In my daily observance of egoistic awareness, one of the sweetest legends happens beyond that topiary hedge of boxwoods which stood behind the swimming pool house at Saint Loup, the alternative boarding school near Geneva where my father, with advice from colleagues diplomats there, chose to shelter me after our family collapsed. As a matter of fact, my own brother had, during some summer vacations on the Jutland coast, treated me one night like some disposable mop, along with his gang of despicable cousins.
I was thirteen, my brother was sent to some far away Ivy League college, and after a week long idyl in London alone with my dad —whom I still call Far, the Danish way— I disembarked with my bags in Switzerland, at a stone throw of the quiet lakeshore. Far had joined the UN Geneva operations, I never felt estranged or caged, although the institution was guarded as a zoo.
The headmaster was a sporty woman with a blond mane, adeptly called Harmony, and she showed inflailing impetus towards some two-hundred pupils, boys and girls. It took a dedicated touch from the teaching team to build the sort of utopian togetherness beyond disciplineI did not ever try to foil. In his den at the top of a medieval tower at a corner of the director’s house, Prof. Achenbach, an astute Jungian figure procured me with a set of moral keys I became aware of later.
No doubt it was expensive, and peopled with the privileged offspring of cosmopolitan expatriates
From the first minute, that younger impish hobgoblin called Ayla, the daughter of waned hard metal glories, had affixed her friendship bracelet to my wrist anjd I still can feel it. She had to shamefully flee when her parents ceased to pay. She became a prostitute the Swiss way, and today she owns a pleasure house in Zürich.
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00 – Lakeshore Paradise
Far and I had flown business from New York. He had spent a wealth of psychology convincing me this was not an exile from Tudor City land, and we had paid a visit to the Nations Palace, which I deemed weirdly different from my all-time idea of these United Nations I saw from our terraces in its brutalist utopia. President Wilson’s sadly failed ambition had left this Art Deco venue that no Corbusier tweaked, either than the glass wall of my childhood, whatever he claimed. I had been horrified by the decor of the main assembly room, with that coarsely symbolic scrimmage painted by the unabashed fascist Jose Maria Sert on its ceiling. The birthplace of all atrocities. Far couldn’t contain his contempt for a generation of sartorial diplomats —and I guess his own lineage was in the lot, for all I had known.
Notwithstanding that I had spilled my heart out to my Far, and that had been acknowledged beyond my self-conscience, like some ugly stain on my soul might have been scrubbed away, I tried to pull out my histrionic behaviour as a bona fide Newyorchese that I wasn’t. My bags had been delivered, but I wore this yellow-sleeved black vintage varsity jacket I had bought at a third Avenue thrift Store, black jeans I had outgrown, black hi-top Chuck Taylor sneakers, and, on top of all, that snazzy bejewelled black Fedora. While my Far went in the sporty-looking headmaster’s office to sort out my case, I was gently drawn towards that agrestic little campus’ cafeteria by a bubbly, tanned brune whose dark chestnut eyes twinkled from underneath a bushy fringe while she kindly twiddled my hands. A smirking cook served us an unforgettable tartine of sourdough bread with a thick layer of creamed morrels I never could steal the recipe for. That slender kind of imp had sneakily tied her multicolour friendship bracelet to my wrist, and I wasn’t sure what it meant. She was a senior in the primary division, she would sleep in a dormitory in a closed house at night. I was a junior in the secondary division, I would sleep in a single room under the roof of an antique convent-like building with more circulation latitude, as I soon learned.
I had been growing up fast, courting elder boys, which had led to the Jutland catastrophy. But Ayla is an irresistible she-devil in a herd of little lambs in flannel nightshirts. My Far had convinced me that, because of our small motherland of which Bismarck had already stolen a third, danes shoul speak as many languages as their heads would contain. French came easy in a French canton, German was a blond teacher I lured into the boxwood thickets, Italian was spoken with volubility in the kitchen and the back rooms, so our Ticinese teacher held class in Italian to warn us of all the linguigtic trappings there are beyond the Tiramisu. Under Ayla’s incentives, I learned to usefully woo my grades.
Whith the help of Julia Grant, the all-American preppy who deemed herself school-captain, and nobody complained, I sussed that the ongoing sexual laisser faire, along with simple lay good sense, produced worthy results without the morbid after-effects of frustrating discipline, nay worse.
My black long-sleeve tee shirt was embroidered with a red-black-yellow number 21, and I offhandedly told the keen little group I intrigued as a novelty that I didn’t know what it meant. Now that I had pulled off the jacket and the hat, Ayla could see I had no more breasts than herself, and she did not dither twiddling my foolberries. I could tell boys found that cheeky, all the more when she slid her hand under. I never have rebuffed Ayla’s manners.
There would be coteries to accustom with, like Radiohead buffs, lake kayakers, or stabbles’ Cossacks, you name it. Naughty affinities, too, though anyone could report to Julia, who wasn’t one to waver about the meaning of consent. The most delicate humanly was the relationships with the protected section where lived people with minor handicaps, in a separate cottage and garden. I was told they were the ones who also nurtured the shambolic rose garden beyond the boxwood hedge, and Ayla smirked finely. Nigh unintentionally, I would later savour a slice of the down syndrome, on a sunny day.
