Doctor Criminale (39 page)

So my problems mounted, and all this took me a long way away from the fortunes (or presumably now the lack of them) of the great philosopher Bazlo Criminale. From time to time, I did spare a
thought or two for the Great Thinker of the Age of Glasnost. Was he off touring the world, his funds severely depleted, with the splendid Miss Belli? Or had he perhaps returned to Barolo, Sepulchra
and the Great Padrona, or gone home to his apartment in Budapest? But if I thought of him now and again, of Ildiko Hazy I thought quite frequently. This was not only because I missed her –
though I did, very much – but also because I had plenty of explaining and compensating to do with the various credit-card companies who had risked their capital in loaning me plastic.
Fortunately the funds so safely invested in the Crédit Mauvais in Lausanne proved more than enough to cover the problem. In fact it was to them I owed my survival over the next couple of
months, when I felt deserted by everyone and everything.

Now and again I thought I might hear something of Ildiko. Of course I had no address for her, and she had none for me. But there were other possible ways of finding out what happened to her. In
fact day after day I checked the newspapers, half-expecting to see Ildiko waving at me through the bars of some Euro-police van, or illustrating some report on a great fraud perpetrated on the
unsuspecting gnomes of Lausanne. The papers were filled with financial fraudulence; it was turning into the great international sport. Half the world’s brokers and investment bankers were
apparently spending Yuletide behind bars that year. Indeed that Christmas it seemed that everyone everywhere was beginning to think – like me – just a little bit Hungarian.

So Yuletide, season of paranoia and general ill-will, seemed that year to be turning even gloomier than usual. But then the winebar I’d once worked for in Covent Garden hired me back, and
I picked up several commissions for
New Musical Express
and various other learned journals. Then one night, as I whizzed round the winebar, clad in butcher’s apron, dispensing a fatal
mixture of cheesecake and Spumante to some big-spending and fast-vomiting seasonal office party or other, one of the group picked himself up from the floor and affably recognized me. He was a
journo ex-colleague who had been convinced by drink that he was a friend of mine, and he advised me of a job he had just been interviewed for and had chosen to turn down. I followed his lead, got
an interview, and found myself in work again, hired to slave on the literary pages of yet another new paper, this time not a Serious Sunday, but an Almost Serious Daily of vague intellectual
pretensions.

Here, as the Gulf War exploded, smart bombs dissolved concrete bunkers and the entire Saudi desert caught fire, I did what I did best. I opined, I interviewed, I columnized, I reviewed, I
freebied. After television, it came as a great relief; as I told you, I am really a verbal person, not a visual person. And I had learned just a few things during my quest for Bazlo Criminale. I
wrote more soberly, more thoughtfully, less aggressively than before. What’s more, Ros in her wisdom had proved perfectly right: my Booker Prize TV appearance had done me a power of good.
Though the winning novel had been virtually forgotten (except in the USA, where it sold millions), everyone remembered the little prick at the Booker. Publishers chased me, all the Fionas gladly
wined and dined me, and gave me interesting literary stories, which I made even more interesting and printed, and I took advantage of all the new writerly acquaintances I had made at Barolo.

Then the Gulf War ended, in a final sickening explosion of horror, genocide, exile, starvation and global pollution, and suddenly, in the gap between crises, the world started reading books
again. With the mess of a new conflict to resolve, it now came time to settle an older one, the Falklands/Malvinas War. In April the resumption of Anglo-Argentine cultural relations was to be
pronounced. Some government agency thought it would be good for my newspaper to cover the event, and a freebie flight was made available. The event was to be declared at the Buenos Aires Book Fair,
the Frankfurt of Latin America, where all the readers and writers of South America gathered once a year. My Arts Editor saw that this meant we could not only cover an important cultural moment but
bring our wise readers up to date on the current state of Magical Realism as well. Selflessly – or rather because she was midway through some foetid love affair that it was dangerous to
interrupt – she turned the assignment down, and passed it on to me.

