But the foreigners who most exercise my Swiss café companions are not British. In fact, they are not even a group. They reserve their ire for one foreigner: Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1800, the thousandth anniversary of Charlemagne’s crossing of the Great St. Bernard en route to coronation in Rome (and the year Barry I was born), Napoleon passed through this valley on his way to be stymied at Fort Bard. His large army “requisitioned” a cornucopia of supplies—including 21,724 bottles of wine and a mountain of foodstuffs—which Napoleon promised to pay for. Predictably, he never came close to honoring the debt, and my Swiss friends are still sore about it.
“He was just a thief,” says Jean-Michel, pointing up toward the Great St. Bernard, “Napoleon and his elephants….”
Clearly, the rosé is taking its toll.
I tell them that I’ve read that French President François Mitterrand tried to remedy the situation, back in the 1980s.
“Mitterrand, another bad apple!” Claude erupts, his singsong Swiss French turning operatic. “Yes, he came here. And what did he give us? A big fat medal!”
“Maybe it was made of gold?” I counter feebly.
“If it had been gold, Hollande would have come here,” Jean-Michel says, referring to current French President François Hollande, “and he would have taken it back!”
“Do you know why?” Claude asks me.
I shake my head.
“Because he’s from Hollande!”
They burst into laughter at what must be a rehearsed routine of Dutch bashing. Now, I am no fan of Dutch campers, but to imply that as a nation they are cheapskates seems a bit much, coming from guys still miffed about an unpaid two-hundred-year-old debt.
We take our leave of each other—I, returning to the Mégane; they, ordering yet another round of rosé. Within minutes, I am at my writer’s-budget hotel in Martigny, once the capital of Roman Helvetia and thus yet another Alpine town with stone memories of Augustus. The place is pleasant enough but has definitely seen better days, its recent urbanism undistinguished. Freed from my responsibilities as a driver, I walk across town and plop down for a glass of wine at the Taverne de la Tour, a place that has been serving fondue since the sixteenth century. Housed on the ground floor of a fine old building, the restaurant interior was brutally renovated into stucco minimalism sometime in the past. The only hint of its age is the arched ceiling held up by ancient pillars, no doubt remnants looted from the town’s Roman ruins. Still the place is impressive: Once a hostelry, I read on its menu, past guests included Rousseau, Goethe, Saussure, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Metternich, Lamartine, Byron, James Fenimore Cooper, Dumas père, Alfred de Musset, Georges Sand, Franz Liszt, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Richard Wagner, Jules Verne, Guy de Maupassant, and Mark Twain. Not too shabby a list, to be sure. I close my notebook and prepare to leave. An elderly man nearby observes me stashing my writing materials and says, “Alors, ça pète le feu ou ça pète pas le feu?” using the expression meaning full of energy and ready to take risks. I assure that I am, indeed, farting fire, which elicits from him a warm smile of approval.
Dinner is taken in a very crowded restaurant where I share a table with a garrulous Swiss businessman. On learning that I live in the United States, he assures me that Switzerland is the best country in the world, the acme of civilization and progress. Why? “We’re willing to work and we’re willing to pay taxes.”
I nod affably and scan the intimidatingly large menu. My companion notices my bewilderment.
“The horse is very good here,” he says.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The horse steak. Australian. Best in town.”
Thinking of Ecce Homo, I heed his advice.
THE NEXT MORNING, my seat-belt sensor refuses to believe that I’ve buckled up. The warning sound is a pleasant ping, so I can live with it. But I change my mind once the pinging switches to a lacerating wail, much more painful than yesterday’s jackhammer in Orsières.
When I pull alongside the Renault garage, I am treated as a hero. The mechanics drop what they’re doing and rush out to examine the car.
“It’s the latest? This is the first one we’ve seen.”
My chest swells, just as it did outside of Turin. At last, I am a man in full. I nod condescendingly and then explain the problem. Surely these poor chaps will be only too eager to work on my wonderful machine.
One mechanic, a disconcerting lookalike of the young Alain Delon, steps forward and peers into the vehicle. He beckons me to join him. He points downward, into the interior.
“The car thinks that you are not alone.”
