In the April of 1991 I found myself, believe it or not (certainly I hardly could), in the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, no longer looking for Bazlo Criminale in any way whatever. The visit came at the end of a long row of disorienting and inconsequential events that happened, as it happened, pretty much like this. When I got back to London from Lausanne, life took a definite turn for the worse. Lavinia, of course, had written my contract properly, so effectively that I not only found myself jobless, redundant, superfluous, in excess of requirements, but also due no money at all from the Criminale Project. The whole affair dissolved into legal bitterness, with very expensive letters from even more expensive solicitors flying this way and that. To make matters worse, Lavinia had evidently passed on to Ros some scurrilous rumour, probably from Codicil via Gerstenbacker, that my stay at Barolo had not been entirely celibate, which meant that I never saw Ros or her little town house behind Liverpool Street station ever again.
But these were only a few of my worries. Though my trip seemed to me to have taken years, my flat, in the basement under the basement, had actually been empty only a few weeks. But as home it proved to be no home at all. Cats were squatting in the bedroom; many of the contents, including my Amstrad word-processor and CD player, had departed, taken off either by local thieves or good friends with big pockets who knew exactly where I hid the key. In a few weeks, the whole world had changed; and so had I. Thanks to the Great Thatcherite Economic Miracle, Britain was now enjoying a deep recession. War fever was growing worse, international shuttle diplomacy was proving useless with Saddam and his moustaches, and conflict seemed certain. Newspapers were folding by the handful, and jobs in the media were disappearing — unless you were the kind of journo who didn’t mind being targeted by smart bombs while being chased by Baghdad security police, or living in a fox- or camel-hole in the desert under fire and strict military censorship.
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 Credit 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.’
And so the discussion began. The British crime novelist spoke about crime and Borges, the British campus novelist-critic spoke about European experimental fiction and Borges, the Argentine writers talked about Latin American writing and Borges, and the mistress of Borges talked about herself, occasionally mentioning her relationship with Borges. On the rafters above the podium there appeared a very large rat, evidently a visitant from nature to culture; it strolled along until it was above the speakers and looked down at them with great interest. This delighted the audience, and by the time the evening was done it seemed clear that cultural relations had resumed in great good humour. ‘But why was it so important to have the mistress of Borges?’ I asked my journalist friend, as he led me through the crowds again to the official party that was to follow. ‘Maybe in a moment you will understand,’ he said.
Over the next half-hour, in another part of the tent, where writers and Argentinian officials jostled to get to the lavish supply of wine, I slowly did. I’ve no real idea of what kind of sex-life Borges enjoyed, or not, during his lifetime, probably about the same as most of us. But he was certainly enjoying a very remarkable one after his death. Nearly every woman I spoke to in the wet tent during that evening had at some time or another been the mistress of Borges. Some were beautiful others not; some were old, like the lady on the platform and some young enough to make the final years of the blind old master into utter scandal. Some told me of his tenderness others of his pure detachment. Some called him generous others thought him mean. Some celebrated his artistic wisdom others bemoaned his political follies. Each one spoke rudely of all the others; every one had a Borgesian tale to tell. Within half an hour I had met at least ten mistresses of Borges.
I went back to my Argentine friend. ‘How did he manage it?’ I asked, ‘How did he enjoy all these women and write as well?’ ‘Remember, he wrote only forty-five stories, some poems, never a novel,’ said my friend. ‘But he was also professor at the university, head of the National Library,’ I said, ‘And he changed all modern writing.’ ‘Also he was a chicken inspector,’ said my friend, ‘Peron made him one. Those bastards have wonderful insults, no?’ I looked across the party at the women. ‘Surely they can’t all have been mistresses of Borges,’ I said, ‘Some of them must have been about twelve when he died.’ ‘Perhaps not actual mistresses,’ said my friend slowly. ‘What other kind are there?’ I asked. ‘I was never in his bedroom, how do I know?’ asked my friend, ‘But don’t forget, this was a great man, a world writer. He belonged to everyone. Here to be a mistress of Borges is a kind of profession, especially if you are a woman and want to be a famous writer.’
