man he was: the odd and inescapable charisma, the strange intellectual power he exerted, the glimpse he gave of offering some answer to the chaotic times we lived in. As I’d confessed to Monza, he was impressive; he impressed others, distinguished figures from around the world, and he even impressed me, sceptical, doubting, Oedipal. He was a true writer among the writers, a true politician among the politicians, but he also seemed more than either, and better than both. Even his mixture of presence and absence made perfect sense. He was no conference trendy, but he was also effortlessly the core or magnet of the whole conference community. Everyone gathered round, everyone needed him; if he had not been there, somehow nor would they. He held with rocklike splendour to his own positions, kept his independence plainly on display.

  And above all, for someone of his complex political back­ground, he displayed no ideological party line. ‘My theory?’ I heard him say, almost mystified, to someone who asked him, ‘What theory? I am a philosopher against theory. I am not a Karl Marx. For me the problem is not to change the world, it is to understand it. I try to help us understand it.’ From his speech on the first night (the people who attacked it had now come to love it), he showed himself open: anxious, provisional, sceptical, above all ironical. (He had called philosophy ‘a form of irony’, I recalled.) This suited me, a late liberal humanist; I love the stu
ff. Liking my convictions soft, my faiths put to doubt, my gods upset, my statues parodied, my texts deconstructed, I took to his tone at once. He did the same thing, but for reasons far higher than my own. So the less I grew suspicious, the more I grew interested.

  Of course (as you’ll see later), I didn’t really understand him. But like a portrait painter who starts off with a sketch, I was just beginning to get the shape of his head, the line of his style, the outline of his story. Now conferences have an odd way of breeding trust among those whom chance, travel-grants and handy APEX flights happen to throw together, as they constantly do these days. Even when lovers betray you (as they also constantly do these days), there never seems anything malign about a fellow conferee. I took advantage of this, of course, always watching at his elbow. I was able to see his strengths: his great courtesy, his intellectual force, his commanding presence. I could see some of his weaknesses: his obvious arrogance, his ironic evasiveness, his cosmic indifference. I saw he was both tolerant and brusque, generous and brutal. Despite what Lavinia said when I called her (‘Life and loves, Francis, life and loves,’ she cried, ‘Plot, crisis, difficulty!’), I started seeing him for what he must have been all the time without my knowing: a person.

  And these things work both ways round: if I was increasingly trusting him, he was beginning to trust me. Even though Ildiko had briefly tried to introduce us on the terrace that first night, I knew he had no idea who I was, where I came from, what (thank goodness) I was doing there. One of nature’s great conference-hoppers, he was much too old a hand to waste his time reading lapel badges or conference biogra­phies, especially of those as fameless as myself. He didn’t know my nationality, never mind my name. What seemed stranger was that, even though Ildiko, his Hungarian publisher, had edited several of his books and knew his apartment, he showed no recognition of her either. But if this surprised me, it seemed, when I mentioned it, natural to her. ‘Why should he recognize me? He lives up there in his mind, you know.’ ‘You’ve worked with him,’ I said. ‘Just a little editor for a big man,’ said Ildiko, ‘And I am not even in my right place. I am much too little a someone to be a someone to someone like him.’

  Still, maybe because I was generally not far from his elbow, Criminale began talking to me quite often: over breakfast, over drinks, over lunch, over dinner. And presumably because I was young (in fact, just like at the Booker, I was one of the very youngest there) and willing, he started using me for a few small tasks and duties. If he wanted some newspapers or books picked up down at the small shop in the village of Barolo, or thought some post was waiting down in the small post office (there always was; his post was fantastic), or needed, say, a new silk tie on some sudden whim, he often asked me to slip down there for him – always with the greatest politeness and courtesy. As he explained, he was so busy: there was always this lecture to prepare, this seminar to give, this article to write, this international phone-call to await. And of course I was willing. I saw his world-class letters: from governments in the Pacific, corporations in Brazil, banks in Switzerland, newspapers in Russia and America. I began to understand his whims, his indulgences, his expensive tastes.

  One afternoon after lunch he asked me to go upstairs to his suite to collect some papers (in fact offprints of the article in which he disputed with Heidegger over irony, which he was distributing as conference favours, pretty much as parents hand out balloons at some children’s party). I went upstairs to his suite, unlocked the door; he had given me his keys. The suite was one of the villa’s best; he was after all a guest of honour, a protégé of the padrona. It was set right over the entrance, with a magnificent view along the central line of the formal gardens and onto the finest angle of the lake. The main room, big and vast, had a Venetian mirror on the wall big as a window at Harrods. Tapestries hung everywhere, there was much fine furniture, and a gilded writing-table with an inkstand – what I think is called an escritoire. This was his Barolo sanctum; once more I was in one of the places where he worked. I looked around.

  On the writing-table, just as in the study in Budapest, everything was remarkably tidy. There were several pages of scrawled handwriting; this was no doubt his early morning’s ,. work. I glanced round, then glanced it over; it was in English, and seemed to be an article on Philosophy and Chaos Theory, not yet finished, plainly intended for some learned journal. Apart from that there was little else. There were a few opened letters, some of them letters I had collected from the post office the day before; one in Hungarian, another, strikingly scented, in French, another, a long scroll of financial reckonings, headed in German, and plainly from some bank. No doubt if Lavinia had been here she would have sat down and read everything; but I was not Lavinia, and the last thing I wanted to do now was to spoil my happy congress in paradise. I moved on, saw the door to the adjoining bedroom was open, glanced, without any great curiosity, inside.