The others join us and look down at the passenger seat. I have placed there several guidebooks and two heavy laminated road atlases of France and Italy. Admiration turns to chuckling. Once again, I am the gearhead goat. The mechanics head back into the garage.
Chastened and in silence, I drive westward up the valley of the Rhône. This is not the Rhône Valley in which I have been stuck in traffic dozens of times, south of Lyon on the Autoroute du Soleil toward the Med, a broad and majestic valley bounded by walls of green. This Swiss version, where the great river is an onrushing mountain stream headed for Lake Geneva, is barely three kilometers wide, the mountains on both sides almost comically tall. The valley floor is covered in orchards, the lower slopes by vertiginous green vineyards going up and up and up. These yield the refreshing white wine called Fendant de Sion, which was lodged in the literary canon by none other than James Joyce. An avid overindulger of Fendant at his home in Zurich, Joyce likened the wine to the piss of an archduchess, calling it, in Finnegan’s Wake, “Fanny Urinia.” Presumably, the sophisticated wine-makers of the valley know that in American English the moniker is amusing, while in British English it is considerably more hard core. Doubtless the devilish Irishman meant the latter.
The peaks of the Pennine Alps to the south of the valley cannot help but turn thoughts from the nether regions suggested by the vineyards. That does not mean these thoughts are necessarily uplifting, for this stretch of hostile rock and glacier is the setting of a 1925 novel that is a monument to the moody culture of la Suisse Romande (French-speaking Switzerland). In La grande peur dans la montagne (Terror on the Mountain), the laconic yet lyrical stylist Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz tells a tale of inevitable disaster, as young villagers ignore the warnings of their elders and take their livestock up to an alpage, or mountain pasture, that is reputed to be cursed, a constant of Alpine folklore about inhospitable heights. Bad omens come in quick succession, and the men turn on each other as Nature impassively watches and waits. The prose is a masterwork of description and doom, until the final cataclysm arrives with a brutality worthy of the final pages of Moby-Dick. The instant nationwide popularity of the novel suggests that the Swiss were not carried off by the Romanticism of foreign lovers of the Alps. They know how difficult and dangerous their beautiful country is. A likeness of Ramuz adorns the Swiss 200-franc note.
The town of Sion lies before me—as do posters touting a summerlong festival dedicated to Audrey Hepburn. The Belgian-born movie star’s association with Switzerland is usually confined to the canton of Vaud: Hepburn resided in a village near Lausanne on the shores of Lake Geneva. I ask the young woman in the tourist office why Sion, the capital of Valais, should pay so much attention to Audrey Hepburn. She looks at me in disbelief and says, “Because she is beautiful.”
A walk around the town proves that beauty is no stranger to the place. Castles crown two gentle hillocks, dominating the Rhône Valley, and an old quarter with serpentine streets spreads up a slope. In the threshold of a medieval house stands a bewhiskered Swiss man, felt cap perched atop his head, white shirt tucked into his red shorts, calmly smoking a long yellow pipe in the morning sunshine. The cobbles look clean enough to eat off of.
The lower quarter is another matter. Aside from a monastic bookshop selling Trappist beer, Sion seems to be a wine bar disguised as a town. Although it is far short of no
on, the terraces are full of men worshiping their cool glasses of Fendant. The women walking back and forth in front of the cafés, ostensibly running errands, seem to be having a competition to see who can wear the tightest jeans. The garments are so form-fitting that they look to have been painted on every bend and fold of the lower portions of their bodies. I leave the men and women of Sion to play their games.
SOMEHOW I AM NOT SURPRISED by what I see in my rearview mirror as I leave town. Viewed at a distance from the east, the two castle-topped hillocks of Sion exhibit an uncanny resemblance to a woman’s breasts. I take a curve in the road and the vision is gone. Sion recedes in memory to be replaced by Sierre, its less pretty sister up the valley. But I do not care about beauty here, I care only about religion. And, as I was raised a Canadian, that religion is ice hockey. I know that one of the heroes of the Montreal Canadiens lies buried in Sierre. Jacques Plante, the goaltender for Montreal during its glory days in the 1950s and 1960s, died in Switzerland in 1986. He was my childhood idol, and his eminently sensible introduction of the goalie mask to protect his face only heightened the sense of mystery with which I invested him. I never really knew what he looked like.
