Doctor Criminale (24 page)

Our congress group was not by a long way the first to settle here, though earlier visitors would not have enjoyed the modern delights we had. Villas had graced the spot for centuries, but this
one was nineteenth century, raised by the Kings of Savoy, aka ‘Gatekeepers to the Alps’, in their heyday. When that heyday became a low day, it declined with the family. By
Mussolini’s Thirties it was neglected, in the postwar disorder it turned into a ruin. That would have been that but for Mrs Valeria Magno, California socialite, heiress to several fortunes in
cosmetics, oil, and weaponry. Following the old rule of American dynasties, she had married an Italian count, who inherited the villa. He died, she remarried, divorced, remarried, in the familiar
Californian ritual. But she never forgot Barolo. She came back and back, restored it, made it splendid. She flew in designers from here, art historians from there; she repurchased or replaced its
fine furniture, rehung its paintings, summoned back the gardeners, brought it back to life.

What for, though? She had many houses and a California beach life to think about. But in those days before the politically correct, American heiresses still did courses in Western literature.
She remembered Vergil and Pliny and Byron and Lawrence, and decided to make it, again, a place of writing and humanism. Barolo would become a great study and congress centre, where the
world’s great scholars and authors could come to work. To promote the highest levels of creation, no expense was spared. The halls were filled with Cellini statues, Canaletto paintings,
Gobelin tapestries, on a scale to mortify a Medici. In the rooms of the villa the walls gleamed with mirrors, the furniture with gold leaf. Even the four-poster beds had six posts. The modern
scholar, coming on a Guggenheim or a McArthur ‘Genius’ grant, got everything: power showers and jacuzzis, electronic typewriters and computer interfaces, fax facilities to keep
inspiration in close contact with the office or home. Mrs Magno loved famous men around her, the geniuses of the age. No wonder Criminale became one of her prize specimens.

So when the press couldn’t find him, politicians lost track of him, this is where he was. Where could be better? The house-rule was that everyone should be able to work without
interruption. Critics were bumrushed from the door, pressmen flushed out of the shrubbery. Telephone calls were blocked at the exchange, visitors kept on the far side of high walls and electric
fences. Nowhere could have done more to nourish thought and art. When the great scholars and writers woke in the morning, a lake lay in view of every window, framed by cypresses, backed by lush
green hills. White doves flitted in the trees, white-sailed yachts sailed through the vista, fishermen plied their ancient trade in ancient waters. The scholars had small studios in the grounds
– a classical belvedere, a romantic gazebo, each with a computer terminal. Fragrant perfumes blew from the gardens, distant churchbells on the hillsides tolled out the hours of the
hard-thinking day. Sixteen invisible gardeners worked like set-designers to ensure the grounds were perfect for each new dawn. Above the gardens, where the island came to its craggy peak, were wild
woods. But here too nature had been turned to culture – every tree shaped, every cave refined, to form pleasing grottoes where scholars could retire to meditate or, in the softer moments even
scholars have, engage in drip-threatened dalliance with some fellow meditator.

So the great scholars came, for one month, two. In perfect Paradise, they produced. They produced avant-garde novels, speculative, disjunctive poems in projective verse, atonal musical
compositions, studies of the defeat of the bourgeoisie, the end of humanism, the death of narrative, the disappearance of the self. Then, after a good morning of postmodern literary labour or hard
deconstructive thought, they gathered for drinks on the terrace or, if wet, in the indoor bar, before taking a lunch of rare pastas served by the most civil of servants. Afterwards, if tennis or
boating did not beckon, they went back to the chaotic delights of their speculations, until it was time, again, for evening drinks, followed by a rare dinner, where the wit flowed as free as the
select Italian wine, and the wine as the wit, and another day of contemporary authorship and scholarship came towards its close. Even then, Barolo’s work was not yet done. In the Magno
queendom it was as important to refine the night as the day. After dinner, as Italian darkness fell, the hills would resound with the sound of music, as some small chamber orchestra came by to
play, or one of the American atonal composers offered his newest work. The guests down at the Gran Hotel Barolo, usually transient tourists who had tripped in by the hydrofoil for a day or two,
would stop entranced over the tortellini to listen. Often you could see them peering in at the security gates of the villa, staring in a homage to pure wisdom and beauty, until the uniformed guards
moved them on.