  I suddenly saw a strange featureless face staring directly at me. Then I realized what it was: a dummy head, with Sepulchra’s great high wig on it. That was how she managed to transform herself so quickly for her dinner appearance in the evening. The wardrobe door hung a little open; inside I saw a wonderful display – a row of Criminale’s excellent silk suits, his equally rich shirts, his splendid silk ties, all doubtless Hermes or Gucci. Otherwise all was neat; luggage and its contents had been carefully put away, either by the punctilious Criminale, the ever-tidying Sepulchra, or the self-effacing Barolo servants, who saw to absolutely everything. Finally there was a study; every Barolo suite had a large and well-fitted study, the ultimate sanctum for the great scholar. Once again, all was neat. A word-processor sat on the desk; Lavinia would have switched it on and started to decode. I didn’t. Stacked by the wall were several locked suitcases; Criminale had already explained that this was where he kept his papers. He had handed me the key to one. I tried them all, knowing that if Lavinia was here she would have been out with a penknife and trying all these locks by now. But I was still not Lavinia. I found the right suitcase, took out the papers, locked up the case and the door of the suite as I left, and returned to the pre-lunch chatter below, where Criminale smiled graciously and took the papers from me.

  So, day by day, in every way, I felt I was getting closer to Criminale. However, I did find one serious problem on my hands: Ildiko was growing bored. The seminar meetings, which she only attended on and off, did not impress her. ‘Why do they read papers to each other they have printed already?’ she kept asking. ‘They could send those things in the post.’ ‘And if they did, there wouldn’t be a congress,’ I said. ‘But nothing happens,’ she says, ‘Nobody listens to anyone else. The writers don’t like the ministers, the ministers don’t like the writers. Nothing changes, everything is the same. When we all go away from here, nothing will be different.’ ‘I suppose the important thing is the experience itself, people getting together,’ I said. ‘No, I think they have all just come here for a holiday, and they don’t really like to hear these papers at all,’ said Ildiko, ‘Why don’t they admit it?’ ‘Because you can’t get a grant just for taking a holiday.’ Ildiko sat in her armchair and yawned. ‘Well, I don’t have to listen to it,’ she said, ‘I am just a publisher. And I am bored.’

  ‘All right, you’re a publisher, why don’t you go and get hold of Criminale?’ I asked. ‘Because I haven’t done what I like yet,’ said Ildiko, ‘I was never in the West before, I like to enjoy it. I want you to take me shopping.’ ‘You went shopping in the village,’ I said. ‘That is not shopping,’ said Ildiko, ‘In Cano at the end of the lake there is Next and Benetton. Tomorrow why don’t you take me there?’ ‘Ildiko, there’s only one boat in the morning, another in the evening,’ I said, ‘It means missing a whole day, and I can’t be away from Criminale that long.’ ‘Do you find out anything?’ asked Ildiko, ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘I admit there must be more to him than I’ve seen,’ I said. ‘Well, I am tired of being stuck in one place all the time,’ said Ildiko. ‘You said it was paradise,’ I
reminded her. ‘Yes, and paradise is dull if you stay too long,’ said Ildiko, ‘Now I want to go out of it. I like to see the West before I go back, yes? Please, forget Criminale Bazlo just for one day.’ ‘I daren’t,’ I said, ‘Supposing he disappears again?’

  *

  I was crass, of course; but it was my solution to the problem that brought a new stage in the quest for Criminale. Looking for a compromise, what I did was to borrow one of the rowing boats that lay tied up beneath the Old Boathouse, which had not acquired its name for nothing. And the next afternoon, when the now familiar lunchtime storm had exhausted itself, I set out to row Ildiko round the island. The trees dripped with rain, the water churned a little. I steered for the head of the promontory, where the craggy peak above the villa rose to its highest and wildest. There were thickly wooded slopes, and steep rockfalls; it was the part of the Barolo grounds that was hardest to reach. Ildiko sat irritably in the back of the boat, tugging her sweater round her. On the shoreline, there were tiny fragments of beach, no doubt idyllic in the summer, no doubt quite chilly at this time of year. We came round an arm of rocks; and there I caught a sudden new glimpse of Bazlo Criminale.

  There on the grey sand he sat, with a bag beside him, buck naked except for a smart blue yachting-cap. He was not alone. By his side was Miss Belli, equally naked, if not more so. She sat stroking his back and talking with Italian vehemence. Suddenly she rose, ran a little way along the tiny narrow beach, stopped at a large rock, and seemed to pose there, wide-legged, straddled against it. Criminale reached in his bag, brought out a camera, and rose to move towards her. ‘See, Criminale Bazlo!’ said Ildiko, stirring suddenly, ‘What is he doing?’ ‘Sit still,’ I said urgently, in a low voice, as the boat rocked alarmingly. ‘And Blasted Belli!’ cried Ildiko, ‘He is with Blasted Belli!’ ‘Quiet, Ildiko, they haven’t seen us,’ I said, ‘Let’s get round the corner, out of sight.’ I heaved at the oars, rowing on hurriedly. Laughter came bubbling from the shore; Criminale, looking like some coarse and hairy satyr, was up close to naked Miss Belli, a Botticelli Venus, framing her through his camera. We turned a bar of rock that hid us from view; sweating heartily, I let the boat drift.