Doctor Criminale

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘“Bazlo caro, eat something,”’ said Ildiko, beside me, mim­icking, ‘See how she pushes him around? Poor man, he might as well have stayed with Sepulchra, yes?’ ‘Belli has quite a few qualities Sepulchra lacks these days,’ I said, watching as Miss Belli began stuffing small morsels into Criminale’s upturned mouth. ‘Oh, you wish you could run away with her as well?’ asked Ildiko. I looked at her; her attitude seemed increasingly strange to me, but it was clear that the sight of Criminale on his erotic holiday had done her no good at all. I took her by the arm and led her outside onto the deck. It was chilly by now, and nearly dark. Our bright-lit steamer was thumping on down the lake, Swiss flag flying out behind. Where were we headed: Geneva, Evian, Montreux? I saw we were close to the shoreline, and there were odd illuminated glimpses of finely latticed vineyards sloping down to the edge of the lake. We must have been going toward Vevey and Montreux.

  ‘Don’t they look happy?’ asked Ildiko, very bitterly, I thought, ‘I remember once when he was just like this before.’ ‘When was that?’ I asked. ‘When he first left Gertla for Sepulchra,’ said Ildiko. ‘Gertla?’ I asked. ‘His second wife, you remember her, I think,’ she said, ‘You saw her nude in Budapest.’ ‘I did what?’ I asked. ‘Her photograph,’ said Ildiko, ‘You saw her nude in Budapest. He was married to Gertla many many years. Oh, some affairs, of course, he is a Hungarian man, after all. Then one day Sepulchra walked into his life. Not as she is now, she was a painter, very very pretty. So they had this nice thing, you know about these nice things, and he left Gertla. He was all excited, happy, looking quite different, just as he is here.’ ‘Well, why not?’ I asked. ‘Because it is when he is with women that Bazlo always destroys himself. Now he does it again.’ ‘Destroys himself, how?’ I asked. ‘He lets them make nonsense of his life,’ said Ildiko.

  This rather baffled me: the last thing the Criminale I had just seen resembled was a man who was destroying himself, making nonsense of his life. Although I was no expert on love (a fact that must be fairly clear to you by now), it seemed to me that any rational man (and Criminale was above all things a rational man), faced with the choice between fat, fussy Sepulchra and beautiful Miss Belli, would be likely to make the same decision. No doubt I saw only what I wanted to see, as we all do, and Ildiko saw something else (in fact she must have seen quite a lot else). ‘Anyway, I think it’s time one of us spoke to him,’ I said. ‘But he will think we are following him,’ said Ildiko. ‘We are following him,’ I said, ‘Now we have to get in closer. Anyway, I thought you wanted to warn him.’ ‘I warn him?’ asked Ildiko, ‘Why?’ ‘About little Miss Black Trousers,’ I said. ‘Let her have him if she wants to,’ said Ildiko bitterly. ‘I thought you were worried for him,’ I said. ‘Why should I worry?’ asked Ildiko, ‘He is looked after so nicely by this other person.’ ‘You came all the way from Budapest to talk to him,’ I said. ‘Well, now I don’t like to,’ said Ildiko, Talk to him if you like, but do not tell him I am here. Do whatever you like, but all I like is to be left alone and get something a little to eat, okay? Do not come.’

  And Ildiko walked angrily off, disappearing inside the ship. I stayed there chilly against the ship’s rail, feeling very confused. I was a young man then – I still am to this day, this very day – and the truth is that for all my fondness for Ildiko (and I was, and still am, very fond of her indeed) I was finding her very difficult to handle and understand. In fact I wasn’t an inch anywhere nearer understanding her complicated and mercurial temper than I was on the day I met her with Sandor Hollo in Buda at the Restaurant Kiss. Of course I too had my own faults and failings. I’m something of a New Man, of course, but I realize from the magazine articles that I do lack some of the graces and subtleties I probably ought to possess. And when it comes to the crunch no one would admit more readily than I will that I’m not always the most thoughtful of lovers or the most understanding of friends. I had my obsession, of course, as she presumably had hers. If Ildiko was difficult, I suppose I was too.

