A day in Geneva
The Ecuadorians are going on holidays. He is a short and compact man with a low giggle that curls up into a sigh and a face well cultivated for his broad moustache. She is leathery and alert, with a pair of glittering white runners. They are happy to be on their way to the Canaries and I’m happy that I can understand their Spanish. Only the pinch-browed woman sitting in front of me is not enjoying some kind of novelty. My leather cap is pulled low, my tatty earphones pushed into my ears. They talk about the things people talk about. Holiday reading, getting around, weather. Their conversation stumbles gently into the hum of the train. It is early. Moustache man sends a text about the feast of St. Francis to someone. Something about a big party. A phone rings elsewhere. Turning to the pinch-browed lady, the leathery one speaks German in easy tones. I get the drift. They laugh. I turn to Charles Mingus and follow the line of the horizon with one eye until the train reaches Geneva.
I feel I should be impressed with the highest fountain in the world. I am not. Impressed. And I feel I am somehow missing something. Perhaps I am the one who is not impressive. Many of the tourists in Geneva are impressed. I stop to watch them at work. Big, blonde and booted, three happy girls compete with Japanese men in immaculately ironed clothes to be filmed and photographed in front of a clock, the face of which is a flowerbed. Watching them, I miss the green man. For a city with so many clocks there is very little time and I do not miss the green man again.
In the river Rhone there are eight bicycles and four trolleys. I am impressed. That’s just from were I am standing. The water is clear and I can see the eight or ten feet to the bottom. A big metal pipe is just discernible. The bicycles and trolleys are lying along the pipe at intervals like ritual offerings.
I start walking again. I go to the old town. There is a grand air to the place and though it is dead like many old towns, there are no ghosts whispering melancholy here. Money still greases the wheel. I get excited by the price of cameras and I buy a nectarine. There are big orangey fruit that look very juicy and are called ‘kai’. I have never heard of them so I buy three. On a cafe terrace a man jokes loudly about being in a Lebanese jail for 17 hours. He is American, wears a fur trimmed coat and dark glasses and sits with a friend. Two slender men stand over him in the stiff pose of chance encounter.
In the cathedral I see Calvin’s chair; a posture-producing wooden yoke, and I wonder whether his sermons were long and if so, was it because he couldn’t face sitting back in the chair for the rest of the service, or is it one of those deceptive chairs, designed to look uncomfortable so your friends don’t sit in it and only the cat and you know the truth.
I bet the fat man knows.
The fat man sells me a ticket to see the tower and I mount the steps. There are a dozen other nationalities squeezed into the tower and it seems the fat man has sold us all tickets and left us to it. Now I am trapped between a Mexican family and a cold-eyed man with sweat on his face. I squirm to one side and let the Mexicans barge and trample the cold-eyed man.
Escaping the tower I make my way to the Museum of the Reformation. It consists of old bibles and portraits of solemn reformers. Then I find a diorama of all the main players lighting the candle of the Reformation. This is great. Pulling on the levers makes them nod their heads, transforming them into rock-band reformers. Martin Luther and Calvin are lead and rhythm guitar, Zwingli is on the drums and there’s the Scot Knox just nodding along. Must be a roadie. Wrenching away on the levers in search of a bassist I spy a member of staff looking pretty close to agast. Matthius Illyricus will have to do. A nearby wall turns out to be a door and opens automatically onto a worn-carpeted staircase descending into gloom. It is not long before I am in the subterranean ruins of the old Roman cathedral, a confusing pile of rocks, pits and iron walkways amid which the occasional mosaic causes pause. The baptismal font is well-preserved and I ponder all those lives of which a moment was spent here in the waters, and wonder what they would would have made of the diorama.
Waiting for the train out of Geneva I find myself earwigging again. “But why?” A teenage American is crying. She keeps grabbing at her damp blonde hair. In front of her is a shuffling boy in baggy trousers, hands in pockets, eyes casting around in slow resignation. Waiting. The girl takes a ring from her finger and throws it to the tarmac platform. “I hate you!”
“I need to know!” She put her hands to her head and sobs. When she sobs she shudders. “I know I’ve been terrible. Is it me?” She sobs hands to head again. “I’ve had times when I wasn’t so sure about you. I don’t know why.” A group of Swiss Germans in lurid matching raincoats mill around like penned bullocks. They are also watching the breakup. Then one of them says something and they all laugh. A passerby steps on the ring. I am willing the boy to pick it up but I am not even sure he noticed the girl’s gesture. Apart from this the breakup is going to script.
“You’ll be just fine, you’re just gonna go home and watch movies,” says the girl with as much reproach as she can muster. She takes a phone from her bag. “Hi Corine, can you meet me at the station?” She sobs for effect. The train comes. All that is left on the platform is the cheap plastic ring. Their tattered relationship has a few more stops to go. Poor Corine. She is in for a long night.
Back in bed, I begin the drift into another man’s words. This book holds out promises of journeys to me in cupped hands. Page one and already we have ‘…the intricacy and divergence of paths, the fortuity of delays, the uncertainty of evening, and the asymmetrical quality of any journey…’
Still on page one I hear my companion murmuring to herself beside me. Then, ‘Clack!’ The room is filled with gas and my skin begins to burn. I run from the room naked. My eyes are on fire. My nose is running. She has found a mace gun under the bed. It belongs to the woman subletting the apartment to us. In the kitchen with my head in the sink I hear her say, “I didn’t know it was pepper spray. I mean, who keeps that kind of thing under the bed!” She says this as if I am an idiot. I do not respond; she still has the mace gun. Wrapping a wet towel around her face, she goes back to the bedroom to take down the curtains and decontaminate the room.
Having abandoned everything in my flight I sit naked and bookless in the kitchen. The burning has now reached my testicles. Ignoring it I try peeling a kai. Like many new discoveries they are not peelable.
Corine is not the only one in for a long night.
admin @ October 8, 2008