And so, once again, I made my way to Heathrow, to board the Saturday overnight flight, BA to BA. By now, having travelled rather more lately, I was getting smart enough to realize that
sixteen-hour long-haul flights on jumbo jets are not as amusing as all that. In fact these things are roughly the modern equivalent of the old Greek slave galleys, except even those poor sweating
creatures, chained in rows, were spared the ultimate indignity of having to watch an inflight movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger in it. So, turning on the overhead light, I devoted my trip to a quick
skim-read of the great Magical Realists, Borges and Marquez, Carpentier, Cortazar and Fuentes, writers wise enough to know that history and reality deserved to be treated with a sense of wry
absurdity. Inflight gins and tonics helped my Spanish considerably, and while my bodily fluids drained away into the aircraft pressure system, and Schwarzenegger moved like a mad violent buffoon
round the silent screen in front of me, I read. My neighbours complained about the overhead light. But tough titty, I told them; I’m a verbal person, not a visual person.

We stopped and refuelled in Rio de Janeiro, a row of metal gastanks seen in a glum dawn. Then we flew on south, over the pampa, across the wide gaping mouth of the River Plate, and down to
Epeiza airport. Spring was autumn, there was a sub-tropical humidity. Argentina is not famous for its economic management (but then who is these days?). As I found when I got to immigration, the
country had changed not only the value of its currency but even the name of it, without informing the cashier at my newspaper. There was therefore a lot of fussy trading to do before I could even
enter the country, hire a taxi, and get myself driven into central Buenos Aires, some distance away. At last, though, I found myself being taxied into the city over a badly potholed, broken-down
highway. Stalls sold balloons by the roadside, signs announced the electoral virtues of Menem, billboards proclaimed the Malvinas eternally Argentine. Snubnosed, bright-painted buses, broken-down
farm trucks, veered from lane to lane to avoid the potholes as we rode between shanty towns and scrubby pampa.

Then, suddenly, we were out of the pampa and on the great boulevards of a distinguished, monumental city. It was Sunday morning, time of peace. On the fine Avenida 9 de Julio everything was
quiet. There were green parks filled with tropical trees and plants, squawking with green parrots. Vast marble statues stood everywhere, to conquistadores and generalissimos, to Columbus and
Belgrano and San Martin and the Independence of 1810. I sat in a café over coffee and croissants; my jetlag cleared, my mood changed. Sandor Hollo, I remembered, had called Budapest the
Buenos Aires of Europe. By the same token, Buenos Aires was the Budapest of Latin America, a European city that was not built in Europe at all. Its fine early modern buildings – ministries
and synagogues, merchants’ palaces, great apartments, grand banks – had evidently been designed for some other site or country entirely, and then set down on strange soil amid
sub-tropical vegetation, European tastes and cultural dreams laid over a world of lost history and chaotic libertarian adventuring.

Over the following week I came to fall in love with BA. I saw almost nothing of it, of course: a vast sprawling city of 12 million people scattered over a great plain. But its public spaces were
grand, its gardens beautiful, its restaurants fine, its pastas splendid, its wines superb. It was a city playing at being a city. When you shopped, you found there was no agreed economy. When it
rained, you found there were no underground drains. There was the intellectual life of the town and the violent life of the pampa, the world of writers and painters and the world of the gaucho,
square-bodied, hide-booted, high-hatted figures who proudly jostled you into the gutters: a place where learned intellectuals were part of a culture that valued warriors, generals, knife-wielders
and anyone who really fancied a fight. There was literacy and poverty, great architecture and sad shanty towns, fine art galleries and armed soldiers riding trucks down the streets.

To my own rather literary mind – and you know by now I have a rather literary mind – it was the world according to Borges: a fiction with a resemblance to an idea of Argentina that
had acquired a certain reality and decided to call itself Argentina, a world of random fragments that could only fit together by some inventive act of the mind. In the café near my hotel,
fine elderly gentlemen in Parisian suits danced the tango and sang the old sentimental songs to their grey-haired old wives and the friendly young whores; later on it was explained to me that these
were the very generals who had run the repression. In a park in the city Borges’s own National Library stood, halfway through construction, like a story that had been started but never
finished, like someone’s uncompleted fiction.

