Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
‘How did you get that?’ I asked. ‘Very easy,’ she said, ‘It cost a hundred Swiss francs from one of the delegates. I hope you don’t mind I spend some of your
very precious money?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘But what did you do?’ ‘Of course, I asked if anyone there was Russian,’ said Ildiko, ‘I found one and he sold
his briefcase to me. Those people will sell you anything.’ ‘Ildiko, sometimes you are absolutely wonderful,’ I said. Ildiko had opened the wallet and was looking inside.
‘And sometimes you are a true pig,’ said Ildiko, taking out a conference lapel badge and pinning it onto me, ‘But now you are a quite different pig, a pig called Dr Pyotr
Ignatieff. Take this, before they move away the plank. Then walk through there with me on your arm as if you really belonged to a photo congress, yes?’ We went through the turnstile and up
the gangplank of the waiting ship.
Moments later, the ship’s whistle sounded shrilly, the seagulls, or lakegulls, fluttered and fled, the great metal armatures of the ship’s well-oiled engines began to lever and
turn, the paddle-wheels churned the grey water into a thick white foam. Soon our ship was backpaddling out into the misty lake; we stood on the deck and watched Lausanne and the port of Ouchy
standing off on the shore. In the middle of the shoreline stood the great illuminated façade of the Beau Rivage Palace; somewhere out of sight round the corner was the hidden low frontage of
the Hotel Zwingli, which I now conceded deserved its want of stars in the local guide. Bells clanged, the saloons were bright with a crowd of happy people. Thanks to Ildiko, we were now, for the
moment, members of the Lausanne International Congress on Erotics in Postmodern Photography, and I was Dr Pyotr Ignatieff of Leningrad: quite a change of life.
*
By this stage I was beginning to learn a good deal about congresses and conferences, as anyone would whose task was to follow in the footsteps of Doctor Bazlo Criminale. I had
certain half-formed thoughts on the subject which might in fact have made quite a good paper, if they ever decided to hold a conference on the topic of conferences (and I’ve no doubt that
sooner or later they will). In one sense all congresses are like each other: they all have lapel badges and briefcases, banquets, trips, announcements, lectures in the congress hall, intimate
liaisons in the bar. In another sense every congress, like every love affair (and the two are often closely connected), is different. There is a new mix of people, a new surge of emotion, a new state of the state of the art, a new set of ideas and chic philosophies, a
changed order of things. There are congresses of politics and congresses of art, congresses of intellect and congresses of pleasure, congresses of reason and congresses of emotion.
In this simple scale of things, the Lausanne International Congress on Erotics in Postmodern Photography, which, standing in the entrance of the ship’s saloon, we began to inspect, was
pretty clearly a congress of art, pleasure and emotion. At Barolo, now seemingly so far away, we had been a group of paper-giving introverts. The photographers of Lausanne, who numbered about
eighty strong and had come from everywhere, were clearly a group of ego-fondling extroverts. Writers are sometimes inclined to let their work do the talking; photographers have to let their talking
do much of the work. Helped by waiters who served them Dôle, and Fendant, and various of the local Vaudois vintages, they had quickly turned the ship into a noisy babble. They stood close to
each other, pawing and fussing and fluttering and flapping. They chatted and embraced and laughed and shouted; they kissed and gasped and flirted and posed.
Yes, they were a flamboyant crowd. One woman was bare-breasted. One man wore a Napoleonic uniform. Many had crossdressed: several of the men had on what looked like chiffon bedroom wear, and
several of the women were clad in ties, tweeds or dress shirts and dinner-jackets. They had a band on board, so they began to dance. There was a bar on board, so they began to drink. There was
finger-food on board, so they began to snack. There were celebrities on board, so they started celebrating. There were evidently illegal substances on board, so they began to dream. There were lips
and breasts and buttocks on board, so they began to neck and fondle and nuzzle and suck. They were beautiful people, and they knew they were, so they started to do beautiful and outrageous and
infinitely photographable things. They also photographed themselves doing them, making their circle of unreality complete.
But amid all this glitzy excitement there was one small pool of calm, sanity and metaphysical reason. It surrounded, of course, Bazlo Criminale. We wandered round the ship – the chilly top
deck, the back of the lower deck, the front saloon, the rear saloon – and at first we couldn’t find him. Then there he was, sitting stockily at a table in a corner of the rear saloon.
His great erotic adventure – and, looking at Miss Belli, who sat beside him, it surely must have been a great erotic adventure – seemed to have changed him a little. His humour seemed
much brighter, and the air of domesticity had gone. He wore a bright Ralph Lauren sports shirt under his fine suit, and his hairstyle was no longer bouffanted in the style of Romanian dictators but
had been slicked firmly down in the style of a Thirties seducer. Belli, beside him in her bright orange dress, chattered, laughed, flirted, and constantly touched him on the arm. And in a crowd of
flamboyant celebrities, he seemed somehow to be the true celebrity, as perhaps the constant flash of cameras insisted. I saw now how Criminale and
People
magazine could somehow go
together.
But he was still the hardy philosopher. As at Barolo, a crowd had gathered round, small at first, but growing all the time, listening to what he was saying. I stood on the fringes and caught
some of it. ‘I read in the newspaper today a very interesting thing,’ he was remarking. ‘Always first in the morning when he wakes he reads the newspapers,’ explained Miss
Belli. ‘I see the Japanese have now invented a special new toilet, the Happy Stool,’ said Criminale, ‘It takes what you drop in the bowl each morning and at once makes a medical
diagnosis of it.’ ‘Bazlo, caro, you are disgusting,’ said Belli. ‘In goes your effluent, out from a slot in the wall comes your health report,’ said Criminale,
ignoring this, ‘Too much vodka last night, sonny, now look what you have done with your cholesterol. Maybe even a needle comes into your rump and puts the matter right.’ ‘Bazlo,
caro, eat something,’ said Miss Belli, pushing forward a tray of canapés, ‘All this blasted lovely food and you don’t take any!’ ‘After I read this, how can I
eat something?’ asked Criminale, ‘You see what it means, there is no secret anywhere any more.’