‘So the mistresses of Borges weren’t really the mistresses of Borges?’ I asked. ‘In these matters, what is “really”?’ asked my friend. ‘You sound like Otto Codicil,’ I said. ‘Please?’ he asked. ‘Oh, no one you ever heard of,’ I said, ‘Someone I met in Vienna. I forgot where I was.’ A little later the British Ambassador and his lady departed, evidently called to duties elsewhere; after that the party showed signs of rapid deterioration, as the writers began to turn back into gauchos and literary and political rivalries flared. I moved to leave, and was detained by a quiet, dignified, elderly and very well-dressed publisher I had met earlier. ‘It gets worse now,’ he said, ‘I wonder, do you care to do me the excellent honour of dining with me at my apartment? Some authors I publish will be there, I think they would like to meet you, also you them. And it will be more select than this, I do promise. Also good food and no rats.’
I accepted, of course; and not much later I found myself standing outside the tented city, getting into one of a row of limousines that was waiting to drive a group of us to a fine modernist apartment block in an elegant part of town. Soon I was rising up above the dark and dangerous streets in a stainless-steel elevator; at the door of a great penthouse apartment high above the city, a white-coated butler opened the door, a maid in gloves took my coat. The walls were hung with remarkable Impressionist and Modernist paintings; I stopped in amazement in front of a Van Gogh (I think his Carnations). ‘You like it?’ asked my host very quietly, ‘You know I may have paid too much. Fifteen million at Sotheby New York, and now the art boom is over. But I like it very much. Also in a country like this it is well to have something you can carry away, if things go a bit wrong.’
I moved into the room, filled with elegant and designer-dressed people, talked to a professor from the university who was writing a book on Neo-Platonism in South America (‘Of course I must include Borges’), and then we moved to table and sat down. As the butler and maid began to serve, I turned to my neighbours on either side. One was a young married woman in diamonds, clearly passionately in love with her neighbour on the further side, to whom she wasn’t married. My other companion was a fine-featured woman, around sixty, her grey hair wonderfully tinted and coiffured, her shape very slim. She wore bright jewels and a low-cut dress covered in black beads, and she wanted to talk. ‘You went to this official thing?’ she asked, ‘I do not think I like Book Fairs, they are all books. And I have had too many official occasions in my life. But did anything interesting happen?’
So, hoping to be amusing (as I’ve said, from time to rime I can be a little amusing), I told her the story of the flag, the writers, the rat, and the mistresses of Borges. ‘You must be careful when you tell such stories,’ said the woman, ‘Perhaps I also was a mistress of Borges.’ ‘Were you?’ I asked. ‘I was not,’ said the woman, ‘How nice for once to be so unusual. But this is what happens to a famous and distinguished man. He finds one day he does not possess himself. Everyone needs him, so he becomes two people. In fact Borges himself wrote very well about this, do you know? His essay, “Borges and I”, do you remember it?’ At once I did. ‘Yes, he says he suddenly became not the dreamer but the dreamt,’ I said, ‘Not the writer, but the reader of himself.’ ‘“My life is a flight, and I lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him,”’ quoted the lady beside me, ‘He no longer knew who he was. Do you know who you are?’
‘I’m Francis Jay,’ I said, ‘Just visiting from Britain.’ ‘And I, well, I am a painter here,’ said the woman, ‘My name is Gertla Riviero.’ ‘Gertla, that’s an unusual name,’ I said boringly. ‘You have never heard it before?’ asked the woman. ‘I have,’ I said, ‘One of the wives of Bazlo Criminale was called Gertla. I don’t suppose you know who I mean.’ ‘The Hungarian philosopher, sometimes called the Lukacs of the Nineties,’ said the woman. ‘You do know him,’ I said. ‘Better than that,’ said the woman, ‘Maybe I was never the mistress of Borges. But I was the wife of Criminale Bazlo. Is that as good?’ ‘But Gertla was Hungarian,’ I said. ‘And so was I,’ said the woman, ‘Who do you think they are, the people in this room? Most came from Europe not so long ago. I did too. For love, of course. Another love. But how do you know all that? You are interested in Criminale Bazlo?’
