Geneva — Samuel Harwood

Our small apartment in Geneva, Switzerland, has big windows that face the windows of the other apartments in the courtyard. When we arrived here, we imagined that our neighbors would stick their heads out and shout to one another, angling for the latest gossip. And there is one old lady who opens the shutters to look down at the sidewalk when the weather is good. There is a thin man with long hair who waters the plants at his windowsill and always keeps his shirt off even when the weather is bad. But otherwise, people keep their windows closed and roll down the shutters that face the other windows when they come home in the evening. You can see their lights on around the edges of their blinds. By 10pm, everyone has turned off their lights and the view from our window is a sea of darkness. We find ourselves engulfed in silence — an eerie silence, neither that of a country refuge nor a peaceful oasis in the city, a silence that calls attention to the absence of sound. You sit in the apartment, aware, in theory, that there are people above, below and beside you and you wonder how it’s possible that they aren’t making any noise. You look out the window and see buildings, businesses, streets and sidewalks, and wonder how a city can exist absent the hum of city life.

This has been our first home as a married couple. For over three years, we made it work through long visits to our respective, decidedly un-Swiss home cities, Los Angeles and Mexico City. We became increasingly tired of the long, difficult separations between each visit. Then, in January 2022, we agreed against an orange-flushed sky overlooking the Pacific Ocean to share our life together. That summer, when we were still engaged but not yet married, she was offered a job at an NGO in Geneva and we took it as a chance to for the first time share a home together.

We realized soon after arriving that, aside from being offensively expensive, this was a city severely lacking in edges, color, flavor, spice. Although at first glance it seems to have a distinctive history and diversity of culture, a kind of hegemonic dullness prevents those forces from coming together into the unique, unpredictable combustion that gives a city its life.

Geneva is built around a big, pretty lake that’s clean enough to swim in. This was the first sign that we might not be in a proper city, where lakes, rivers and reservoirs typically function as health hazards rather than public pools. At the south side of the lake is the Jet d’Eau, one of the main tourist sights, which shoots water high up in the air and lets it fall back down into the lake. A few minutes later the water shoots up and falls down again, repeating the cycle throughout the day. Those standing from a distance take photos for their Instagram. Those closer by run the likely risk of getting wet.

There are trams that go to the city center and move at about the same pace it takes to walk. The main sight there is Saint Pierre Cathedral, where Jean Calvin used to preach when he was leading the Protestant Reformation. You can still see the chair where he would sit while delivering his sermons. He was apparently quite small.

The stores in Geneva close by 7pm at the latest. If you walk on the city center’s main stretch at 8pm on a Saturday, you’ll find it depopulated and deserted. If you do happen to see another person out late at night, you might feel inclined to ask them, “What are you doing here?” as if you’re both convicts on the run. Oddly enough, the city’s only 24/7 businesses seem to be the gyms. It’s not uncommon to see someone sweating after midnight on a window-facing elliptical, with nowhere else to go to keep their late-night restlessness at bay — as if the gyms were granted an exception so that they could function at all times, to keep that restlessness from spilling out into the streets.

It’s been nearly a year since we moved here and we have yet to meet a single Swiss person. They go to their offices all day and in the evenings go home, leaving few opportunities to cross their paths in between. An American friend tried to branch out by taking dance lessons, but said that her Swiss classmates walk side-by-side in silence down the hall at the end of each class, like soldiers in formation. On the days that we leave our apartment and walk down the nearby Rue de Lausanne, we mostly see immigrants from Africa, South America and the Middle East. We’ve met three who told us that they love living here. A grocery clerk from Bangladesh and a restaurant manager from Rio de Janeiro both gave the same reason: “It’s quiet.” A friend from Portugal told us that she never liked in cities the way dirt blackened the snow on the ground and mixed with the mud when it melted. Here it’s clean, white snow all winter long.

The city’s institutional dullness has made us grateful for the graffiti on the walls of the tunnels and the occasional eccentric we’ve come across: the old man on the small bicycle loudly playing Vivaldi from his speakers as he rode by the lake; a young man walking with large headphones on, swaying and singing along to his music, indifferent to the crowds passing by him; the old, thin man with a long gray beard who spends entire days in the grocery store cafe with two laptops and a pile of books before him, as if trying to singlehandedly solve one of the world’s great conspiracies. The sight of these few people who were kind enough not to insist on their normality gave us reassurance that the city hadn’t completely lost its mind.

Geneva is the home of the United Nations’ headquarters, which gives it the vibe of an extensive office campus. As lovely as the lakeside park — La Perle du Lac — can be on a sunny day, Geneva’s landlords seem to have designed it as a place for U.N. leaders on break to sit at a bench and look at a nice view while they take lunch, rather than as a communal gathering point for the city’s neighborhoods. Those who move here to work as top brass for that and other organizations run the risk of believing that the city’s cleanliness and organization was designed for them, to facilitate their important work. They may start to believe that they must indeed be very important people — why else did they land themselves in a job for which all of this was created?

