Neither Here Nor There - Travels In Europe Part 7

The only phrase book I've ever come across that was of even the remotest use was a nineteenth-century volume for doctors, which I found years ago in the library of the county hospital in Des Moines. (I worked there part-time while I was in college and used to go into the library on my dinner break to see if I could find a medical condition that would get me excused from Phys. Ed.) In five languages the book offered such thoughtful expressions as 'Your boils are septic. You should go to a hospital without delay' and 'How long has your p.e.n.i.s been distended in this way?' Knowing that I was about to summer in Europe, I committed several of them to memory, thinking they might come in handy with truculent waiters. At the very least I thought it might be useful, upon finding oneself on a crowded train or in a long queue, to be able to say in a variety of languages, 'Can you kindly direct me to a leprosy clinic? My skin is beginning to slough.' But I never found a use for any of them and sadly they are forgotten to me now.

Eventually, with the waiting-room empty and nothing happening, I presented myself at the nearest interrogation cubicle. The young policeman who was taking down details from a woman with a bruised face looked at me irritably for disturbing him twice in two hours. 'Do you speak Italian?' he said.

'No.'

'Then come back tomorrow. There will be an English-speaking policeman here then.' This rather overlooked the fact that his own English was accomplished.

'Why didn't you tell me this two hours ago?' I enquired in the semi-shrill voice of someone challenging an armed person.

'Come back tomorrow.'

I checked back into the Hotel Corallo and spent a festive afternoon dealing with the Italian telephone system and trying to get through to the claims office in London. I had two types of traveller's cheques, Visa and American Express, which meant that I got to do everything twice. I spent the afternoon on telephone lines that sounded as if they were full of water reading out lists of serial numbers: 'RH259-'

I would be interrupted by a tiny voice shouting at me from a foot locker at the bottom of a very deep lake, 'Is that R A 2 9 9 ...?'

'No, it's R H 2 R H 2 five nine-' five nine-'

'Can you speak up, please?'

'IT'S R H TWO FIVE NINE!!'

'h.e.l.lo? Are you still there, Mr Byerson? h.e.l.lo? h.e.l.lo?'

And so the afternoon went. American Express told me I could get my refund at their Florence office in the morning. Visa wanted to sleep on it.

'Look, I'm dest.i.tute,' I lied. They told me they would have to wire the details to an a.s.sociate bank in Florence, or elsewhere in Europe, and I could have the money once the paperwork was sorted out at my end. I already knew from experience how byzantine Italian banks were you could have a heart attack in an Italian bank and they wouldn't call an ambulance until you had filled out a Customer Heart Attack Form and had it stamped at at least three windows so I unhesitatingly told her to give me the name of a bank in Geneva. She did.

In the morning I returned to the Questura and after waiting an hour and a half was taken into a room called the Ufficio Denuncie. I just loved that. The Office of Denunciations! It made me feel like making sweeping charges: 'I denounce Michael Heseltine's barber! I denounce the guy who thought Hereford & Worcester would make a nifty name for a county! I denounce every sales a.s.sistant at every Dixons I've ever been in!'

I was introduced to a young lady in jeans who sat at a desk behind a ma.s.sive and ancient manual typewriter. She had a kind, searching face and asked me lots and lots of questions my name and address, where I came from, my pa.s.sport number, what I did for a living, my ten favourite movies of all time, that sort of thing and then typed each response with one finger and inordinate slowness, searching the half-acre keyboard for long minutes before tentatively striking a key, as if fearful of receiving an electric shock. After each question she had to loosen the typewriter platen and move the sheet of paper around to get the next answer in the vicinity of the blank s.p.a.ce for it. (This was not her strongest skill.) The whole thing took ages. Finally, I was given a carbon copy of the report to use in securing a refund. The top copy, I have no doubt, went straight into a wastebasket.

I walked the couple of miles to the American Express office I was now out of money wondering if I would be lectured like a schoolboy who has lost his lunch money. There were seven or eight people, all Americans, in the single queue and it became evident as we chatted together that we had all had our pockets picked by children of roughly the same description, though at different places in the city. And this of course was just the American Express cheques. If you added in all the Visa and other kinds of traveller's cheques that were taken, and all the cash, then it was obvious that the gypsies must clear at a minimum $25,000-$30,000 every Sunday afternoon. Presumably the cheques are then laundered through friendly exchange bureaux around the country. Why do the police care so little about this racket (unless of course they get a cut)? At all events, American Express replaced my cheques with commendable dispatch, and I was back on the street fifteen minutes later.