‘Yes,’ I said, looking up from my soup to examine her, ‘I did some research on him once.’ ‘Another professor?’ she asked, ‘There is a tango about professors.’ ‘No, a journalist,’ I said. ‘And you are from London?’ she asked, ‘What is your paper? A good one, very responsible?’ ‘Oh very,’ I said grandly. ‘And you know Criminale’s story?’ asked Gertla. ‘A version of it,’ I said. ‘Whose version?’ she asked. The Codicil version,’ I said. She looked at me. ‘And you are still interested?’ she asked, ‘I have a weekend place, a hacienda, out on the pampa, quite a way from here. Come out on Saturday, if you like to talk some more. Friends from B A will come, and they can drive you. But it will take a whole day, maybe your life is too busy.’ ‘No,’ I said quickly, ‘I’d like to come.’
To be truthful, it wasn’t as convenient as all that. I was flying home the day after, and I’d arranged a farewell lunch with my journalist friend. I cancelled it, of course. In the middle of a world where most things were unexpected, I had suddenly met my philosopher’s second wife — called something else, doing something else, living a new and amazingly different life. Yet for some reason she was happy to talk to me, and I would never have such a chance again. In some odd fashion I was back where I didn’t wish to be, but felt I had to be: on the quest for Bazlo Criminale. And so, on the Saturday (by which time I had, incidentally, met two more mistresses of Borges), I was picked up from my hotel by a middle-aged couple, smartly dressed in Burberry for a day in the country, and was driven out of town.
It was a strange trip, from the middle of a near-European city into something else. As we drove away, a heavy cloudburst exploded, overflowing the city’s non-existent drains and forcing us into unexpected routes. We drove through uncomfortable, threatening areas of the city; the couple in front of me locked the car doors on the inside. We passed the Army Engineering School, which was, they told me, a place of terror during the Repression. Then, out on the autopista, the weather cleared. Parrilla stalls and balloon vendors stood at the roadside. There was a wide flat plain, grey with eucalyptus trees and scattered with cattle and horses. We were stopped at endless tollbooths, which, my companions told me, had not even been there the previous week. ‘They call it free-market, Thatcherism,’ said my driver, ‘They have sold the roads.’ We drove out somewhere past Hurlingham, founded by the British, weekend land of the rich.
Finally, at the end of a vast long drive, we found Gertla Riviero’s hacienda: a long, low, verandah-ed house, around it paddocks for polo ponies, a pool for swimming, courts for tennis, enclosures for calves and goats. In cashmere sweater and designer slacks, Gertla came over to the car; either she or her husband was very seriously rich. She led me to the verandah, where a weekend house-party sat drinking. Children played on great lawns; other guests splashed in the pool. ‘Do you like it, Argentina?’ asked one of the guests. ‘Very exciting,’ I said. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Gertla, handing me a glass of wine, ‘Inflation 130 per cent. When Menem tries to fight corruption, he has to arrest his own officials first. Here rich are rich, poor are poor, and only the army holds them apart. It is exciting.’ ‘And what a beautiful estate,’ I said. ‘Very,’ said Gertla, ‘And if you are wondering where is my husband, he is out riding the estate, by the way. He will not be back for a long rime.’ ‘When did you come here?’ I asked. ‘When Hungary became impossible, seven, eight years ago,’ said Gertla, ‘Now I live very nicely and worry about inflation and cancer from the ozone layer. Enjoy your drink now, and we will take a walk together after lunch, all right?’
