Doctor Criminale

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 Lausa

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 begi

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 Mado

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.’