The Snug: A Blog

 Shoplifting at Dracula's: a memoir, cont'd.

In our Ford Squire, Dad at the wheel (Mum never drove when he was available, regardless whether he was drunk or sober—although she was never drunk), we returned to the Continent, Dover to Calais across the choppy Channel under November skies the color of slate and, bidding Paris au revoir from the périphérique, traveled down the poplar-lined Roman highway, Route Nationale 5, through the dirty golds and muddy midwinter spinach-greens of Burgundy and over the Col de la Faucille into Switzerland, a mountainous land of mystery, and Geneva, placid city of plenty and plenty of mysteries and my home for the next seventeen years.

      Yes, the Swiss-French metropolis had (and has) boulevards; cafés; the French language; bookshops; a Left Bank and a Right Bank; an opera house that is a faithful replica, in miniature, of the Palais Garnier; and even a mini-Pigalle (les Paquis), all of which make its Parisian parentage apparent. But there’s a hidden heart at its core, and the wild is nearer in Geneva than in domesticated Paris. When we arrived and the fogs of November blew away in the express train of an Alpine wind they call La Bise, I experienced color and space on a hyper-Floridian scale. The lake was immense, blue, and unruly, stirred into foaming whitecaps by the wind. Shunning the city were the Voirons’ forested slopes, on which every pine tree was clearly silhouetted in the preindustrial clarity of the light, and from which timid wisps of cloud were whipped away by the bise. Great snowy mountains called the Alps rose to the heavens. Two rushing rivers, the Rhône and the Arve, blended blue and brown in a confluence of snowmelt. Outside the then-sparse suburbs the countryside rolled away comfortably in every direction, bearing vines and farmhouses to the foothills of the mountains. In the lake was ice; in the streets, snow. It may have been my first sight of snow; in Paris it merely rained, and before that I’d known only Florida. And indeed, what I mostly remember of those early days in Geneva is snow. Meteorological history (via quick research on the Internet) bears me out. The winter of 1957 was one of the coldest on record, with mini-icebergs clunking and grinding up and down in the harbor. The swans were taken squawking and flapping from their lakeside nests and housed in the disused opera house for the winter. There they honked and hissed and, I suppose, paddled about in tubs of tepid water until the thaw came.

      Geneva turned out to be quite different from Paris in other ways. For one thing, it was surrounded by mountains. For another, it had no metro. This was a disappointment to me, although as an aspiring future Paris metro I could have applied for the position; but Geneva would be a hard place to stick an underground train because a) it’s as hilly as a sick man’s fever chart and b) it’s a palimpsest of ancient artifacts dating back to Neolithic times. Also, its extremities are in another country, France, just down every side road. History, customs formalities and the up-and-down topography therefore make an underground impractical. But there were, and are, trolleys and streetcars that sway and lurch down the middle of the city streets, transporting nine-to-fivers to and from the dormitory communities now creeping up the green lower slopes of the Jura Mountains to the north and colonizing the foothills of the Alps on the southern side—but many of those commuters need their passports, for all these mountains are in France. In fact, when you look out over the city from the North Tower of St. Pierre Cathedral, the only countryside you see is in France, except for a slice of Switzerland along the north shore of the lake; and even that was French until 1815 (Congress of Vienna and all that). The border lies at the end of every lane, every suburban avenue. Rare is the bus or trolley line that doesn’t finish its run at the booted feet of French customs guards. With the same language, culture, newspapers and TV on both sides of the border, Switzerland becomes France, France Switzerland. Tens of thousands live in France and cross the border three or four times a day to go to jobs and the theatre and the restaurants in Switzerland. The tide turns on weekends when the Swiss flood to French supermarkets for food bargains. Everyone speaks a kind of French, or English, or Italian (the third language; to see the tip of Mont Blanc from Geneva on a clear day is to see the northernmost sliver of Italy). When you live in Geneva, you fully appreciate the fluidity of national identities. Living there sealed my mongrelism; I was multicultural avant la lettre. Half the city’s population is foreign, yet the place contrives to be simultaneously wholly Swiss in its order and cleanliness (less so now, with drugs and urban graffiti) and wholly un-Swiss, if by “Swiss” one wishes to denote the leather shorts and alpenhorns of, say, Appenzell or Unterwalden, in the heartland of the picturesque country the urbane and urban Genevese dismiss as “la Suisse primitive.” Geneva’s root culture is French, for the distinction between Swiss-French and French is much less than that between the Swiss-German of Zurich and the German of Berlin or Hamburg. Geneva, herself a world capital, acknowledges only one cultural capital, and that is Paris. So it is quite fitting that her suburbs should be in France, and fitting that I should have made the transition from the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Elysées to the remote borderlands of the Léman Basin, where mountain hamlets an hour from cosmopolitan boulevards doze in the slumber of the ages. Where in the remote pastures of the High Jura the solitary mas, alpine barns, slumber beneath their eiderdowns of snow through the long winters. Where paths footworn over the centuries lead from the forest’s edge of the mysterious Voirons to the hut that hides among the trees like the witch’s house in “Hansel and Gretel,” its chimney smoking quietly. And where, too, the ski slopes echo to the rollicking of Geneva jet-set millionaires and lesser party animals seeking the oblivion of sex and booze and a fast schuss to the nearest disco. (Solitary myself, I was always more drawn to the somber solitudes, although once or twice in my teens I drunkenly roamed the snowy streets of high-end Alpine resorts in an intoxicated and fruitless search for a friendly girl or two.)

