Neither Here Nor There (26 page)

By the time I had finished, much of the tablecloth was a series of grey smudges outlined in a large, irregular patch of yellow that looked distressingly like a urine stain. I casually tried to hide this with my elbow and upper body when the waitress brought my dinner, but she saw instantly what a mess I had made of things and gave me a look not of contempt, as I had dreaded, but – worse – of sympathy. It was the look you might give a stroke victim who has lost control of the muscles in his mouth but is still gamely trying to feed himself. It was a look that said, ‘Bless him, poor soul.’

For one horrible moment I thought she might tie a napkin around my neck and cut my food up for me. Instead, she retreated to her station behind the bar, but she kept a compassionate eye on me throughout the meal, ready to spring forward if any pieces of cutlery should clatter from my grasp or if a sudden spasm should cause me to tip over backwards. I was very pleased to get out of there. The cast-iron pot was an ashtray, by the way.

Brig was a bit of a strange place. Historically it was a staging post on the road between Zurich and Milan, and now it looked as if it didn’t quite know what to do with itself. It was a reasonably sized town but it appeared to offer little in the way of diversions. It was the kind of place where the red-light district would be in a phone box. All the shops sold unarresting products like refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and televisions from behind shiny plate-glass windows. Then it occurred to me that the shops in most countries sell unarresting items from behind plate-glass windows. It was simply that I was no longer in Italy, which caused me a passing pang of grief. This is the problem with travelling: one day you are sitting with a cappuccino on a terrace by the sea and the next you are standing in the rain in the dullest town in Switzerland looking at Zanussis.

It dawned on me that I hadn’t seen a refrigerator, vacuum cleaner or other truly functional thing on sale anywhere in Italy. I presume they don’t all drive to Brig to buy them, that they must be able to purchase them somewhere in their own country, but I couldn’t recall seeing any. In Brig, however, there was nothing else. I walked the empty streets trying to work up an interest in white goods, but the mood wouldn’t take me, and I retired instead to the bar of my hotel, where I drank some beer and read Philip Ziegler’s classic account of the black death, imaginatively entitled
The Black Death –
just the thing for those lonely, rainy nights in a foreign country.

Actually, it was fascinating, not least because it dealt with places I had just passed through – Florence, for instance, where 100,000 people, half the populace, lost their lives in just four months, and Milan, where the news from Florence so terrified the locals that families suspected of harbouring a victim were walled up inside their houses.

There’s nothing like reading about people being entombed alive to put your own problems in perspective. I tend to think of life as bleak when I can’t find a parking space at Sainsbury’s, but imagine what it must have been to be an Italian in the fourteenth century. For a start, in 1345 it rained non-stop for six months, turning much of the country into a stagnant lake and making planting impossible. The economy collapsed, banks went bust and thousands died in the ensuing famines. Two years later the country was rocked with terrible earthquakes – in Rome, Naples, Pisa, Padua, Venice – which brought further death and chaos. And then, just when people were surely thinking that things
had
to get better now, some anonymous sailor stepped ashore at Genoa and said, ‘You know, I don’t feel so hot,’ and within days the great plague was beginning its long sweep across Europe.

And it didn’t stop there. The plague returned for a mop-up operation in 1360–61, and yet again in 1368–69, 1371, 1375, 1390 and 1405. The odd thing to me is that this coincided with one of the great periods of church-building in Europe. I don’t know about you, but if I lived in an age when God was zinging every third person in my town with suppurating bubos, I don’t think I’d look on Him as being on my side.

In the morning I took a fast train to Geneva. We rattled through a succession of charmless industrial towns – Sierra, Sion, Martigny – places that seemed to consist almost entirely of small factories and industrial workshops fringed with oildrums, stacks of wooden pallets and other semi-abandoned clutter. I had forgotten that quite a lot of Switzerland is really rather ugly. And everywhere there were pylons. I had forgotten about those, too. The Swiss are great ones for stringing wires. They thread them across the mountainsides for electricity and suspend them from endless rows of gibbets along every railway track and hang them like washing lines on all their city streets for the benefit of trams. It seems not to have occurred to them that there might be a more attractive way of arranging things.

