Adultery(3)

Anyway, I look at my neighbor this morning and feel like crying. He is washing his car, and I think: “Look at that, another person just like me and my husband. One day we’ll be doing the same thing. Our children will have grown up and moved to another city, or even another country. We’ll be retired, and will spend our time washing our cars even if we can perfectly well afford to pay someone else to do it for us. After a certain age, you have to do irrelevant things—to pass the time, to show others that your body is still in working order, to express that you still appreciate the value of money and can still carry out certain humble tasks.”

A clean car won’t exactly change the world, but this morning, it is the only thing my neighbor cares about. He says good morning, smiles, and goes back to his work as if he were polishing a Rodin sculpture.





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.





ANOTHER day at the newspaper, trying to ferret out some interesting news other than the usual car accident, weaponless mugging, and fire (which dozens of fire engines manned by highly qualified firemen rushed to put out and flooded an old apartment. All because the neighbors were alarmed about the smoke issuing from a pot roast left too long in the oven).

Back home, there’s the pleasure of cooking, the table set, and the family gathered around it, thanking God for the food we’re about to receive. Another evening when, after supper, each person goes about his business—the father helping the children with their homework, the mother cleaning the kitchen, tidying the house, and putting out the money for the maid the next morning.

There are times during these months when I feel really good, when I really believe that my life makes perfect sense, that this is the role of human beings on Earth. The children feel that their mother is at peace, their father is kinder and more attentive, and the whole house seems to glow with its own light. We are an example of happiness to the rest of the street, the city, the canton—or what you might call the state—of the entire country. And then suddenly, for no reason, I get into the shower and burst into tears. I can cry there because no one can hear my sobs or ask me the question I hate most: “Are you all right?”