I ditch the car and lope purposefully to the tourist office. The young man there takes my request in stride. He’s heard weirder, no doubt.
“Which cemetery?” he asks, poker-faced.
Seeing my blank look, he adds, “Protestant or Catholic?”
As Plante was from Quebec, there can be only one answer.
The tourist host warms to the task and calls the Catholic cemetery. A long conversation ensues, which entails spelling out the name of the deceased. At last he lowers the cellphone.
“He won’t tell you anything.”
“Why not?”
The phone returns to his ear and is lowered again.
“Because he’s not allowed to.”
I must look dumbfounded, because a smile begins creeping across the young fellow’s features. At last I ask him, “Is it because of Charlie Chaplin?”
This non sequitur clearly pleases even more. Faced with a growing grin at my lunacy, I hastily explain that Charlie Chaplin’s corpse was dug up and held for ransom in 1978. The scandal occurred near Lake Geneva, in Vevey, the town where I chatted with the mountain-loving waitress. Fortunately, Swiss police eventually located the body and it was given a second, more secure burial.
Impressed by my knowledge of Swiss scandal, he takes up the phone and conveys my question. There seems to be a long silence on the other end of the line. Perhaps the gravedigger is impressed, too. A glimmer of hope?
When the phone is lowered, I am informed: “No, it has nothing to do with Charlie Chaplin. But he’s willing to tell you that Jacques Plante has been moved to another cemetery.”
“Where?” I croak.
The question is repeated into the phone. And the call is ended.
“He’s not allowed to say.”
My dreams of boyhood dashed by a gravedigging Kafka, I hurriedly leave town, but not before asking where the big change occurs. A few kilometers east of Sierre, I cross a brook named La Ripaille, thereby leaving the land of the Latin for that of the Germanic. I have gone from La Suisse to Schweiz, but I have not in fact crossed a cantonal boundary. Valais is now Wallis.
Out of curiosity, I pull into the first gas station on the other side of La Ripaille. I buy gum at the counter, but it is the newsstand that interests me the most. Astounding. Absolutely all of the publications are in German or Swiss German. Not a trace of the French a mere stone’s throw away. Again, as someone raised a Canadian, I am accustomed to bilingualism, but a slow bleeding of English into French, and vice versa, occurs at the meeting of Ontario and Quebec, with signs, newspapers, advertisements, and the like appearing in both languages on either side of the border. Apparently not in multilingual Switzerland.§ Here the transition is brutal and uncompromising. Road signs now are exclusively in German. Perhaps the Swiss Federation, formed so that the different peoples of the region would stop their incessant warring with one another, has decided to let the different language groups lick their wounds in peace and quiet, among their own kind.
Whatever the case, in this canton the German-speakers seem to have gotten a raw deal. The verdant valley of the Rhône in Valais eventually becomes a rocky declivity in Wallis, with the river itself now a rush of whitewater. On the north side of the mountain wall, near the village of Susten, at a height of about 150 meters, rises a forest of white satellite dishes pointed in all directions. Are they placed there to detect whether anyone in Wallis is not speaking Swiss German? I learn later that the impressive array owes more to listening than talking. The facility would make Edward Snowden ill: Part of the Swiss military system Onyx, the dishes conduct electronic surveillance on all and sundry. There are three such sites in Switzerland, constantly monitoring civilian and military communications conducted via satellite, such as faxes, internet traffic, and telephone calls. In 2007, thanks to a leak to a newspaper, it was revealed that Onyx had intercepted a fax from the Egyptian government to its embassy in London confirming the existence of black sites, CIA torture hot spots in eastern Europe. Embarrassed, the Swiss government took those who reported the story to court but eventually lost its case.