Outside a gypsy woman with a three-year-old on her lap asked me for money. 'I gave already,' I said, and walked on to the station.

16. Milan and Como

I arrived in Milan in mid-afternoon, expecting great things. It is after all the richest city in Italy, the headquarters of many of the most famous names of Italian commerce: Campari, Benetton, Armani, Alfa-Romeo, the Memphis design group, and the disparate empires of Silvio Berlusconi and Franco Maria Ricci. But this, as I should have realized beforehand, is its problem. Cities that are dedicated to making money, and in Milan they appear to think about little else, seldom have much energy left for charm.

I got a room in an expensive but nondescript hotel across from the monumental white marble central railway station like something built for Mussolini to give a strutting address to ma.s.sed crowds and embarked on a long, hot walk into town along the Via Pisani. This was a broad, modern boulevard, more American than European. It was lined with sleek gla.s.s and chrome office buildings, but the central gra.s.s strip was scrubby and uncared-for and the few benches where you could rest had syringes scattered beneath them. As I moved further into the city the buildings became older and rather more pleasing, but there was still something lacking. I paused to consult my map in a tiny park on a pleasant residential street near the cathedral square and it was depressingly squalid gra.s.sless and muddy, with broken benches, and pigeons picking among hundreds of cigarette b.u.t.ts and disused tram tickets. I find that hard to excuse in a rich city.

Two blocks on and Milan blossomed. Cl.u.s.tered together were the city's three glories: La Scala, the Duomo and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. I went first to the cathedral cavernous and Gothic, the third-largest church in the world begrimed on the outside and covered in scaffolding, and so gloomy within that it took me whole minutes to find the ceiling. It was quite splendid in a murky sort of way and entirely free of tourists, which was a happy novelty after Florence. Here it was just a constant stream of locals popping in to add a candle to the hundreds already burning and say a quick 'Ave Maria' before heading home for supper. I liked that. It is such an unusual sight to find a grand church being used for its intended purpose.

Afterwards I crossed the cathedral square to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele and spent a happy hour wandering through it, hands behind my back, browsing in the windows and noting with unease the occasional splats from the pigeons that had managed to sneak in and were now leading a rewarding life gliding among the rafters and s.h.i.tting on the people below. It is an imposing shopping arcade, four storeys high, built in the grandiose style of the 1860s and still probably the most handsome shopping mall in the world, with floors of neatly patterned tiles, a vaulted latticework roof of gla.s.s and steel, and a cupola rising 160 feet above a rotunda where the two interior avenues intersect. It has the loftiness and echoing hush, and even the shape, of a cathedral, but with something of the commercial grandness of a nineteenth-century railway station thrown in. Every shopping centre should be like this.

Needing my afternoon infusion of caffeine, I took a table outside one of the three or four rather elegant cafes scattered among the shops. It was one of those typically European places where they have seventy tables and one hopelessly overworked waiter, who dashes around trying to deliver orders, clear tables and take money all at the same time, and who has the cheerful, nothing's-too-much-trouble att.i.tude that you would expect of someone in such an interesting and remunerative line of work. You don't get a second chance in these places. I was staring at nothing in particular, chin in hand, idly wondering if Ornella Muti had ever done any mud wrestling, when it filtered through to my consciousness that the waiter was making one of his rare visits to my vicinity and had actually said to me, 'Prego?'

I looked up. 'Oh, an espres-' I said, but he was gone already and I realized that I was never going to get this close to him again unless I married his sister. So with a sigh of resignation I pulled myself up, moved sideways through the tiny gaps between the tables, grimacing apologetically as I caused a succession of unforgiving people to slop their coffee or plunge their noses into their gateaux, and returned unrefreshed to the streets.

I strolled along the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, a wide pedestrian shopping street, looking for an alternative cafe and finding none. For a moment I thought I had died and been sent by mistake to yuppie heaven. Unlike the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where at least there were a couple of bookshops and an art gallery or two, here and on the neighbouring streets there was nothing to sustain the mind or soul, just boutiques selling expensive adornments for the body: shoes, handbags, leather goods, jewellery, designer clothing that hung on the body like sacking and cost a fortune. Things reached a kind of understated intensity on the Via Montenapoleone, an anonymous-looking side street but none the less the most exclusive shopping artery in the country, and lined with ritzy stores where the pa.s.sword was clearly 'Money's no object'. Apart from the old shopping arcade, Milan appeared to have no cafe life at all. There were a few establishments, but they were all hole-in-the-wall stand-up places, where people would order a small coffee, toss it back and return to the street all in five seconds. That wasn't what I was looking for.