‘“Bazlo, caro, eat something,”’ said Ildiko, beside me, mimicking, ‘See how she pushes him around? Poor man, he might as well have stayed with Sepulchra,
yes?’ ‘Belli has quite a few qualities Sepulchra lacks these days,’ I said, watching as Miss Belli began stuffing small morsels into Criminale’s upturned mouth. ‘Oh,
you wish you could run away with her as well?’ asked Ildiko. I looked at her; her attitude seemed increasingly strange to me, but it was clear that the sight of Criminale on his erotic
holiday had done her no good at all. I took her by the arm and led her outside onto the deck. It was chilly by now, and nearly dark. Our bright-lit steamer was thumping on down the lake, Swiss flag
flying out behind. Where were we headed: Geneva, Evian, Montreux? I saw we were close to the shoreline, and there were odd illuminated glimpses of finely latticed vineyards sloping down to the
edge of the lake. We must have been going towards Vevey and Montreux.
‘Don’t they look happy?’ asked Ildiko, very bitterly, I thought, ‘I remember once when he was just like this before.’ ‘When was that?’ I asked.
‘When he first left Gertla for Sepulchra,’ said Ildiko. ‘Gertla?’ I asked. ‘His second wife, you remember her, I think,’ she said, ‘You saw her nude in
Budapest.’ ‘I did what?’ I asked. ‘Her photograph,’ said Ildiko, ‘You saw her nude in Budapest. He was married to Gertla many many years. Oh, some affairs, of
course, he is a Hungarian man, after all. Then one day Sepulchra walked into his life. Not as she is now, she was a painter, very very pretty. So they had this nice thing, you know about these nice
things, and he left Gertla. He was all excited, happy, looking quite different, just as he is here.’ ‘Well, why not?’ I asked. ‘Because it is when he is with women that
Bazlo always destroys himself. Now he does it again.’ ‘Destroys himself, how?’ I asked. ‘He lets them make nonsense of his life,’ said Ildiko.
This rather baffled me: the last thing the Criminale I had just seen resembled was a man who was destroying himself, making nonsense of his life. Although I was no expert on love (a fact that
must be fairly clear to you by now), it seemed to me that any rational man (and Criminale was above all things a rational man), faced with the choice between fat, fussy Sepulchra and beautiful Miss
Belli, would be likely to make the same decision. No doubt I saw only what I wanted to see, as we all do, and Ildiko saw something else (in fact she must have seen quite a lot else). ‘Anyway,
I think it’s time one of us spoke to him,’ I said. ‘But he will think we are following him,’ said Ildiko. ‘We are following him,’ I said, ‘Now we have to
get in closer. Anyway, I thought you wanted to warn him.’ ‘I warn him?’ asked Ildiko, ‘Why?’ ‘About little Miss Black Trousers,’ I said. ‘Let her
have him if she wants to,’ said Ildiko bitterly. ‘I thought you were worried for him,’ I said. ‘Why should I worry?’ asked Ildiko, ‘He is looked after so nicely
by this other person.’ ‘You came all the way from Budapest to talk to him,’ I said. ‘Well, now I don’t like to,’ said Ildiko, ‘Talk to him if you like, but
do not tell him I am here. Do whatever you like, but all I like is to be left alone and get something a little to eat, okay? Do not come.’
And Ildiko walked angrily off, disappearing inside the ship. I stayed there chilly against the ship’s rail, feeling very confused. I was a young man then – I still am to this day,
this very day – and the truth is that for all my fondness for Ildiko (and I was, and still am, very fond of her indeed) I was finding her very difficult to handle and understand. In fact I
wasn’t an inch anywhere nearer understanding her complicated and mercurial temper than I was on the day I met her with Sandor Hollo in Buda at the Restaurant Kiss. Of course I too had my own
faults and failings. I’m something of a New Man, of course, but I realize from the magazine articles that I do lack some of the graces and subtleties I probably ought to possess. And when it
comes to the crunch no one would admit more readily than I will that I’m not always the most thoughtful of lovers or the most understanding of friends. I had my obsession, of course, as she
presumably had hers. If Ildiko was difficult, I suppose I was too.
So, there at the rail, I tried to think what had gone wrong with our joint quest for Criminale, and why we were at cross-purposes. It was true that, in the simple matter of finding adequate
hotel accommodation, I had been less than an ideal travelling companion when I found us single bunks at the Hotel Zwingli. I regretted it already, and I’d made up my mind to shift camp next
day down to the Hotel Movenpick, a very modern-looking chain hotel I’d spotted just a little way further down the Ouchy promenade, where good old-fashioned Swiss Calvinism was more likely to
be tempered by some good old-fashioned Swiss commercialism. But even then of course it would be nothing like the splendours of the Beau Rivage Palace, which I could never provide. In fact nobody
could, except for Bazlo Criminale. But perhaps that was the point. The more I thought about it, the more I was sure something more than a bad room in a bad hotel was making Ildiko behave in this
angry and temperamental way.
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 Lausanne. Yet she had kept in the background then, just as she did now. So what had changed, why was she suddenly so angry with him now? It seemed to me it
was at Barolo, on the night of the storm and Criminale’s sudden departure, that her mood had really changed. Something new had begun to agitate her, but I couldn’t see at all what it
was. No, the simple fact was I just didn’t understand Ildiko, and as I say I’m not really sure I do to this day.
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.