  So, there at the rail, I tried to think what had gone wrong with our joint quest for Criminale, and why we were at cross-purposes. It was true that, in the simple matter of finding adequate hotel accommodation, I had been less than an ideal travelling companion when I found us single bunks at the Hotel Zwingli. I regretted it already, and I’d made up my mind to shift camp next day down to the Hotel Movenpick, a very modern-looking chain hotel I’d spotted just a little way further down the Ouchy promenade, where good old-fashioned Swiss Calvinism was more likely to be tempered by some good old-fashioned Swiss commercialism. But even then of course it would be nothing like the splendours of the Beau Rivage Palace, which I could never provide. In fact nobody could, except for Bazlo Criminale. But perhaps that was the point. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure something more than a bad room in a bad hotel was making Ildiko behave in this angry and temperamental way.

  I put it down to jealousy. It was clearly a part of her temperament; she had even been jealous of myself and Cosima Bruckner, one of the more unlikely sexual pairings to come out of the great dateline computer in the sky, it seemed to me. At Barolo, I had thought I understood her feelings. Here was Bazlo Criminale, breaking with Sepulchra at last, looking for some new erotic excitement in his life. There was Ildiko, back in his space again, but instead he’d opted for some brand-new Italian charmer he had just met at a conference. In spite of what she’d seen at Barolo Ildiko had insisted on following him to Lausanne. Yet she had kept in the background then, just as she did now. So what had changed, why was she suddenly so angry with him now? It seemed to me it was at Barolo, on the night of the storm and Criminale’s sudden departure, that her mood had really changed. Something new had begun to agitate her, but I couldn’t see at all what it was. No, the simple fact was I just didn’t understand Ildiko, and as I say I’m not really sure I do to this day.

  I was still there, out on the cold deck, watching the Swiss lights flicker by on the shore and thinking these confused thoughts, or something very much like them, when someone came and leaned on the rail beside me. I turned, and there was a neat young man with a small beard, in a plum-coloured jacket, with a congress briefcase tucked under his arm. There then followed a familiar conference ritual, which resembles that of dogs sniffing each other; I checked his lapel badge, he checked mine. I saw that he was Hans de Graef, from somewhere in Belgium, and he saw that I was – well, whoever I was, because whoever I was I had completely forgotten by now. He said he knew my city very well, and how interested he was in the fact that it would not be called by that name for very much longer. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘But I thought you all voted to call it Saint Petersburg now?’ he said. ‘Oh yes, that’s right,’ I said, trying to remember what the place was called before; and I quickly explained that, over the years of glasnost, I had chosen to move to the West and pursue my photographic career in the more attractive studios and dark-rooms of the British Isles.

  He then began addressing me in Russian; I had to explain that I refused to speak my language until my native city regained its traditional name. He seemed, I thought, a little suspicious, but began talking to me about the day’s congress proceedings, especially the intense discussion of the Feminist Non-Erotic Nude in Scandinavia, which had provoked such fury right after lunch. I must have acquitted myself quite well on this, though, because he switched to more general conference gossip, which provided me with a good deal of useful information. I now learned that the congress was in its second day, that there had been a good deal of bad blood between the Americans and French until they had been united by common hatred of the British, and that it was very unfortunate that Susan Sontag had failed to come; apparently she had preferred to attend some writers’ congress somewhere in northern Italy.

  I shifted the talk, or maybe he did, to Bazlo Criminale. Had he, I enquired, been a sudden new addition to the congress programme? No, he said, glancing at me in obvious surprise; he had been in the congress information from the very beginnin
g. In fact that was why he, de Graef, had chosen himself to come. He was, after all, the leading thinker in the field. I nodded, explaining that I myself had been a very late enroller. But his news came, of course, as a considerable surprise. Criminale hadn’t, as I’d been supposing, suddenly descended at whim on the conference, like some god from heaven deciding to lower his golden car. His flight from Barolo to Lausanne was not sudden after all; it had been down there in his diary all the time. But then why was it such a surprise to Professor Monza, Mrs Magno and the Barolo organization, who had sent security guards out everywhere to look for him? And if it wasn’t a sudden flight, did it mean that Criminale had all the time intended to go back to Barolo after all? And did that mean he hadn’t abandoned Sepulchra either, and that his trip with the splendid Belli was no more than a joyous weekend fling?

