Doctor Criminale

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 ma

‘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 co

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 di

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 di

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 stuff. 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 begi