But perfection has one problem, as Ildiko and I found the first night, when our lovemaking was interrupted by Mrs Magno’s mechanical arrival. No matter how well protected, perfection is
never eternally safe. Even here in Paradise the scholars and writers suffered constant annoyance. There were the attempted intrusions of the tourists, occasional curiosity from the press. There was
the endless irritating mechanical whine from Italian motorscooters on the autostrada across the lake; even from time to time a tempestuous Alpine storm, which could bring down trees, sink small
boats, and send the paperwork and thought of days flying across the studio. But these interruptions were as nothing compared with the one for which the villa and the Magno Foundation was itself
responsible: the coming of the great international conferences which the villa was also famous for hosting – like the congress on Literature and Power that had brought Ildiko and myself into
their perfect domain.

At these times, Barolo showed its other face. The place where Pliny thought and Byron swam changed from perfect peace to world-shattering tumult. World leaders poured in: heads of state holding
some mini-summit, foreign ministers of the European Community meeting in off-the-record session, negotiators trying to halt some tribal war, American peace missions dreaming of uniting Palestinians
and Israelis, disarmament buffs trying to stop the spread of chemical weapons. With them came security teams and hangdog retinues. The place grew hellish with the sound of clattering photocopiers,
chattering interpreters, motor-bike couriers who came flying up to the villa with news of the collapse of some government or country, the clickety-clacking of helicopters, especially when Mrs Magno
chose, as she often did, to revisit her paradisial domain. Meals were ruined with toasts, after-dinner speeches, and endless announcements – especially if the conference organizer happened to
be Professor Massimo Monza, Mrs Magno’s favoured consultant. Then the resident scholars would retire, hurt, to their rooms. The newcomers would see them just occasionally, wandering like
monks observing vows of silence and solitude, praying that this too would pass, like all the false glories of the world, and Barolo would return to the state of pristine perfection for which it was
always intended.

But visiting conferees, too, expected their own share of Paradise. And over the days that followed Criminale’s edgy, difficult speech, we began demanding ours. Carefully
steered by Monza, the conference began to acquire what, wiser and older now, I see is a familiar congress sensation – the strange feeling that no other world exists, this is the one human
reality, that problems left behind were never real problems anyway, that every convenience, pleasure and delight is yours by absolute right. Then conference personalities begin to emerge,
conference friendships – more than friendships – begin to develop, conference hostilities begin to grow: in our case, between French and Italians, Indians and British, novelists and
poets, postmoderns and feminists, critics and creators, writers and politicians, and, of course, visiting conferees and the regular scholars.

Yet there was always Bazlo Criminale, who proved to be the one reconciling figure. He was resident scholar
and
conference visitor. He was writer and politician, critic and creator. He was
with us, but more than us; he was almost the spirit of the place itself. If his opening speech had at first disappointed, it had the desired effect of setting us disputing about the coming crises
of the Nineties. On this everyone had a prophecy and an opinion, but they always checked it with Criminale. If East fell out with West, South with North, Marx with Freud, he understood both angles,
and had a suggestion or a solution. He expressed internationality, he was the spirit of contemporaneity. He was of his time, he was also eternal. And he never seemed mean, hostile,
parti
pris
. His presence, even when it was his absence, always somehow blessed the occasion. If he was the grand authority, he was also kindness itself. He was benign to everyone, he seemed to listen
to anybody. Whatever you said to him, he responded. ‘Good, that is good, that is interesting,’ he would say reflectively, ‘But now let me put this point back to you. Let us
suppose . . .’

I soon saw that I could never have a better opportunity than here to read, see, and study the nature of Bazlo Criminale, and I began to map his daily life and follow him. The congress day
started early, especially if you were Criminale. He always rose close to dawn, like a monk called by matins, and worked for an hour or so in the lighted window of his suite in the villa. Then, if
the weather permitted (and at the start of the congress it did), he went out and wandered the landscape, of which Barolo had no shortage, evidently sorting his mind. The grounds were vast: a maze
of plant-lined walks and rocky climbs, each finally leading to a shrine, a formal glade, a trysting place, a chapel, a belvedere or pier with a view. In the early morning they were his. In one of
these spots you could generally find him, posed to perfection: Criminale in a dappled glade, Criminale in a prospect of flowers, Criminale gazing on a mountain view, Criminale beside a statue of
Jove, Criminale by a balustrade, Criminale thinking.