After southern Italy, Milan seemed hardly Italian at all. People walked quickly and purposefully, swinging shopping bags with names like Gucci and Ferragamo on them. They didn't dawdle over espressos and tuck into mountainous plates of pasta, napkins bibbed into their collars. They didn't engage in pa.s.sionate arguments about trivialities. They took meetings. They made deals. They talked into car phones. They drove with restraint, mostly in BMWs and Porsches, and parked neatly. They all looked as if they had just stepped off the covers of Vogue Vogue or or GQ. GQ. It was like an outpost of southern California in Italy. I don't know about you, but I find southern California hard enough to take in southern California. This was Italy I wanted pandemonium and street life, people in sleeveless vests on front stoops, washing hanging across the streets, guys selling things from pushcarts, Ornella Muti and Giancarlo Giannini zipping past on a Vespa. Most of all, I wanted a cup of coffee. It was like an outpost of southern California in Italy. I don't know about you, but I find southern California hard enough to take in southern California. This was Italy I wanted pandemonium and street life, people in sleeveless vests on front stoops, washing hanging across the streets, guys selling things from pushcarts, Ornella Muti and Giancarlo Giannini zipping past on a Vespa. Most of all, I wanted a cup of coffee.

In the morning I went to the Brera Gallery, hidden away on a back street and reached through a courtyard in a scaffolding-covered palazzo. Big things were going on here: plaster dust hung in the air and there was a commotion of hammering and drilling. The gallery seemed to be only half open. Several of the rooms were closed off and even in the open rooms there were lots of rectangles of unfaded wallpaper where pictures had been lent out or sent away for restoration. But what remained was not only sensational but familiar Mantegna's foreshortened body of Christ, a Bellini madonna, two Ca.n.a.lettos recently and glowingly restored, and Piero della Francesca's gorgeously rich but decidedly bizarre 'Madonna with Christ Child, Angels, Saints and Federico da Montefeltro' our old friend the Duke of Urbino again.

I didn't understand this picture at all. If it was painted after the Duke died and here he was now in heaven, why was Christ a baby again? On the other hand, were we to take it that the Duke had somehow managed to fly through the centuries in order to be present at Christ's birth? Whatever the meaning, it was a nifty piece of work. One man liked it so much that he had brought his own folding chair and was just sitting there with arms crossed looking at it. The best thing about the Brera was that there was hardly anyone there, just a few locals and no foreign tourists but me. After Florence, it was bliss to be able to see the paintings without having to ask somebody to lift me up.

Afterwards I walked a long way across the city to see Leonardo's 'Last Supper' in the refectory beside the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. You pay a load of money at a ticket window and step into a bare, dim hall and there it is, this most famous of frescoes, covering the whole of the far wall. A railing keeps you from approaching any closer than about twenty-five feet, which seems unfair since it is so faint that you could barely see it from five feet and must strain to the utmost to see anything at all from twenty-five feet. It's like a ghost image. If you hadn't seen it reproduced a thousand times before, you probably wouldn't be able to recognize it at all. One end was covered with scaffolding and a great deal of gleaming Dr Who-like restoration equipment. A lone technician was on a platform scratching away. They have been working on the 'Last Supper' for years, but I couldn't see any sign that the thing was actually coming to life.

Poor old Leonardo hasn't been too well served by history. The wall began to crumble almost immediately (some of it had been built with loose dirt) after he finished painting it, and some early friars cut a door into it, knocking off Christ's feet. Then over time the chamber stopped being a refectory and became in turn a stable (can you imagine that a roomful of donkeys with the greatest painting in history on the wall?), a storage-room, a prison and a barracks. Much of the earlier restoration work was not, to put it charitably, terribly accomplished. One artist gave Saint James six fingers. It is a wonder that it survived at all. In point of fact, it hasn't really. I don't know what it will be like after another ten or fifteen years of restoration work, but for now it would be more accurate to say that this is where the 'Last Supper' used to be.

