Malcolm Bradbury - Doctor Criminale

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 beginning. 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.

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?’