Doctor Criminale (35 page)

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. 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?’

‘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?’

‘Thank you,’ I said, taking one from the elegant case he presented to me. I put it into my mouth, nibbling the end. ‘No, no, not like that, my friend, these are from Castro,
they must be respected,’ he said, taking it back and shaping it neatly with his pocket knife, ‘You see, we have no great story for ourselves, and so we go nowhere. Isn’t it
true?’ ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I said. And so we stood there, two friendly passengers, our cigar ends glowing, staring out over the rail as the lights of Vevey and then Montreux
slipped brightly by. ‘You know, I like this lake,’ he said after a moment. ‘Yes, it’s very pleasant,’ I said. ‘The lake of exiles,’ said Criminale,
‘The people who loved it most were mostly exiles, like myself. All came looking for what you can never find. Rousseau came, looking for human innocence. It was not here. Byron came seeking
political liberty. Not here. Eliot came wanting a relief from the madness of the modern. No good. Nabokov came and thought he would find Russia again. He found Swiss hotels.’ He wasn’t
the only one, I thought.

I looked at him sideways. One thing, I realized, was certain: whatever erotic delights this famous and fortunate man was enjoying – or perhaps not enjoying – in the warm arms of Miss
Belli, they had not diminished by one jot his teacher’s unquenchable desire to instruct and explain. I was full of questions; I wanted to ask him things, to ask him everything – about
his childhood, his politics, his philosophy, his experience under Karl Marx, his life, his loves. But I settled for listening, and why not? That was what you did with Bazlo Criminale. After all, in
the middle of an egotistical world, very short on dignity (the photographers behind us were now turning the party raucous), he had the gift for deepening and dignifying any occasion, for adding
presence and value to any thought. I found now, as I had at Barolo, that I liked the sound of his talking voice, the slow, ironic tone of his ideas, that I liked
him
. I liked his
seriousness, his human flavour, his sense of history. He came out of confusion, but he brought a sort of order. At moments like this I knew there was nothing wrong with Criminale.

‘But the best book of this lake was Edward Gibbon,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. He finished it here, a very great book. You have read it, of course?’ ‘No,
I’m afraid not,’ I said. ‘Do it one day, to please me,’ said Criminale, ‘A book that shows that to all historical epochs there is a finite cycle. Also a book that
began the modern reinterpretation of history. Just as I sometimes think I must someday begin the reinterpretation of philosophy.’ ‘That’s quite a project,’ I said.
‘Well, I think we were put on this earth to perform quite a project,’ said Criminale, ‘I am not like many philosophers today, who think we were put here to perform nothing at all.
Of course they have a reason. All those who tried the great project in modern times have failed. Nietzsche found confusion and it drove him mad. Heidegger was deluded by those Nazis, whom he mixed
up with great philosophers when they were really bully-boys, thugs. Sartre, naive like some girl with all those Stalinists, I knew those people and how they used him. But of course a philosopher is
there to be used.’

‘So why do you try?’ I asked. ‘Because worse is to do nothing at all,’ said Criminale, ‘Today they tell the philosopher, be modest, you have done enough harm. But
how can he be released from philosophy? I think always we need a morality, a politics, a history, a sense of self, a sense of otherness, a sense of human significance of some kind. Now we have
sceptics who invent the end of humanism. I do not agree. The task of philosophy is simply always to reinvent the task of philosophy, to subject our age and our world to thought. You are a young
man, we owe you ideas. And always we need a morality, a politics, a history, a sense of self, a sense of others, a sense of eternity of some kind. So how then do we invent philosophy after
philosophy? That is the question I always ask myself.’ ‘And how do you answer?’ I asked.

‘Well, that there is always something to divert us,’ he said, ‘Love, money, power, celebrity, boredom. Speaking of this I must go and find my young companion. You are
alone?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘I thought I saw you with someone. What is happening?’ The paddles were churning, the ship turning; I looked down
over the side. A small pier was in view below. ‘We’re docking,’ I said, ‘We must be going ashore.’ ‘Ah, yes, Chillon,’ said Criminale, dropping his cigar
carelessly over the side, ‘I must get ready to give my lecture.’ ‘You’re lecturing now, here?’ I asked. ‘I think so, that is how they plan to spoil this nice
evening,’ he said, ‘Don’t you have it in your programme?’ ‘Ah, I lost it,’ I said quickly, ‘Well, I look forward to hearing you.’ ‘Never look
forward to a lecture,’ said Criminale, raising his hand to me, ‘Only look back on it, if it has been worth it. Goodnight.’ He walked off along the deck. He was looking, I suppose,
for Miss Belli, although the relationship between them struck me as far stranger than I had thought before.