I slotted 1,000 lire into a machine on the wall, knowing that it would be a mistake, and was treated to a brief and ponderous commentary about the history of the fresco related by a woman on Mogadon whose command of English p.r.o.nunciation was not altogether up to the task ('Da fresk you see in fronna you iss juan of da grettest works of art in da whole worl ...'), then looked around for any other ways to waste my money and, finding none, stepped blinking out into the strong sunshine.

I strolled over to the nearby Museo Tecnica, where I paid another small fortune to walk through its empty halls. I was curious to see it because I had read that it had working models of all Leonardo's inventions. It did small wooden ones but they were surprisingly dull and, well, wooden, and for the rest the museum was just full of old typewriters and oddments of machinery that meant nothing to me because the labels were in Italian. And anyway, let's be frank, the Italians' technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven.

I took a late-afternoon train to Como for no other reason than that it was nearby and on a lake and I didn't wish to spend another night in a city. I remembered reading that Lake Como was where Mussolini was found hiding out after Italy fell, and I figured it must have something going for it if it was the last refuge of a desperate man.

It did. It was a lovely little city, clean and perfect, in a cupped hand of Alpine mountains at the southern end of the narrow, thirty-mile-long lake of the same name. It is only a small place, but it boasts two cathedrals, two railway stations (each with its own line to Milan), two grand villas, a fetching park, a lakeside promenade overhung with poplars and generously adorned with green wooden benches, and a maze of ancient pedestrian-only streets filled with little shops and secret squares. It was perfect, perfect.

I found a room in the Hotel Plinius in the heart of town, had two coffees at a cafe on the Piazza Roma overlooking the lake, ate a splendid meal in a friendly restaurant on a back street and fell in love with Italy all over again. Afterwards I spent a long, contented evening just walking, shuffling with hands in pockets along the apparently endless lakeside promenade and lolling for long periods watching evening sneak in. I walked as far as the Villa Geno, on a promontory at a bend in the lake, and strolled back round to the opposite bank to the small lakeside park with its museum, built in the likeness of a temple, in commemoration of Allesandro Volta, who lived in Como from 1745 to 1827, and there I lolled some more. I walked back to the hotel through empty streets, browsing in shop windows, and thinking how very lucky the Italians are not to have Boots and Dixons and Rumbelows filling their shopping streets with tat and glare, and retired to bed a happy man.

In the morning I visited the two main churches. The Basilica of San Fidele, begun in 914, was much the more ancient, but the domed cathedral, 500 years younger, was larger and more splendid indeed, more splendid than any provincial church I had seen since Aachen. It was dark and I had to stand for a minute to adjust to the dimness for fear of walking into a pillar. Morning sunlight flowed through a lofty stained-gla.s.s window, but was swallowed almost immediately by the gloom among the high arches. The church was not only surprisingly large for its community, but richly endowed it was full of subtle tapestries and ancient paintings and some striking statuary, including a Christ figure that is said to weep. (They must show it a Jimmy Tarbuck video beforehand.) I spent an hour sitting out of the way, gazing at the interior and watching people lighting candles. Very restful. This done, I felt content to return to the station and climb aboard the first train to Switzerland.

The train went north, through steep and agreeable countryside, but without the lake views I had been hoping for. We left the country at Chia.s.so, at the southernmost tip of a pointed length of Switzerland that plunges into Italy like a diver into water. Chia.s.so looked an una.s.suming border town, but it was the setting of one of Europe's greatest bank frauds, when in 1979 five men at the small local branch of Credit Suisse managed to syphon off the better part of $1 billion before anyone back at head office in Zurich noticed this slight drain on the bank's liquidity.

Switzerland and Italy are threaded together like the fingers of clasped hands all along the southern Alps and I spent much of the day pa.s.sing from one to the other, as I headed for Brig. The train climbed sluggishly through ever-higher alt.i.tudes to Lugano and thence Locarno.

At Locarno I had to change trains and had an hour to kill, so I went for a look around the town and a sandwich. It was an immaculate, sunny place, with a lakeside walk even finer than Como's. They still spoke Italian here, but you could tell you were in Switzerland just from the zebra crossings and the glossy red benches, which all looked as if they had been painted that morning, and the absence of even a leaf on the paths of the little lakeside park. Street sweepers were at work everywhere, sweeping up leaves with old-fashioned brooms, and I had the distinct feeling that if I dropped a chewing-gum wrapper someone in uniform would immediately step out from behind a tree and sweep it up or shoot me, or possibly both.

