Neither Here Nor There (25 page)

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 pronunciation 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 café 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-glass 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 Chiasso, at the southernmost tip of a pointed length of Switzerland that plunges into Italy like a diver into water. Chiasso looked an unassuming 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 passing from one to the other, as I headed for Brig. The train climbed sluggishly through ever-higher altitudes 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 glass 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 glasses 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 glass, wordlessly placed them on the table and returned to his cloth and wet glasses. He looked as if he had just learned that his wife had run off with the milkman and taken all his Waylon Jennings albums, 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 pronounced 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 pronunciation. ‘Ah, Domodossala!’ he said, pronouncing 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 passengers? Finally, I went and asked a porter and he indicated to me, in that friendly why-don’t-you-go-fuck-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 passes, 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 associated 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
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.

I reached Brig, by way of Domodossala and the Simplon Pass, 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, Delémont 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: Knoblauchbrot, Schweinskotelett ihrer Wahl, Portion Schlagobers (and that was a dessert).

I ordered Entrecôte 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, embarrassing cry of disappointment that waiters always give when they find you haven’t touched your Goat’s Scrotum En Croûte. 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 assumed 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 snatched out my cigarette butt 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 glass with the side of my hand and slopped beer all across the table.