Salon Wanderlust | How Zurich invented the modern world

How Zurich invented the modern world
By Carlos Fuentes
A week in Bosnia
By Debbie Devoe
War lessons and legacies
D E P A R T M E N T S
Road Warrior
Business travel & beyond
Mondo Weirdo
Drunk on Thai moonshine
Table Talk
The life of the expat: Discuss with other travelers the benefits and costs of living overseas.

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LA S T+W E E K
Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1997

Expatriate Blues
By Karl Taro Greenfeld
You've got money, women -- so why aren't you happy?
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[How Zurich invented the modern world]

+++++A DISTINGUISHED MEXICAN NOVELIST REFLECTS ON
+++++THOMAS MANN, ZURICH AND THE IMAGINATION OF EUROPE.

BY CARLOS FUENTES | in 1950 I was 21 years old and arrived for the first time in Switzerland to follow studies both at the University of Geneva and at the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales. I was employed at the Mexican Mission to the International Labour Organization (ILO) and served as secretary to the Mexican Member of the International Law Commission. All of this gave my arrival in Switzerland a very formal tone. Geneva was, as always, an international city. I made friends with foreign students, foreign diplomats and foreign journalists. I met a beautiful young Swiss student and fell in love with her, but our clandestine meetings were interrupted (A) by my expulsion from the very strict pension where I was staying on the rue Emile Young, and (B) by her parents' commandment that their daughter should not consort with a young man from a country of dark, uncivilized people, who probably ate human flesh.
I consoled myself, the day that my girlfriend told me it was all over, by going to a cinema on the place du Molard to see Carol Reed's famous film "The Third Man," which was then the greatest movie attraction in the world. It starred one of the most beautiful women ever seen on the screen, Alida Valli, a perfect mask of icy sensuality and flaming, vengeful, diamond-clear eyes.
But most importantly, it was acted by Orson Welles, whose "Citizen Kane" I had seen as a child in New York and which impressed me forever -- to this very day -- as the greatest sound film Hollywood has ever made. Its formal beauty, the audacity of the lighting, camera angles and illumination of significant detail, all converged in the telling of the great American story: money, how to make it and how to keep it; happiness, how to search for it and never find it; power, how to attain it and how to lose it. Kane was both the American dream and its reverse, the American nightmare. Now, at the Molard cinema, Welles appeared in the shadows of the Vienna sewers as the cynical dealer in crime, Harry Lime, a little Caesar, a pygmy Kane of the postwar underworld, who justified his criminal activities with a phrase that became universally famous and that directly affected Switzerland.
Italy, said Harry Lime-Orson Welles, has had the Medicis, assassinations, corruption and produced Michelangelo. Switzerland has had peace, order, lots of cows and produced the cuckoo clock.

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