They don't seem to eat sandwiches in Locarno. I walked all around the business district and had trouble finding even a bakery. When at last I did find one it seemed to sell nothing but gooey pastries, though they did have a pile of what I took to be sausage rolls. Starving, I ordered three, at considerable expense, and went outside with them. But they turned out to contain mashed figs a foodstuff that only your grandmother would eat, and only then because she couldn't find her dentures and tasted like tea leaves soaked in cough syrup. I gamely nibbled away at one of them, but it was too awful and I put them in my rucksack with the idea that I might try them again later. In the event I forgot all about them and didn't rediscover them until two days later when I pulled my last clean shirt from the rucksack and found the rolls clinging to it.

I went into the station buffet for a gla.s.s of mineral water to wash away the stickiness. It was possibly the unfriendliest place in Switzerland. It had eight customers but was so quiet you could hear the clock ticking. The waiter stood at the counter lazily reaming beer gla.s.ses with a cloth. He made no move to serve me until I held up a finger and called for a mineral water. He brought a bottle and a gla.s.s, wordlessly placed them on the table and returned to his cloth and wet gla.s.ses. He looked as if he had just learned that his wife had run off with the milkman and taken all his Waylon Jennings alb.u.ms, but then I noticed that the other customers were wearing the same sour expression. It seemed chilling after the boundless good humour of Italy. Across from me sat an old lady with a metal crutch, which clattered to the floor as she tried to get up. The waiter just stood there watching, clearly thinking, Now what are you going to do, you old cripple? I sprang to her aid and for my pains was given a withering look and the teensiest of 'Grazie's', then she got up and hobbled out.

Locarno, I decided, was a strange place. I bought a ticket on the two o'clock train to Domodossala, a name that can be p.r.o.nounced in any of thirty-seven ways. The man in the ticket window made me try out all of them, furrowing his brow gravely as if he couldn't for the life of him think what nearby community had a name that might cause an American difficulty, until finally I stumbled on the approximate p.r.o.nunciation. 'Ah, Domodossala!' he said, p.r.o.nouncing it a thirty-eighth way. As a final act of kindness he neglected to tell me that because of work on the railway lines the service was by bus for the first ten kilometres.

I waited and waited on the platform, but the train never came and it seemed odd that no one else was waiting with me. There were only a couple of trains a day to Domodossala. Surely there would be at least one or two other pa.s.sengers? Finally, I went and asked a porter and he indicated to me, in that friendly why-don't-you-go-f.u.c.k-yourself way of railway porters the world over, that I had to take a bus and, when pressed as to where I might find this bus, motioned vaguely with the back of his hand in the direction of the rest of the world. I went outside just in time to see the bus to Domodossala pulling out. Fortunately, I was able to persuade the driver to stop by clinging to the windscreen for two hundred yards. I was desperate to get out of there.

A few miles outside Locarno we joined a waiting train at a little country station. It climbed high into the jagged mountains and took us on a spectacular ride along the lips of deep gorges and forbidding pa.s.ses, where farmhouses and hamlets were tucked away in the most inaccessible places, on the edge of giddy eminences. It would be hard to imagine a more difficult place to be a farmer. One misstep and you would be falling for a day and a half. Even from the train it was unnerving, an experience more akin to wing-walking than rail travel.

It struck me as inconceivable that anyone could be confronted by such grandeur and not be overwhelmed by the beauty of it and yet, according to Kenneth Clark, almost no visitor to the Alps before the eighteenth century remarked on the scenery. They seemed not to see it. Now, of course, the problem is the reverse. Fifty million tourists a year trample through the Alps, delighting in and despoiling its beauty all at the same time. All the encroachments a.s.sociated with tourism resorts, hotels, shops, restaurants, holiday homes, ski runs, ski lifts and new highways are not only altering the face of the Alps irreparably but undermining their very foundations. In 1987, just a few miles east of where I was now, sixty people died when a flash flood raced through the Valtellina valley, sweeping houses and hotels away like matchboxes before a broom. In the same summer, thirty people died in a landslide at Annecy in France. Without the mountainsides being denuded of trees for new housing and resorts, neither would have happened.