We found the shore of Lake Geneva at Villeneuve and spent the next hour racing along its northern banks at a speed that convinced me the driver was slumped dead on the throttle. We shot past the castle of Chillon –
shoomp
: a picturesque blur – flew through the stations at Montreux and Vevey, scattering people on the platforms, and finally screeched to a long, slow stop at Lausanne, where the body of the driver was presumably taken away for recycling (I assume the fanatically industrious Swiss don’t bury their dead but use them for making heating oil) and his place taken by someone in better health. At all events, the final leg into Geneva was made at a more stately pace.

Just outside my carriage were two young Australians who spent the passage from Lausanne to Geneva discussing great brawls they had taken part in over the years. I couldn’t quite see them, but I could hear every breathless word. They would say things like, ‘D’ya remember the time Muscles Malloy beat the crap out of the Savage triplets with a claw hammer? There was blood and guts all over the place, man.’

‘I was picking pieces of brain out of my beer!’

‘Yeah, it was fan-tas-tic! D’ya remember that time Muscles rammed that snooker cue up Jason Brewster’s nose and it came out the top of his head?’

‘That Muscles was an animal, wasn’t he?’

‘Not half!’

‘Did you ever see him eat a live cat?’

‘No, but I saw him pull the tongue out of a horse once.’

It went on like this all the way to Geneva. These guys were serious psychopaths, in urgent need of a clinic. I kept expecting one of them to look in at me and say, ‘I’m bored. Let’s hang this asshole upside-down out the window and see how many times we can hit his head on the sleepers.’ Eventually, I peeked out. They were both about four feet two inches tall and couldn’t have beaten up a midget in a blindfold. I followed them off the train at Geneva and out of the station, chattering excitedly as they went about people having their heads stuck in a waffle iron or their tongues nailed to the carpet.

I watched them go, then turned and, with an instinct that seldom fails to let me down, checked into the dreariest and unfriendliest hotel in its class in Geneva, the aptly named Terminus.

Finding nothing to detain me there, I went straight to the Union Bank of Switzerland offices on the Rue du Rhône to claim my refund on my Visa traveller’s cheques. I was directed to a small room in the basement, where international transactions were dealt with. I had assumed that things would be painlessly efficient here, but I hadn’t allowed for the fact that the Swiss national motto is ‘Trust No One’. It took most of the afternoon.

First, I had to stand in a long queue, full of veiled women and men in nightshirts, all involved in complicated transfers of funds from one Arab sandpit to another, requiring the production of parchment documents, the careful counting of huge stacks of brightly coloured money and occasional breaks to pray to Allah and slaughter a goat. All of this was presided over by a blonde woman who clearly hated her job and every living thing on the planet. It took an hour for me just to reach the window, where I was required to do no more than establish my identity and reveal, in a low voice and with significant sidelong glances, the secret reclaim number I had been given over the phone in Florence. This done, the woman told me to take a seat.

‘Oh, thanks, but I’d never get it in my suitcase,’ I said with my best Iowa smile. ‘Can’t I just have my cheques?’

‘You must take a seat and wait. Next.’

I sat for three-quarters of an hour before I was summoned to the window and handed a claim form packed with questions and sent back to my seat to fill them in. It was an irritating document. It required me not only to explain in detail how I had been so reckless as to have lost the traveller’s cheques with which Visa had trustingly endowed me, and to give all manner of trifling detail including the number of the police report and the address of the police station at which the report was made, but also contained long sections of irrelevant questions concerning things like my height, weight and complexion. ‘What the fuck does my complexion have to do with traveller’s cheques?’ I said, a trifle wildly, causing a pleasant-looking matron sitting next to me to put some space between us. Finally it instructed me to give two financial references and one personal reference.

