La Place de la Concorde Suisse by John McPhee

Author:John McPhee [McPhee, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

When I have not been out walking and collecting information with the Section de Renseignements, I have been in the charge of Captain Rumpf, whose “Little Book of Service” shows eleven hundred days. The latter ones may have been trying for him. It is possible that Rumpf would prefer to be crawling under machine-gun bullets. After I made application to the government in Bern—and was softwared, dossiered, and cleared—I received letters informing me that I would “serve” with units of the Tenth Mountain Division and be under the general surveillance of Captain François Rumpf. He is an adjutant of Divisionnaire Tschumy, and has completed two or three months of special training to become a major, which is not quite enough; as a final requirement he has been given the task of overseeing me. I alone stand between Rumpf and the broad gold stripe of a major.

Rumpf is forty-one. He married Juliette Roussy, a daughter of the Dean of the Cathedral of Lausanne, and has three young daughters. When I first met him, in Basel, he was wearing a Cardin blazer, a yellow V-necked cashmere pullover, a white-collared blue-and-white-striped shirt, and an English club tie. My own daughters would call him megaprep. With his apple cheeks and boyish manner, he did seem like a teacher at Uppingham or Kent, but he proved to be in charge of all private customers, worldwide, for the Schweizerischer Bankverein. He appreciatively acknowledges that he was given the job because of his rank in the army. The son of two doctors, he grew up in Vevey. His surname notwithstanding, he is resolutely Suisse romand—pure Vaudois and so much so that he regards Geneva as “absolutely not a Swiss town,” and goes on to remark, “You will see a lot of Arabs there.” In one of those moments of amazed recognition when someone exclaims “It’s a small world!” Rumpf genteelly disagrees. “I say it is not a small world,” says Rumpf. “I say the upper class is thin.” He served the Bankverein for eight years in Monaco, and is now posted to Basel, from which he sends his children—Sophie, Joelle, Laetitia—daily into France to school. His ancestors lived in Basel, but he says the people of Basel today would never understand his Bentley (which he keeps in France). They might regard as rather odd his passion for distinguished cars.

The army has given him and me a sick Opel. We get around, seeing people and exercises. We go into the hanging valleys. Rumpf is an aesthetician. He likes sunsets, snow-covered couloirs, vines in fruit, and Switzerland. He points out the lovely, rock-enlofted church in Raron—where Rainer Maria Rilke is buried by the south-facing wall—and on the road to Simplon he ignores the hidden cannons. He tends to treat the army itself as if it were a military secret.

We went into the Val d‘Anniviers. The dendritic valleys of Valais, branches of the Rhone system-Blinnental, Lötschental, Mattertal, Val de Bagnes, Val d’Hérens, Val d‘Anniviers—are so competitively beautiful that (as with most awards) no one valley can reasonably be chosen above all others.

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