Gertla turned to talk to the other guests; I sat and looked at her, the woman I had, I recalled, seen nude in Budapest. Well, she was no Sepulchra; this one had kept all the grace and dignity I had noted up there on Bazlo’s walls. No wonder he had been attracted to her; the wonder was he had then gone off with La Stupenda, the Great Ship. Then I recalled what Ildiko had said, about an affair with the chief of secret police; I wondered if this was the man now out riding the estate. But his name was Riviero, and who knew what to think of anything Ildiko had told me? In any case that all seemed strangely remote, here on the pampa, a southern sky spreading flatly to a distant horizon, grey eucalyptus trees blowing in the wind. When natural functions called me and I went inside for the bathroom, I found expensive furniture, and walls covered in flamboyant and experimental paintings, all signed ‘Gertla Riviero’. She was a woman of character; a woman of wealth as well.
There was a barbecue lunch (beef and some curious black pudding) served by, presumably, a daughter of the house; she bore no Criminale characteristics. Then, while the other guests continued earing and drinking, Gertla walked me towards the paddocks. If there was something she intended to tell me, she seemed in no great hurry. ‘You were going to tell me about the unofficial Criminale,’ I said. ‘You know, if you want really to understand Criminale, you must understand first how he was with women,’ she said, stopping to look over the horses, ‘They really possessed him. With each one he had different thoughts. You know about Criminale’s women?’ ‘Well, there was Pia, you, Sepulchra,’ I said, counting them off on my fingers, ‘And wasn’t there one more?’ ‘One more, many more,’ said Gertla, laughing, ‘But I think you mean Irini. This one he loved but never married.’ ‘So what should I know about them?’ I asked.
‘Pia you know was a great anti-Nazi, very fierce,’ said Gertla, ‘She helped him a lot, but she died then, quite young, in Berlin. This was before he was well-known. I, well, I am here, you can see what I am. If you don’t mind I say so, with me was his best time, when he grew famous. And then Sepulchra, well, you would not even like to see her. Pretty once, but silly, and now blown up fat like a fish.’ ‘I have seen her,’ I said. ‘Then I think you know what I mean,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘Yes, I think I do,’ I said. ‘For him she was a great mistake, of course,’ said Gertla, ‘Bazlo needed someone who was strong, someone with ideas of her own. Sepulchra was his folly, she had no mind, no politics. But that is what he wanted, that is what he had to have. Always there had to be another woman. But I had other interests too.’ I thought again of what Ildiko had told me, and began wondering once more whether it might just be true.
I said: ‘So with Pia he began as an anti-Nazi?’ ‘Therefore a good socialist, who believed that society must be changed,’ said Gertla. ‘Then with you he was what?’ ‘By now a very important Marxist philosopher, famous in his country,’ said Gertla. ‘And also a frequent traveller to the West,’ I said. ‘That is true, later on,’ said Gertla, nodding, ‘And then with Sepulchra he became, well, what he is today. The big celebrity, the Lukacs of the Nineties?’ ‘That’s what the newspapers say,’ I said. ‘Well, you are the newspapers,’ said Gertla, turning to look at me, ‘I notice you have not asked me about Irini.’ I somehow knew now what the question was I had been brought out here to ask. I said, ‘I’ve always wondered what happened to Irini. Didn’t she disappear, around the time he met you?’
‘She disappeared, that is true,’ said Gertla, ‘Irini was sent to a camp in 1956.’ ‘A camp?’ I asked, ‘You mean to prison?’ ‘In 1956 she went into the streets, fighting the Russian tanks,’ said Gertla, ‘Then she tried to cross the frontier to go to the West. She did not succeed. You will not remember these things, of course. The British were too busy, invading Egypt at Suez. That is what gave the Russians their chance to come in.’ ‘I wasn’t even born then,’ I said. ‘No, of course,’ said Gertla, ‘So it doesn’t even matter to you, I think. But in the Soviet bloc it mattered to everyone.’ ‘When Irini was caught, what did Criminale do? Did he help her?’ ‘What did he do?’ said Gertla, ‘Of course Bazlo did nothing.’ ‘Nothing?’ I asked, shaken. Gertla smiled at me. ‘No, by this time his affair with her was entirely over. Now he was with me. Bazlo did nothing, because Irini and I were not of the same kind at all. You must understand I had a very different opinion of those things.’