I was sitting on the wrong side of the train to see the scenery outside my window there was nothing but a wall of rock but a kindly bespectacled lady sitting across the aisle saw me straining to see and invited me to take the empty seat opposite her. She was Swiss and spoke excellent English. We chatted brightly about the scenery and our modest lives. She was a bank clerk in Zurich but was visiting her mother in a village near Domodossala and had just had a day shopping in Locarno. She showed me some flowers she had bought there. It was wonderful. It seemed like weeks it was was weeks since I had held a normal conversation with anyone, and I was so taken with the novel experience of issuing sounds through a hole in my head that I talked and talked, and before long she was fast asleep and I was back once again in my own quiet little world. weeks since I had held a normal conversation with anyone, and I was so taken with the novel experience of issuing sounds through a hole in my head that I talked and talked, and before long she was fast asleep and I was back once again in my own quiet little world.

17. Switzerland

I reached Brig, by way of Domodossala and the Simplon Pa.s.s, at about five in the evening. It was darker and cooler here than it had been in Italy, and the streets were shiny with rain. I got a room in the Hotel Victoria overlooking the station and went straight out to look for food, having had nothing to eat since my two bites of Mashed Fig Delight in Locarno at lunchtime.

All the restaurants in Brig were German. You never know where you are in Switzerland. One minute everything's Italian, then you travel a mile or two and everyone is talking German or French or some variety of Romansch. All along an irregular line running the length of east-central Switzerland you can find pairs of villages that are neighbours and yet clearly from different linguistic groups St Blaise and Erlach, Les Diablerets and Gsteig, Delemont and Laufen and as you head south towards Italy the same thing happens again with Italian. Brig was a nipple of German speakers, so to speak, between the two.

I examined six or seven restaurants, mystified by the menus, wishing I knew the German for liver, pig's trotters and boiled eyeball, before chancing upon an establishment called the Restaurant de la Place at the top of the town. Now this is a nice surprise, I thought, and went straight in, figuring that at least I'd have some idea what I was ordering, but the name Restaurant de la Place was just a heartless joke. The menu here was in German, too.

It really is the most unattractive language for foodstuffs. If you want whipped cream on your coffee in much of the German-speaking world, you order it 'mit Schlag'. Now does that sound to you like a frothy and delicious pick-me-up, or does that sound like the sort of thing smokers bring up first thing in the morning? Here the menu was full of items that brought to mind the noises of a rutting pig: k.n.o.blauchbrot, Schweinskotelett ihrer Wahl, Portion Schlagobers (and that was a dessert).

I ordered Entrecote and Frites, which sounded a trifle dull after Italy (and indeed so it proved to be), but at least I wouldn't have to hide most of it in my napkin rather than face that awful, embarra.s.sing cry of disappointment that waiters always give when they find you haven't touched your Goat's s.c.r.o.t.u.m En Croute. At all events, it was an agreeable enough place, as much bar as restaurant: dark and plain, with a tobacco-stained ceiling, but the waitress was friendly and the beer was large and cold.

In the middle of the table sat a large cast-iron platter, which I a.s.sumed was an ashtray, and then I had the awful thought that perhaps it was some kind of food receptacle and that the waitress would come along in a minute and put some bread in it or something. I looked around the room to see if any of the other few customers were using theirs as an ashtray and no one seemed to be, so I s.n.a.t.c.hed out my cigarette b.u.t.t and dead match and secreted them in a pot plant beside the table, and then tried to disperse the ash with a blow, but it went all over the tablecloth. As I tried to brush it away I knocked my gla.s.s with the side of my hand and slopped beer all across the table.

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 compa.s.sionate 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-gla.s.s windows. Then it occurred to me that the shops in most countries sell unarresting items from behind plate-gla.s.s windows. It was simply that I was no longer in Italy, which caused me a pa.s.sing 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 Za.n.u.ssis.

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 cla.s.sic account of the black death, imaginatively ent.i.tled The Black Death The Black Death just the thing for those lonely, rainy nights in a foreign country. 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 had to get better now, some anonymous sailor stepped ash.o.r.e 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. to get better now, some anonymous sailor stepped ash.o.r.e 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 136061, and yet again in 136869, 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 G.o.d 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 sh.o.r.e 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 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 a.s.sume 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 pa.s.sage 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 c.r.a.p 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 a.s.shole 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 cla.s.s 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 Rhone to claim my refund on my Visa traveller's cheques. I was directed to a small room in the bas.e.m.e.nt, where international transactions were dealt with. I had a.s.sumed 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 doc.u.ments, 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 ident.i.ty 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 doc.u.ment. 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 f.u.c.k 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 s.p.a.ce 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 b.u.t.t 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 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 endors.e.m.e.nt 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, b.u.t.toned 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 j.a.pan's and more than double Britain's.) Money is everything in Switzerland the country has more banks than dentists and their quiet pa.s.sion 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, s.p.a.cious, 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.

