to me, asking that I hide it away until his birthday.
The postman came. I signed for the parcel. As soon as he left, I proceeded to the computer, where I assured Violeta, quite elegantly, that I had taken delivery of the gift.
“J’ai fait l’accouchement de la cafetière,” I typed, having checked and double-checked each word in my English-French dictionary.
Months went by before I learned that, by my account, I’d given birth to—as in, physically delivered, through the vagina—a coffee machine.
GROCERY STORES, as much as cathedrals or castles, reveal the essence of a place. In New York I’d shopped sparingly at the supermarket on my block—a cramped warren hawking con-cussed apples and a hundred kinds of milk. One day I bought a rotisserie chicken. I took it home and started shredding it to make a chicken salad. Halfway through, I realized that there was a ballpoint pen sticking straight out of the breast, like Steve Martin with an arrow through his head. The next day, receipt in hand, I went back to the store and asked for a refund.
“Where’s the chicken?” the cashier barked.
“I threw it away,” I said. “It had a ballpoint pen in it.”
The closest grocery store to our apartment in London was almost parodically civilized. A cooperatively owned chain, it sold bulbs and sponsored a choir. Nothing amused me more than shaving a few pence off the purchase of a pack of toilet paper with a discount card that read “Mrs. L Z Collins.” I’d hand it over to an employee-shareholder in a candy-striped shirt and a quilted vest, who would deposit the toilet paper into a plastic bag emblazoned with a crest: “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen Grocer and Wine & Spirit Merchants.” If the store made a show of a certain kind of Englishness, its shelves were pure British multiculturalism: preserved lemons, gungo peas, mee goreng, soba noodles, lapsang souchong–smoked salmon. One November a “Thanksgiving” section appeared, featuring a mystifying array of maple syrup, dried mango chunks, and pickled beetroot.
As national rather than regional concerns, British supermarkets played an outsize role in public life. Every year, the launch of their competing Christmas puddings was attended by the sort of strangely consensual fanfare—everyone gets into it, even if it’s silly—that Americans accord to each summer’s blockbuster movies. The feedback loop of the food chain was tight: if a popular cookbook called for an obscure ingredient, the stores would quickly begin to carry it, a fact about which the newspapers would write, leading the cookbook to become even more popular, and the ingredient to materialize simultaneously in every British pantry. There was a coziness to the stores, amid their great convenience. Shopping in them always reminded me that London was a big city in a small country. From the £10 Dinner for Two deal at my supermarket—it included a starter or a pudding, a main course, a side dish, and an entire bottle of wine—I could extrapolate something about, and participate in, if I chose to, a typical middle-class British Friday night.
Food shopping in Geneva was a less idiosyncratic affair. For fruits and vegetables, I went often to the farmers’ markets. They had nothing to do with yoga or gluten. They were just a cheaper place to buy better carrots. The selection, though, was limited. For everything else, there were the Swiss supermarkets—two chains distinguished, as far as I could tell, by the fact that one of them sold alcohol and the other didn’t. I frequented the former, whose breakfasty theme colors made it seem like it was perpetually 7:00 a.m. Despite a few superficial points of contrast—you could find horse meat hanging alongside the chicken and the beef; the onions, taskingly, were the size of Ping-Pong balls—there wasn’t much to distinguish the experience. Cruising the cold, clean aisles, I could have been in most any developed nation.
My nemesis there—my imaginary frenemy—was Betty Bossi, a fifty-eight-year-old busybody with pearl earrings and a shower cap of pin-curled hair. Betty Bossi was inescapable. There was nothing she didn’t do, and nothing she did appealingly: stuffed mushrooms, bean sprouts, Caesar salad, Greek salad, mixed salad, potato salad, lentil salad, red root salad, “dreams of escape” salad, guacamole, tzatziki sauce, mango slices, grated carrots, chicken curry, egg and spinach sandwiches, orange juice, pizza dough, pastry dough, goulash, tofu, dim sum, shrimp cocktail, bratwurst, stroganoff, gnocchi, riz Casimir (a Swiss concoction of rice, veal cutlets, pepperoni, pineapple, hot red peppers, cream, banana, and currants).
Who was she? Where did she come from? What kind of name was Betty Bossi? Her corporate biography revealed that she was the invention of a Zurich copywriter, who had conjured her in 1956 in flagrant imitation of Betty Crocker. “The first name Betty, fashionable in each of the country’s three linguistic regions, was accepted straightaway by the publicity agency,” it read. “Equally, her last name was widespread all over the country. Together, they sounded good and were easy to pronounce in all the linguistic regions.”
Switzerland, like Britain, was a small country, but due to any number of historical and geographical factors—chief among them the fact that the population didn’t share a common language—it didn’t have a particularly cohesive culture. The political system was heavily decentralized. (Name a Swiss politician.) There was no film industry to speak of, no fashion, no music. (Name a Swiss movie.) With the exception of Roger Federer, who spent his downtime in Dubai, there weren’t really any public figures. (Name a Swiss celebrity.)
Swiss francophones looked to France for news and entertainment; German speakers gravitated toward Germany, and Italian speakers to Italy. (Speakers of Romansh, which is said to be the closest descendant of spoken Latin, made up less than 1 percent of the population and almost always spoke another language.) Gainful as it was, Switzerland’s multilingualism rendered public life indistinct, a tuna surprise from the kitchen of Betty Bossi. The country was in Europe, but not of it. Its defining national attribute, neutrality, seemed at times to be a euphemism for a kind of self-interested disinterest. The morning after Russia announced that it was banning food products from the European Union due to its support of Ukraine, the front page of the local paper boasted “Russian Embargo Boosts Gruyère.”
A few months later, it emerged that the supermarket chain that did not sell alcohol was selling mini coffee creamers whose lids featured portraits of Adolf Hitler. After a customer complained, a representative apologized for the error, saying, “I can’t tell you how these labels got past our controls. Usually, the labels have pleasant images like trains, landscapes, and dogs—nothing polemic that can pose a problem.” Betty Bossi as an icon; Hitler as a polemic. It was this bloodless quality that depressed me so much about Switzerland. My alienation stemmed less from a sense of being an outsider than from the feeling that there was nothing to be outside of.
The consolation prize of Geneva was the grande boucherie—a ninety-five-year-old emporium of shanks and shoulders and shins, aging woodcocks and unplucked capons, their feet the watery blue of a birthmark. The steaks were festooned with cherry tomatoes and sprigs of rosemary. The aproned butchers, surprisingly approachable for people of their level of expertise, would expound on the preparation of any dish. One day, craving steak tacos—Geneva’s Mexican place only had pork ones, and a single order cost forty dollars—I convinced Olivier, who wasn’t big on cooking, to chaperone me to the boucherie. I explained to him that I wanted to buy a bavette de flanchet, the closest thing I had been able to find to a flank steak, after Googling various permutations of “French” and “meat.”
“Bonjour, monsieur,” Olivier said. “On voudrait un flanchet, s’il vous plait.”
The butcher rifled around in the cold case, his fingers grazing handwritten placards: rumsteak, entrecôte, tournedos, joue de boeuf. Ronde de gîte, paleron, faux-filet.
“Malheureusement, je n’ai pas de flanchet aujourd’hui,” he said. “En fait, on n’a généralement pas de flanchet.”
“What?”