It shouldn’t have done, but it took me a moment, as we stood there, to understand just what Gertla meant. I was a nice upstanding young man, and Gertla was calling up battles I had almost forgotten, decisions that I hardly recognized. Then I saw, and said, ‘You supported the Russian invasion, you mean?’ ‘It was the only way,’ she said, ‘If that revolution had succeeded, what has happened now would have happened even then. I was a Marxist then, I still am today. And I hope you realize that what has happened now will not succeed for long? Soon there will be a coup in Russia, these foolish freedoms that are not freedoms will be swept away, the Party will take control again, to hold the empire together. This is just a small moment in a larger process.’ ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘But did Criminale support the Russian occupation too?’ ‘We sat in our apartment above Budapest and watched those tanks roll in,’ said Gertla, ‘I told Bazlo to stay away from his democrat friends and get behind what Kadar did. The coup was bound to fail. I was right, of course. If he had not done it, today he would have been no one. He would probably have gone to a camp too. Then who would have heard of Bazlo Criminale?’
She leaned on the fence. I looked at her, and knew there was something very firm and steely about Gertla Riviero. I also knew she wasn’t telling me this by chance. She understood I was a journalist, and a story told to a journalist is a story for print. I said, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ She thought a moment and then said, ‘The Lukacs of the Nineties, that is just what Bazlo is not. Lukacs was a real philosopher. He used reason to prevent chaos and create a meaning to history. Bazlo needs chaos nowadays, and he cannot afford to think of history. He thinks it will save him from the past, and the future. But the past does not go away. Democracy, the free market, do you really think that can save us? Imagine, in a place like this? Inflation at 130 per cent, the rich against the poor, the army waiting, and only the exercise of power can prevent chaos? As Bazlo understood once, when he was with me, Marxism is a great idea, democracy just a small idea. It promises hope, and it gives you Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know what Bazlo is now? The philosopher of Kentucky Fried Chicken. I think we should go back to the house.’
I stood there. ‘You haven’t told me what happened to Irini,’ I said. ‘Is that what interests you?’ she asked, ‘Well, you cannot check anything with her, she died, a long time. All this surprises you, I think. It is not the usual story of Bazlo Criminale. The dissident, opponent of the regime. But you are a journalist, Mr Jay, you must know the real truth is always a little bit round the corner. Nothing is ever quite what the official story says it is, no?’ ‘True enough,’ I said. ‘Really,’ said Gertla, ‘Did you never ask what Bazlo did in 1956, when so many great choices had to be made? Didn’t you ask what side he was on who he supported? It never occurred to you?’ ‘Of course ‘ I said, ‘But according to the book by Otto Codicil .’ Gertla looked at me and laughed. ‘The book by Codicil?’ she said ‘I hope you didn’t believe a word of it?’ ‘Some of it,’ I said.
‘Well, I don’t believe a word of it,’ said Gertla, ‘And I wrote it.’ ’You wrote it?’ I asked, astonished. ‘It was thirty years after 1956, and the scores were still being settled,’ said Gertla, ‘It was best to show Bazlo in a very positive way. He was being challenged in many places.’ ‘Then why publish it under Codicil’s name?’ I asked. ‘Oh please, it was a whitewash, for both of us,’ said Gertla, ‘You can hardly think I would print it under my own name.’ ‘And why in the West?’ ‘To make his reputation,’ she said. ‘And how did it reach Codicil?’ ‘I had good channels, I had good friends,’ said Gertla, ‘And Codicil, well, that one had some debts it was time for him to pay. Let us go in, I have told you enough.’