Instead I noticed on my city map that just up the road was the Musee International de la Croix-Rouge et du Croissant-Rouge (International Museum of the Red Cross and Red Breakfast Roll), which sounded much more promising to me. And so it proved to be. It really was a surprisingly nice place, if that isn't too inappropriate a term to apply to a museum dedicated to human suffering in all its amazing and manifold variety. I mean that it was thoughtfully laid out, with a confident and accomplished use of multi-media resources, as I believe they would call it in the trade. It was virtually empty, too, and generally effective at putting its story across, considering that everything had to be explained in four languages and that they couldn't be too graphic in their depictions of disasters and human cruelty lest it unsettle young visitors.

Clearly too the organization's hands were tied by certain political considerations. One of the displays was a replica of a cell no bigger than a cupboard in which Red Cross workers had discovered seventeen prisoners being held in conditions of unspeakable discomfort, unable even to lie down, for no reason other than that their political views did not accord with those of the rulers. But nowhere did it hint in what country this cell had been found. At first I thought this constant discretion craven, but on reflection I supposed that it was necessary and prudent. To name the country would have jeopardized the Red Cross's operations there, wherever it was. The scary thing was to realize just how many countries it might have been.

I spent the rest of the day shuffling around the city, wandering through department stores, fingering the merchandise (this drives Swiss sales clerks crazy), dining on the only affordable food in town (at McDonald's), visiting the cathedral, exploring the old town and gazing in the windows of antique shops that sold the sort of over-ornate objects you would expect to see in, say, a House Beautiful House Beautiful article on Barry Manilow's Malibu hacienda life-sized porcelain tigers, oriental vases you could put a large child in, oversized Louis-Quatorze bureaux and sideboards with gilt gleaming from every curl and crevice. article on Barry Manilow's Malibu hacienda life-sized porcelain tigers, oriental vases you could put a large child in, oversized Louis-Quatorze bureaux and sideboards with gilt gleaming from every curl and crevice.

In the evening, having scrubbed the mashed figs of Locarno out of my last clean shirt, I went for a beer in a dive bar around the corner, where I waited weeks for service and then spent the next hour gaping alternately at the largeness of the bill and the smallness of the beer, holding the two side by side for purposes of comparison. Declining the advance of Geneva's only prost.i.tute ('Thanks, but I've just been f.u.c.ked by the management'), I moved to another semi-seamy bar down the street, but found precisely the same experience, and so returned with heavy feet to my hotel room.

I went into the bathroom to see how my shirt was drying. The purply mashed-fig stains, I noted with the steady gaze of someone who knows his way around disappointment, were coming back, like disappearing ink. I dropped the shirt in the wastebin then went back to the bedroom, switched on the TV and fell onto the bed all in one movement and watched a 1954 film called The Sands of Iwo Jima, The Sands of Iwo Jima, featuring John Wayne killing j.a.panese people while talking in French using someone else's voice an acting skill I never knew he possessed. featuring John Wayne killing j.a.panese people while talking in French using someone else's voice an acting skill I never knew he possessed.

It occurred to me, as I lay there watching this movie of which I could understand nary a word other than 'Bonjour', 'Merci bien' and 'Aaaaagh!' (what the j.a.panese said when John stuck them in the belly with his bayonet), that this was almost boring enough to cause brain damage, and yet at the, same time and here's the interesting thing I was probably having as much fun as anyone in Switzerland.

I took a morning train to Bern, two hours away to the east. Bern was a huge relief. It was dignified and handsome, and full of lively cafes and young people. I picked up a city map at the station's tourist office and with its aid found a room in the Hotel Kreuz in the centre of town. I dumped my bag and went straight back out, not only eager to see the town but delighted at my eagerness. I had begun to fear in Geneva that my enthusiasm for travel might be seeping away and that I would spend the rest of the trip shuffling through museums and along cobbled streets in my w.i.l.l.y Loman posture. But, no, I was perky again, as if I'd just been given a booster shot of vitamins.