  And it now began to occur to me that, having totally failed to understand Ildiko, I had also totally failed to understand Bazlo Criminale as well. In fact from that moment onward, the things I thought I had understood began to grow ever more obscure. Just behind the two of us, in the saloon, the band was going through its eclectic repertoire, which seemed to range from ‘Mirabelle, Ma Belle’ to the latest Madonna hits. The decks of the vessel bounced; the erotic photographers were clearly in the best of spirits. Then, glancing through the port, I suddenly caught another, momentary glimpse of Bazlo Criminale. He was twirling and turning in a stiff and stately waltz: rather surprisingly, since the band was playing something entirely different. I couldn’t, from this angle, see his dancing companion, though the dress in his arms was clearly not the bright orange garb of Miss Belli. And there was a moment, though it made no sense to me at all, when I actually thought the partner in his arms was Ildiko, who was so determined not to speak to him.

  But just then we were both interrupted by a very physical-looking young Frenchwoman – she was strapping, entirely bald, and wearing what seemed to be a bathing-dress; in fact in every detail except the grease she appeared indistinguishable from an Olympic swimmer – who came over to us, seized young de Graef by both hands, and demanded he come to the dance-floor. He smiled at me apologetically – I rather gathered that this was exactly what he had come out onto the deck to get away from – and then I was left alone again, leaning over the rail, listening to the water splash and crash in the paddle-boxes below me, and seeing the lighted streets and rising towers of a reasonably sized lakeside town come out of the darkness ahead. Then a moment later, someone else joined me by the rail, puffing somewhat, wiping his brow with a handkerchief. I turned, and saw, to my complete surprise, that it was Bazlo Criminale.

  12

  I do not know whether Bazlo Criminale recognized me . . .

  To this day, I have no idea whether – as we stood there on the cold deck of the steamer on Lake Geneva, leaning over the side like two passengers on a transatlantic liner, very probably doomed – Bazlo Criminale recognized me, or whether I was some obscure grey figure in the darkness to whom he by chance began to talk. If he had some idea who I was, he certainly showed no surprise at seeing me there. Perhaps, given that he lived in the higher realm of thought, to him one congress was so like another, one congress face so like another, maybe even one congress lover just like another, that every situation merged into one. Maybe his reaction was somewhere between the two: he knew me, and he didn’t know me; I was both satisfyingly familiar and totally obscure. He was the elephant, I was the flea – that very convenient thing, the quiet young man who was interested in him but in no way represented a rival or a threat. At any rate, there I was, a someone; he began to talk.

  ‘You don’t dance, I see,’ he said, wiping his sweating brow, ‘Perhaps I should admit myself I am too old for this kind of thing.’ ‘Oh, surely,’ I said. ‘You know, when I was young, sex was such a wonderful discovery,’ he said, ‘My young friend, I will tell you something important, but it will take you a long time to believe it. When you reach a certain age these things cease to be a great discovery and turn into a bad habit.’ ‘Is that possible?’ I asked. ‘These people there talk all day about the erotic,’ said Criminale, waving his hand back towards the dancing photographers, ‘They are like chefs who spend all their time thinking about food but have forgotten what it is like to eat it. But believe me, when you are over fifty, and I am quite a long way past it, sex is like meat, only worth taking if there is a certain sauce with it.’ ‘What kind of sauce?’ I asked. ‘In my case it is power,’ said Criminale, ‘The erotic for me has always something to do with power. A woman to please me must always have a certain grip on power.’

  I found this bewildering. Did the bewitching Miss Belli have a certain grip on power? She didn’t seem the Jackie Kennedy or Joan Collins type to me. ‘No, sex is not so amazing,’ Criminale went on, ‘It is what we confuse ourselves with on the way to something better. It misdirects us and empties us. It is our unfortunate necessity, our incontinence, our error, our folly. Now the women don’t want it anyway.’ ‘That’s very depressing,’ I said, thinking that if this was his current state of mind it must be still more depressing for Miss Belli. ‘It is not an original observation,’ said Criminale, ‘Maybe not even quite true. But truer than I imagined when somewhere a long way from here I set out on my small life adventure.’ ‘And where was that?’ I asked, realizing that this was a chance to find out what I could. ‘A place you have never, heard of, a place you will never visit,’ said Criminale. ‘Veliko Turnovo?’ I asked. He turned and looked at me. ‘You know more about me than I thought,’ he said.

