Adultery

I LEAVE my car at the park-and-ride (Take the bus into town! Say “No” to pollution!). I catch the usual bus and look at the same things I always look at on the way in to work. Geneva doesn’t seem to have changed at all since I was a child; the grand old houses are still between the buildings put up by some mad mayor who discovered “new architecture” in the 1950s.

I miss all of this when I travel. The appalling bad taste, the absence of huge glass-and-steel towers, the lack of highways, the tree roots that push through the concrete sidewalks and trip you up, the public parks with their mysterious little wooden fences overgrown with weeds because “that’s what nature is like.” In short, a city that is different from others that have been modernized and lost their charm.

Here, we still say “Good morning” when we meet a stranger in the street and “Good-bye” when we leave a shop after buying a bottle of mineral water, even if we have no intention of ever going back. We still chat to strangers on the bus, even though the rest of the world thinks of the Swiss as being very discreet and reserved.

How wrong they are! But it’s good that other people should think of us like that, because that way we can preserve our way of life for another five or six centuries, before the Barbarians cross the Alps with their wonderful electronic gadgets; their apartments with tiny bedrooms and large living rooms to impress the guests; their women, who wear too much makeup; their men, who talk loudly and bother the neighbors; and their teenagers, who dress rebelliously but who are secretly terrified of what their parents might think.

Let them believe that all we produce is cheese, chocolate, cows, and cuckoo clocks. Let them believe that there’s a bank on every corner in Geneva. We have no intention of changing that image. We’re happy without the Barbarian hordes. We’re all armed to the teeth (since military service is obligatory, every Swiss man has a rifle in his house), but you rarely hear of anyone shooting anyone else.

We’re pleased that we haven’t changed for centuries. We feel proud to have remained neutral when Europe sent its sons off to fight senseless wars. We’re glad not to have to explain Geneva’s somewhat unattractive appearance, with its fin de siècle cafés and elderly ladies strolling about the city.

To say “we’re happy” might not be entirely true. Everyone is happy apart from me, as I travel to work wondering what’s wrong.