As I’ve told you, I’m not myself a morning person. Nor, as it turned out, was Ildiko, who in any case seemed, rather oddly, to have no great desire to intrude on Criminale now she
had caught up with him. As she explained to me, she wanted to wait for the right moment to approach him on the small publishing matter that bothered her. But, while she turned irritably over in the
great emperor bed, and dived back into sleep again, I made a point of rising early, just as the great man himself did. I may have been in Paradise, and Ildiko made it more paradisial; there was no
doubt of that. But I also had a job to do. I also took to walking, or sometimes jogging, in the grounds in the early morning; often, of course, I saw Criminale. From time to time we would exchange
a passing word or two, as one congress visitor to another. But he hardly noticed me; he was plainly abstracted. Meanwhile I observed him. In fact with each passing day of the congress I felt I was
coming just a little closer towards understanding the Great Thinker of the Age of Glasnost.

Breakfast at Barolo was a movable feast, but I made a point of taking it at the same time as Bazlo Criminale. It was a meal no less perfect than the others; the coffee was ideally brewed, the
breakfast rolls were marvels of bakery. Each crackled like twigs, and split open to reveal, inside, an airblown, conch-like spiral of nothingness, a grotto-like core as ornate as those on the
hillside above. ‘Once more quite a perfect morning,’ he would say, coming in, sitting down, his square features suggesting without vanity that he had already done as much thinking since
sun-up as the rest of us would manage in a year. The other members of the congress, emerging from their various residences within the villa or around the estate, would sit down near him, as if he
were a natural magnet: Martin Amis, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Susan Sontag and the others would gather round in unaccustomed silence as he began to talk. Then, after a while, Sepulchra would come
sailing in. ‘Coffee, dearling?’ she would say, and Criminale would turn for a moment and watch her pour the hot milk, until, with the lift of one of his fine, gold-ringed fingers, he
would give her the signal to stop.

Meanwhile, as the group around him grew bigger, Criminale would begin to chase some complicated or curious line of thought. I sat a little way off, at times even jotting down the odd note in my
notebook. I began to see a pattern or two. For instance, Criminale would often mention Lukacs, as if that relationship was obsessive. ‘We know of course he was man of many
contradictions,’ he would say, ‘He had the mind of a Hegel, the historical sense of a Napoleon . . .’ ‘Dearling, that man would not have given one backside glance if all of
his friends were shot,’ Sepulchra would interrupt, ‘Eggs two?’ ‘Yes, two,’ Criminale would say, ‘He sacrificed individuals to thought, yes. But he also
considered it better to live under the very worst of communism than under the best of capitalism. Let us ask: Why?’ ‘Dearling, because they gave him good job and nice apartment,’
Sepulchra would say, ‘Do you need clean spoon?’ ‘Because he truly believed in the progress of history, the great work of the philosophical idea, and he wanted to be there at
history’s making,’ said Criminale. ‘He sold his soul,’ Sepulchra said, ‘Now dearling, please, talk less, eat your eggs two.’ And Criminale would smile, look
round, and say to the others, ‘Now you know why God or maybe history gave men wives. So that, whenever they wished to interpret an important thing, there would always be a dialectic opposite
there to correct it.’ ‘Eat, or you will die,’ Sepulchra would say, ‘Then you will blame me.’

After breakfast, carrying a cup of coffee, Criminale would always retire to the lounge. I wouldn’t be far behind, keeping my observer’s distance; he was the great man, I the
nonentity. Here he would go round the room and gather up all the papers that lay there:
Oggi
,
La Repubblica
,
Le Monde
,
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
,
The International
Herald Tribune
,
The New York Times
. News, the world of big events, seemed a world away from Barolo, and the papers were often a day old at least by the time they arrived. It made no
difference; Criminale would sit down and impatiently gut them for world news like some tough old journalist, keeping up an audible commentary. All things seemed to interest him. ‘I see the
Russians claim there is an international plot to destabilize their economy,’ he would say, ‘We know that. It is called Marxism.’ Or, ‘Another piece about the enigma of
Islam. Why is Islam always thought such an enigma? After all, they chador their women, but we all know very well what is underneath, I think.’ Or, ‘They are asking again who killed
Kennedy. We know who killed Kennedy. Why do we all love these theories of conspiracy? What is wrong with the end of our nose?’