  ‘I read some magazine articles about you,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure whether they’re true.’ ‘Most definitely not,’ he said, ‘But that is so, yes. It was a place to be born in, also a place to leave if you wished to live a significant life.’ ‘You’ve certainly done that,’ I said. ‘You think so?’ he asked, glancing at me, ‘You know, the other day a very nice young lady wrote to me and said she had read my book Homeless, and it had changed her life. I thought about it. How? I wrote it, and it did not change mine.’ ‘You’ve influenced a lot of people,’ I said, ‘Including me.’ ‘Well, it has made me famous, and rich,’ he said, ‘And I suppose one should not despise these things, although I think I do. It has even made me erotic, you know.’ ‘I suppose fame is erotic,’ I said. ‘But let me warn you, the love life of celebrities, which fills up all the newspapers, is never quite what it seems,’ said Criminale, ‘The image is a deception. The description is nothing like the reality. Celebrity is a public delusion for which the world will make you pay. And now where in the world have we got to?’

  ‘Where in the world?’ I asked. I thought at first he was posing me some philosophical question, but he waved his hand grandly at the lake in front of us. ‘Oh, on the lake,’ I said, ‘I think those lights must be Vevey.’ ‘Ah, yes, Vevey,’ said Criminale, ‘Once the exile home of a very great man.’ ‘Oh yes?’ I asked. ‘Charlie Chaplin,’ he said, ‘Do you know Adolf Hitler’s men had strict orders that the Führer must never watch his movies, for the fear that he might think the fool he was watching up there on the screen was himself?’ ‘No, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Those two were born in the same year, 1889, by the way,’ he said, ‘Think of it, Hitler and Chaplin, the fascist and the clown. If you are a photographer, then you must visit the Chaplin Museum here, you know.’ ‘You’ve been there?’ I asked. ‘Of course, I opened the centennial exhibition of last year there myself,’ said Criminale, ‘I found it quite moving, by the way.’ ‘You seem to be a great traveller,’ I said, ‘I gather you go everywhere.’

  ‘No, no, I am not a traveller,’ said Criminale, There are no travellers now, only tourists. A traveller comes to see a reality that is there already. A tourist comes only to see a reality invented for him, in which he conspires.’ ‘Yes, we live in a placeless world,’ I said. He turned and looked at me in a half-puzzled way. ‘Did I perhaps say this to you before?’ he asked. I felt he was just beginning to recognize me; in fact perhaps I was half-teasing him to do so. I
thought it was time to tell him a little of the truth (all of it is more than any of us can manage) and perhaps even hint at the reasons for my interest in him. ‘Something like it,’ I said, ‘I heard you lecture the other day at Barolo.’ ‘Really, at Barolo?’ he asked, looking at me over the top of the cigar he was lighting, ‘Well, I was there. You also? So what did I lecture on?’

  It seemed an odd question: was he testing me, or had he in his high-mindedness managed to forget what he said? ‘You spoke about the end of history,’ I told him. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Criminale, ‘You see, my dear young fellow, history always goes on, always takes a shape, whether we like it or not. Perhaps you misunderstood me.’ ‘That’s possible,’ I said. ‘No, no, of course, I remember it now,’ said Criminale, excitedly shaking his cigar at me, ‘What I was talking about, I think, was the end of homo historicus, the individual who finds a meaning or an intention in history. Yes?’ ‘something like that,’ I said. ‘Oh, there are old men in China who still think history is made with the barrel of a gun,’ he said, ‘But they will go soon to their forefathers, and that will be that. And for the rest of us, well, the past embarrasses us, the future is a chaotic mystery. So we are condemned to an eternal present. We know nothing, we remember nothing. And so we cannot tell good from evil, reality from illusion. And who can guide us to another way? Perhaps you like a cigar?’