I reach a town called Visp, birthplace of one of the most reviled people in the sporting world, Sepp Blatter, longtime head of the insanely corrupt FIFA, the global football federation. In a wonderful turn of phrase, The Guardian called him “the most successful non-homicidal dictator of the past century.” But I am not here to celebrate chicanery. Visp also marks the turning point for those headed south to its famous neighbor, Zermatt. I leave the Rhône and head into a dreary, kilometers-long tunnel leading to an even narrower valley. The drive is arduous and sinuous, passing industrial outposts and hundreds of holiday chalets. As usual, Swiss highway engineering displays its usual panache of sturdy viaducts and avalanche galleries, but at one point the road builders evidently threw up their hands and gave up. On a multilingual sign, we are warned that we are passing through a NATURE DANGERS AREA, and we will just have to take our chances. It isn’t difficult to divine the reason for this: On the west side of the valley, half a mountain face has sheared off and tumbled willy-nilly onto the valley floor near the roadway.
The end of the road is a town called Täsch, where human habitation is dwarfed by automotive imperialism—namely, the type of multistory parking garage usually found at a major international airport. The reason for this ungainly structure in the middle of nowhere lies in Täsch’s status as the railhead for the tens of thousands of tourists, climbers, and skiers en route to Zermatt, at the foot of the Matterhorn.
I wait patiently on the platform for the outbound train to arrive back at Täsch. My companions are two Filipina nannies with their charges, towheaded toddlers destined one day to become jet-setters like their parents. At last the red carriages of the train pull into the station and disgorge, on the opposite platform, a suburb of Tokyo. Once this Japanese phalanx has left en masse, bound for a fleet of tour buses in the parking lot, the Filipinas, toddlers, and I board the empty train. Soon we are off.
The cogs do their work, hauling us up steep slopes and then braking us on sudden descents. We seem to be heading into a wilderness, or at least a logging camp, for signs of civilization become scarce, save for the occasional chalet and an intermittently glimpsed road reserved for the locals. We cross a rushing torrent of water. Alas, this unspoiled scenery does not last long. Alighting at Zermatt immediately dispels any idea of approaching an Alpine fastness. The spotless indoor/outdoor railway platform gives way to a thoroughfare lined on both sides with upscale shops hawking jewelry, watches, and designer clothing. We have arrived in a Brigadoon of bling. I mall-walk up the main street, dodging the golf carts driven by municipal employees at vengeful speeds, gawking at the wares on display. Do I really need a $2,000 Swatch? Maybe I do.
My reason for being here—the Matterhorn—lowers somewhere ahead,
sheathed in clouds, like a burlesque dancer teasing the tourists staring up at it, past the wall of faux-chalet time shares on the outskirts of town. My disappointment is somewhat allayed when a couple emerges from a chapel, arrayed in their wedding best: she, a ballistically leggy Suissesse perched atop what can only be called Matterhorn stilettos; he, in a bespoke suit, his head crowned by the telltale turban of a Sikh. Both sets of parents are there, posing for pictures, smiling gamely, except for the groom’s father, in Sikh garb from head to foot, glowering, obviously not in a Bend It Like Beckham mood. The couple, however, seem so happy that it almost hurts to look at them.
Near the chapel in a small square stands the town’s museum—or, rather, hides the town’s museum. It is tucked underground, as if to hush its off-message voice in the surrounding hymn to commerce. The curators seem ruefully aware of Zermatt’s idiosyncrasies. On a wall, an oversize bar graph shows the number of lodgings in town over the years; the entry for 1984 is captioned “The building craze continues [the ‘money vein’].” Elsewhere are evocations of peasant life in the region and a laboratory devoted to the peculiar geological signature of the Matterhorn. Born in the titanic clash of continents millions of years ago, the mountain has the singular characteristic of being a hybrid. Its upper reaches, and its famous summit, are composed of gneisses from the African tectonic plate, whereas the greater part in its lower altitudes is European. Not quite analogous to the wedding party I have just witnessed, but close enough.
The museum’s most visited room, fittingly numbered 13, concerns mountaineering, the faded photographs of climbers from the past a moving testament to the spirit of what-the-hell. The innermost room, which has the distinct feel of a shrine, is devoted to Edward Whymper, the first man to summit the Matterhorn. Whymper, an engraver by trade, was dispatched to the Alps in the 1850s to execute stirring renderings of the peaks. He dropped his pencil for the pickax. A human specimen of exceptional agility and bravery, Whymper soon racked up a record of first ascents of dozens of peaks, “bagging” them, as he liked to say. His accomplishments were such that even the genteel snots of the Alpine Club in London were compelled to admit him to their august company.
The Alps Page 11