She started walking quickly back, towards the hacienda; I followed, still trying to take in what she’d told me. I admired Criminale (I still do); I didn’t wish at all to believe the story about his politics, his duplicity, above all about his betrayal of Irini. My first thought was that, here in the land of labyrinthine fictions, I had been told yet another fiction. But Gertla was certainly not trying to amuse me; there was something firm, bitter, determined about her, a steely political temper, that made me suspect it was probably true. ‘You probably wonder why, if I wrote that then, I say this now,’ said Gertla, looking at me, ‘Well, I am here, and free. Political events have changed, it is time to tell the truth. And I am jealous for myself. The Criminale of 1956 was my Criminale, the best Criminale. Even those love letters he wrote to Sepulchra were not so good as the ones he wrote me. She made him foolish. I made him wise.’
‘You made him a hardline Marxist,’ I said. ‘And why not?’ asked Gertla, ‘Didn’t we work for the biggest truth, the best idea? Do you know that even when he went to the West he reported on everything, really, everything, through me?’ ‘And I suppose you had good contacts,’ I said, remembering again what Ildiko had said. ‘Yes, he is now my husband,’ she said. ‘Your husband here?’ I asked. ‘Yes, both of us are here,’ said Gertla, ‘Of course it is better we have new names.’ I said, ‘I suppose you understand what this would do to Criminale’s reputation, if I went home and printed the story. And you’d be a part of it too.’ She looked very directly at me. ‘You think I care?’ she asked, ‘Look, nobody comes here. Now I am free, I can explain. Why shouldn’t he explain too?’ ‘What should he explain?’ I asked. Gertla stopped for a moment, and stared hard at me. ‘Today they all pretend,’ she said, ‘They hide the past, they lie about how they became what they are. It just happened. I was forced by the Stasi, made to do it by the KGB. I only listened, I didn’t mean. They are just intellectual acrobats, you understand? But do you believe them? What they did, they chose.’
‘Or perhaps you persuaded him,’ I said, ‘He was in love with you.’ ‘No,’ said Gertla, ‘Do you really think none of them, those intellectuals, ever meant not to build the Marxist dream? You think nobody ever believed it, all of it? The crushing of the bourgeoisie, the destruction of property, the struggle against Fascism, the rise of the proletariat? Let them admit it, that was what they thought. And in a few years from now, people will say, of course, they were right. I like Bazlo to be remembered for what he used to be, not the amusing thing he is now. Oh, by the way, if you like it, you can check everything I say. The secret police files in Budapest, the Stasi files in Berlin, they are all open now. Unless maybe someone has been very kind, and burned everything. But I don’t think so. And one day it will all come out, anyway. And you will help me, you are a good journalist, yes?’
I took the jumbo flight back to London the very next day. The plane rose up over the wide River Plate; the pampa stretched out endlessly. Then cloud cover came in, and I thought hard about what had just happened down in the country down below. The last thing I had come for was more of the tale of Bazlo Criminale. Even so, I was coming back with a story, something no journalist can reject. And I was also coming back with terrible knowledge, or knowledge that was terrible if true. And the more I thought about it (I had a bad hotel-room night to think it over), the more I thought it probably was. What Gertla had told me seemed borne of two enduring and authentic forms of human emotion. One was ideology, but the other was sexual jealousy. Gertla, I thought, wanted to repossess two things she had once had: political certainty, and Bazlo Criminale.
In the afternoon, the plane landed at Rio de Janeiro and refuelled. It was another and different Latin America, steaming, mountainous, tropical, exotic. Then came the dull onward flight, as I looked through my notebooks, planned my pieces, tried to order my thoughts. I landed back in London the following morning, and returned tired to my flat. The next day, still jetlagged, I went into my newspaper office, tried to sort my thoughts on magical realism, and reported the happy resumption of cultural relations. All that done with, I leaned forward, over my computer terminal, there in the drab newspaper office, and realized that, like it or not, I had not entirely done with the uncomfortable quest for Doctor Criminale.