Indeed Borges seemed everywhere, and above all at the Book Fair itself – a great tented city beside the railway, packed with hundreds of stalls and thousands of books from all lands. And
if Argentina seemed to me like a book, it was also a world of readers, who passed in great swarms through the fair: businessmen and housewives, politicians and publishers, schoolchildren in long
crocodiles, and gauchos. I was not surprised to find, in one of the main aisles, the plain stall of the Borges Foundation. Here were books from his personal library, experimental magazines
he’d once edited, photographs of him as a dandyish young man or as a blind, basilisk-eyed old one. A youngish woman dressed in white sat at a desk on the stall. ‘But of course, the
widow of Borges,’ said a friendly young Argentine journalist in the press room of the fair, ‘You didn’t interview her?’ I hurried back to the stall, but the woman in white
had gone away.

And so had most of the world-famous writers whom, over the following days, I tried to track down and interview. Some were abroad, some stayed at home; some were in exile, others were presidents
of their countries. I gathered Marquez was in the USA, Vargas Llosa in London, Fuentes in Paris, and so it went on. At first my visit to the fair seemed just another replay of the Booker, but my
young journalist friend proved very helpful. He took me round the many literary cafés and bars of the city, and introduced me to a number of younger, radical writers. My notebook filled, and
only one thing remained to be done: to cover the resumption of Anglo-Argentinian cultural relations, an event that was to be celebrated with a formal ceremony and a bicultural panel of writers in
some tented hall at the fair towards the end of the week.

At first my Argentine journalist friend refused to come with me: ‘I do not go to official occasions,’ he said, ‘Either they are boring or they remind you of the people who like
to put you back in prison.’ But I continued to press him, and eventually he agreed. On the important night, a rainy one, we pushed our way through the crowded fair, dodging between files of
formally dressed schoolchildren, and took our place on wooden benches in the wet tented hall. There was a large noisy audience, an empty platform with a long table on it, and to either side a flag
on a long wooden pole: the Argentine flag to the left, the British Union Jack to the right. A small group of officials and functionaries seemed to be arguing furiously below the platform. To one
side, a little aloof, stood a tall, distinguished and very well-suited figure: undoubtedly the British Ambassador. To the other side stood a smaller, more rounded figure who was doubtless the
Argentine Minister of Culture. A few young Argentinian writers, some of them people I had already interviewed, stood bewildered near the doorway, and so did two writers specially flown out from
Britain, a distinguished lady crime novelist, and a somewhat younger male novelist and critic whose work was associated with the campus novel.

Yet nothing happened; I turned to my neighbour. ‘Diplomatic incident, always a diplomatic incident,’ he said, ‘Perhaps someone is invited who should not be invited. Perhaps
someone is not invited who should be invited. It is always the same at these occasions. You see why I never come to them.’ A few moments later, the Argentine Minister mounted the platform,
reflected on the value of international cultural relations, welcomed the return of the admirable British Council to the country, and then stepped abruptly backwards, knocking into the Union Jack,
which fell slowly to the floor. There were murmurs round the hall, a small burst of applause, a small explosion of laughter. ‘Did he do that on purpose?’ I asked my neighbour.
‘Hard to know,’ he said, ‘Maybe he is clumsy. You know these official occasions.’

Functionaries hurried onto the platform and tried to revive the flag, but the pole had broken. Eventually a young woman stood there and held it aloft, remaining there for the rest of the
proceedings. The British Ambassador climbed to the podium, and responded as the British do in times of international crisis: he made a joke. This was followed by a brief, very elegant speech. Then
the platform cleared again, and functionaries mounted the stage, putting out nameplates for the literary discussion. After a few moments, other functionaries appeared, and removed them again; there
was another long period when nothing happened. I turned to my friend for explanation. ‘Oh, another diplomatic incident,’ he said, ‘Maybe some of these writers are not so good with
the regime. Or they do not properly represent the spirit of our country.’ At last a row of writers mounted the platform, and a chairman took his seat. Again nothing happened, until the door
to the tented hall opened suddenly, an elderly lady in a dark dress staggered in and climbed onto the platform. An extra chair was summoned; the lady sat down and looked round with belligerence.
‘Ah, that is it,’ said my friend, ‘Of course Menem or someone must have insisted she should be here.’ ‘Who is she, a writer?’ I asked. ‘Well, of a
sort,’ said my friend, ‘but what is important is that honour is satisfied. Once she was the mistress of Borges.’