    In Geneva, as in Paris, we lived first in a hotel of faded elegance, en l’occurrence the Hotel Beau-Rivage, on the lake, with a view of the Jet d’Eau and the elegant lakeside villas and the mini-Fujiyama of the Môle mountain pointing the way farther up the geological staircase to the noble Grande Jorasse range and culminating in imperial Mont Blanc, whose profile has been compared by Bonapartists to that of the Emperor, asleep, with his bicorne on. This panorama is the grandest in Europe. Yet here Memory unhelpfully steps in with a limpid mental snapshot of…the Parthenon, as seen from the window of our Beau-Rivage room, the forested slopes of the anvil-topped Voirons in lieu of the Acropolis. No doubt I’d seen a picture of the original; picture mates with reality in my unformed mind, and the resulting pastiche passes itself off as a memory. Combined with the Arcadian clarity of the view—forests, mountains, sky—the image of a great temple amid the wilderness must have entranced me, in those first Geneva days, and I mentally touched up the picture. Still: Caveat, memoirist! Did it really happen, or was’t but a dream? (Or a film?) For instance, I distinctly remember time traveling a few years later, in a wood near Nyon, an old walled town about ten miles up the lake from Geneva, busy and modern as are all prosperous Swiss market towns; but somehow I’d found myself in the year 1450 or so, looking on as a lordly procession entered through the main gate. I can still recall the vision in Cinemascopic detail: the walled city; my lord’s retinue arriving gaily caparisoned, standards flying and horses neighing; milkmaids and blacksmiths and drapers and drovers and other such quaint Breughelian personalities looking down from the city walls; trumpets sounding; the procession entering the town; then, from behind me, a thudding of hooves growing louder and louder and a horseman clad in broad-brimmed hat, breeches and jerkin galloping past me down the hill, on his way to the citadel. Who was he? A prince? A messenger with urgent news from Aix or Ghent? No modern anomalies intrude into this medieval setting. It is pure, intact, a vignette of another time. I even remember the gnawing fear that I would be late for dinner (by about four hundred years). 

     But bygone time is everywhere in Geneva, which was old when the Roman Empire was young. The foundations of Neolithic lake-dwellings are visible in the harbor. Julius Caesar was impressed by the strategic location of the place and the steadfastness of its inhabitants. Growing up there, therefore, was to be constantly aware not only of other places, because of the international population, but of other times. I realize this now, in my late middle age, surrounded as I am by Americans young and old who grew up in landscapes with no past, no view of History’s shimmering ghostly sea behind ancient facades. But in Geneva’s Old Town the Middle Ages survive, especially in the chill fog of December nights; in the tidy elegance of the Athénée district there lingers something of the Grand Siècle; the gesticulating ghosts of Dostoevsky and Bakunin congregate in the quiet courtyards near the Russian Church, in the neighborhood once known as La Petite Russie. Here and there are buildings, such as the Collège Calvin and St. Pierre Cathedral, that seem like reluctant visitors to the modern age. I attended school in just such a building, La Grande Boissière, an eighteenth-century chateau set among orderly eighteenth-century gardens in the shadow of the limestone-striped Mont Salève. The school was the International School, by now an established institution, back then a noble experiment. Arriving from Paris nearly a full year after first grade, I started off in second grade, of which I recall little except my perverse insistence on mispronouncing my name when others pronounced it correctly: “My name’s Bullen,” I’d say, stubbornly. “Boylan?” asked the teacher, who might have recognized the name from Ulysses, at least (ordinary literate people actually read Joyce in those days). “No: BULLEN!” bawled horrid little Boylan. Truly, I was an odd little sod altogether, obsessed to the point of monomania not only with mispronouncing my family name but also with such bizarre trivia as traffic lights, the Paris metro, and stuffed seals, as well as a little boy’s more normal preoccupations such as electric trains, toy cars, and suits of armor. All this was compounded by being an only child. My isolation drove me into myself, where I have since stayed. I made few friends at school, not being especially prone then or now to socializing, preferring sincere solitude to false friendliness. If there’s a liar and a fraud in me, he comes out when I’m being falsely congenial, not when I’m truthfully aloof.[1] This diffidence led to some bullying, of course, as the quiet lad always arouses the playground rowdy, just as in later life in the office the quiet man—the Bartleby—is looked at askance by the hearties, the team players, the oafs who barge in uninvited…happily, in my case the pushing about on the playground was never very severe. Neither my name, however pronounced, nor my person, insignificant (although I did wear glasses), was unusual or exotic enough to warrant industrial-strength bullying, and such as occurred—the odd pile-on, the occasional ambush on the way to the tram stop, the steady kick in the ankles during math class—left no deep emotional scars that I’m aware of.