I couldn’t believe it. By what mad logic should I have to give references to reclaim something that was mine? ‘American Express doesn’t ask for anything like this,’ I said to the matronly lady, who looked at me and shifted her butt another two inches towards safety. I lied on all the answers. I said I was four feet two inches tall, weighed 400 pounds, was born in Abyssinia and busted broncos for a living. I put ‘amber’ for complexion and Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky for my financial references. For a personal reference, I gave myself, of course. Who better? I was spluttering with indignation when I rejoined the queue, which had now grown to include a delegation of Rwandan diamond merchants and two guys with camels.

‘Why do I have to answer all these stupid questions?’ I demanded as I turned in my claim form. ‘This is the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen. It’s really ...
stupid
.’ I get eloquent like that when I’m angry. The woman pointed out that it was nothing to do with her, that she was just following instructions. ‘That’s what Himmler said!’ I cried, both feet leaving the ground at once. Then I realized it was pointless, that she would only make me take a seat again and wait there until Michaelmas if I didn’t act calm and Swiss about it all, so I accepted my replacement traveller’s cheques with nothing stronger than sulky indignation.

But from now on it’s American Express traveller’s cheques for me, boy, and if the company wishes to acknowledge this endorsement with a set of luggage or a skiing holiday in the Rockies, then let the record show that I am ready to accept it.

I spent two days in Geneva, wandering around with an odd, empty longing to be somewhere else. I don’t know why exactly, because Geneva is an agreeable enough place – compact, spotless, eminently walkable, with a steep and venerable old town, some pleasant parks and its vast blue lake, glittering by day and even more fetching at night with the multi-coloured lights of the city stretched across it. But it is also a dull community: expensive, businesslike, buttoned up, impossible to warm to. Everyone walked with a brisk, hunched, out-of-my-way posture. It was spring on the streets, but February on people’s faces. It seemed to have no young people enlivening the bars and bistros, as they do in Amsterdam and Copenhagen. It had no exuberance, no sparkle, no soul. The best thing that could be said for it was that the streets were clean.

I suppose you have to admire the Swiss for their industriousness. Here, after all, is a country that is small, mountainous, has virtually no natural resources and yet has managed to become the richest nation on earth. (Its per capita GDP is almost twenty-five per cent higher than even Japan’s and more than double Britain’s.) Money is everything in Switzerland – the country has more banks than dentists – and their quiet passion for it makes them cunning opportunists. The country is land-locked, 300 miles from the nearest sniff of sea, and yet it is home to the largest manufacturer of marine engines in the world. The virtues of the Swiss are legion: they are clean, orderly, law-abiding and diligent – so diligent that in a national referendum in the 1970s they actually voted against giving themselves a shorter working week.

And this of course is the whole problem. They are so desperately dull, and wretchedly conservative. A friend of mine who was living in Geneva in 1968, when students all over Europe were tearing the continent apart, once told me that the students of Geneva decided to hold a riot of their own, but called it off when the police wouldn’t give them permission. My friend swears it’s a true story. It is certainly true that women didn’t get the vote in Switzerland until 1971, a mere half-century after they got it everywhere else, and in one of the cantons, Appenzell Innherhoden, women were excluded from cantonal votes until 1990. They have a terrible tendency to be smug and ruthlessly self-interested. They happily bring in hundreds of thousands of foreign workers – one person in every five in Switzerland is a foreigner – but refuse to offer the security of citizenship. When times get tough they send the workers home – 300,000 of them during the oil shocks of 1973, for instance – making them leave their homes, pull their children from schools, abandon their comforts, until times get better. Thus the Swiss are able to take advantage of cheap labour during boom times without the inconvenient social responsibilities of providing unemployment benefit and health care during bad times. And by this means they keep inflation low and preserve their own plump, complacent standard of living. I can understand it, but I don’t have to admire it.

On the second day, I went for a long stroll along the lake-side – leafy, spacious, empty – past the old and largely derelict League of Nations building, where young boys with stones were trying without much success to break the windows, through the tranquil Jardin Botanique, and to the gates of the vast Palais des Nations (larger than Versailles, according to the tourist brochures), now home to the United Nations Organization. I hesitated by the gate, thinking about paying the multi-franc entrance fee to go in for a guided tour, and aren’t you glad I didn’t? I am.