In a plaza in front of the U.N. there is a giant sculpture of a chair with a broken leg. Tourists often take photos there. Demonstrators sometimes stage protests. At the end of the plaza are two small, stone monuments to the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. You can sometimes see outdoor photo galleries highlighting some human rights issue in an underdeveloped part of the world. Each public display seems both incongruous with and in service of the corporate monoliths that house the NGOs, the sleek modern mansions that host the major embassies — as if a PR representative became suddenly aware that they might seem out of touch with the populations they purport to serve and made a last ditch effort to say, “It’s not true. We are not detached. We do care. Look at our photos, our monuments, our giant broken chair.”

Last fall, Iranian demonstrators gathered in the plaza on Saturdays to protest the recent crackdown against women and freethinkers in their home country. They shouted in Farsi through a megaphone and held photos of fellow Iranians sentenced to death for expressing the wrong opinions. They called for the fall of their country’s Islamic theocracy and the return of the Shah. In those fleeting weekend hours, the U.N. plaza seemed to come alive with purpose, before it emptied out and quieted down again.

Geneva’s high costs, corporatism and sleepiness may explain why American fast food is so popular here. The McDonalds stay open until 2am and are always filled with people. The Burger King at Cornavin, the train station, has a warm, inviting light. Its walls echo with conversation like it’s a Parisian cafe. In any other European city, such institutions would feel like an affront, a consumeristic threat to the local culture. Here, a city where corporatism largely defines the culture, they feel like a natural part of the environment. There are no Taco Bells, but there is a chain called Tacos Avenue, which sells a fried tortilla wrap filled with meat and cheese. They call it a taco when it’s more like a burrito mixed with a chimichanga. On particularly bad days, we find ourselves wanting to crash into this establishment, grab one of these confections off someone’s plate and announce to the bewildered crowd, “This. Is. Not. A. TACO!”

Food here in general is no cause for inspiration. The managers at the immigrant-run restaurants, rather than maintain the flavors that make their food special, adjust it to fit Swiss taste. A meat plate that would set the palate alive at Awash on Pico & Fairfax, that would send your senses to the heart of Ethiopia, tastes like mildly-spicy tomato sauce at one of the spots in Pâquis. You do, however, find yourself admiring fondue as an innovation, that the Swiss managed to normalize bread dipped in a pot of melted cheese as a meal in and of itself. By the time you finish eating, good as it can sometimes be, you feel as if a bag of concrete has materialized in your stomach. Over time, we got pretty tired of the stink of gruyere cheese wafting onto the sidewalk like a skunk’s emission. And despite the city’s close proximity to the borders with France and Italy, most of its coffee tastes like the leftover grinds at the bottom of a barrel in the Nescafe factory (just 80km away).

Since there isn’t much reason to go out, we have spent much of our time inside. Every morning when we open the blinds, we see a proudly fat seagull perched on the roof of the apartment across the courtyard. We salute it and the mess it makes on the reddish tiles, wider and whiter by the day. He’s Geneva’s most confident rebel. We leave breadcrumbs on our windowsill for him, as well as the sparrows, crows and pigeons, conscious that we must be in violation of some rigid building code. At around 10:30am we hear the shouting and playing of children at recess in the school across the street, the most unbridled and unfiltered show of emotion that we’ve found here. Since the kitchen is the size of a broom closet, careful coordination is required at those times when we both need to get something. If one needs to pass the other by, we find ourselves grinding against one another like it’s the club on a Friday night — this daily dance one of the pleasures of indoor life, in which we’ve been able to create more spark than the city outside can provide. The mini-fridge that came with the apartment obligates us to buy groceries at least 2-3 times per week and play a game of Tetris in the kitchen every time we put them away. In the evenings we cook simple but satisfying meals — veggie curry with coconut milk; chicken with lemon and capers — that bring distinct scents to the apartment that dissolve the city around it, transporting us to faraway places, where we’ve been and where we long to someday go. To give the apartment a bit of color, we’ve taped to the gray walls postcards and mementos of the different trips we’ve taken in the past year.

One of them is a painting of the two of us riding the back of a tiger, which an artist friend made for us as a wedding present. We got married in Italy in late September 2022 (the year of the tiger). A small group of our closest family and friends came from our parts of the world to help us seal the deal. We did it on a terrace overlooking an old town with green hills and valleys beyond. It rained that day, which in Italy is a sign of good luck: Sposa bagnata, sposa fortunata. We closed the evening with a great feast, plates that required us to look at each other after each bite and say, “Are you tasting what I’m tasting?” Outside, after dinner, a friend who had until then concealed from us her talent for singing opera gifted us with her lovely rendition of O Mio Caro Bambino from Madame Butterfly. Everyone, including strangers on the restaurant’s patio, gave her an enthusiastic applause.

Two days later, we headed to Greece for our honeymoon, nearly missing our flight. On the plane, we settled into our first quiet moments following the ceremony. We became aware that something had changed, shared a sense of fear of what that change might mean. When we arrived on the island, it was dark out. We got in the back of a cab. We looked at one another. I saw the bright white light of the moon reflected in the ocean behind her gentle smile. A complete sense of contentment washed over me and the fears became irrelevant. They would come and go, intensify and dissolve, part of the gentler rhythms of a life shared together.

Santorini was covered with light and color and maintained its proud history and culture despite the influx of Instagram tourists. There were long lines to take photos at sunset, as if it was a theme park. Still, it was the kind of place that invites you to sit a while, stay and enjoy yourself. It was covered with stray cats and dogs who were treated as neighbors and friends rather than disturbances and what we started to call “Happy Churches,” the blue and white clay domes that overlooked the Mediterranean, cactuses growing around them, purple bougainvillea lining the walls. On our last evening there, we went into Atlantis Books, the island’s messy treasure trove of a bookstore. The owner was a friendly Canadian who grew up in Tennessee. He founded the store nearly 20 years ago after he came to the island on a trip with friends and decided to stay for good. Outside the store were maps he had made of Santorini, highlighting his favorite spots. We took one with us and later taped it to the wall in Geneva, often looking at it and wondering if we should have followed his example.

From Santorini we went to Crete, which had fewer tourists and a lot more cats. Its cities, each an eclectic cross-section between Arabic and European culture, hummed until late at night with people sitting outside, handing bites to the cats, hanging out on the streets. We spent an afternoon at Knossos, the ancient Minoan palace, and headed afterwards to the Heraklion Archeological Museum where the results of the palace’s excavation were on display. We saw small sculptures of animals that looked the way animals do but each with a shape and flourish that reflected the crafter’s creativity. We saw the recovered pieces of murals that once lined the walls at Knossos, of dolphins, monkeys, warriors, dancers. We were engulfed in evidence of a time completely removed from our own, but part of the same continuity — the same inclinations and impulses but shaped by a completely different environment. I felt a pressure push against the inside of my head that forced me to sit down, as if my window into human experience had been physically expanded — the rhyme, reason and beauty of travel.

*A Gryphon painted on the temple wall at Knossos.*

*Artifacts recovered from Knossos on display at the Heraklion Archeological Museum.*

We spent our last few evenings at Adespoto, a music tavern in Chania, where a guitarist and a mandolin player sang Cretan folk songs until late at night. The waiters sang along with them, one taking a break from his shift to perform on stage. It felt closer to spending time at a good friend’s party rather than taking part in a transactional business. One night, a family sat around a table close to the stage and sang along. They all knew the words to every song. Eventually, the duo on-stage smiled at one another and let the family take over. They sang loudly and happily, the father banging his cigarette lighter on the table in rhythm. At a certain point, their young daughter’s boyfriend joined them. We wondered if the evening was a test, to see if he knew the music as well as they did. We smiled and took each other’s hand across the table, wishing him the best.

On our way back to Geneva, we expected miserable conditions. Instead, the plane flew through a clear, blue sky, the window lining up to a direct view of Mont Blanc, its snow-crested ridges standing right before us. As we walked from the bus back to our apartment, we felt hugged by the warm air. It was a promising welcome back.

We settled back into life here. After we had spent nearly three weeks without opening a computer, it was a struggle to live on one every day. The fact that much of the world is now obligated to live in this way was decidedly deflating. We hung up the painting of us on the tiger, the map of Santorini and cards from Crete we had written one another, infusing the apartment with the sweet, recent memories that their images conjured.

Geneva unfortunately hadn’t changed while we were gone. There was still no color or flavor. No feasts or singing waiters. The landlords remained the same. Its silence and the general deflation it inspires reasserted itself. But our contentment together, the rhythm we found in daily life together, was as intact back in our mini-kitchen as it had been in our faraway travels.

One Saturday, a few weeks back, we were walking in the lakeside park, saying nothing. From the feel of her hand stretched out a gentleness of heart that revealed itself in our slow steady steps and kept stretching out until the once claustrophobic mountains felt wide and alive, the once insufferably dull city infused with clarity and vibrancy. The outside world didn’t need to have spark or life. We had it between each other.

That said, we are leaving soon. We don’t plan to come back. But we’ll take with us the knowledge and reassurance that love travels everywhere and has no time or place.