My Engadine

never been there.

From time to time, I will write posts unrelated to perfume along the lines of my short essays in Folio. This was a piece commissioned by a reputable editor, employed by a reputable Zurich publishing firm, intended to go into a reputable new Swiss mag later this year. They edited and accepted it. Then something happened. When I billed them, they disappeared. Here it is, therefore.

ideogram.ai Take a close look at the village..

Anyone who has the opportunity to take a long, dreamy look at Swiss paper currency eventually notices something odd hidden in plain sight. Outsiders like me typically think of Switzerland as tripartite: the French one, centred on Geneva, where tourists flock to see gold-plated Lamborghinis burn rubber on the Pont du Mont-Blanc; German-speaking Switzerland, basically Germany, if only it had left Poland alone; and Italian, where long ago I used to drive from Milan with wads of someone else's cash in exchange for a good meal and a flutter at the casino. But there is a fourth one, and on the banknotes it makes a ghostly appearance on one side, just below the "Tausend Franken": Milli Francs. This is not, as it turns out, a Swiss female education reformer from the 1920s, but a sample of a rare and wonderful language spoken in the mysterious fourth quarter of Switzerland: Rumantsch, the Rumantsch word for Romance.

I have never been to Engadine or indeed the Canton it is embedded in, but they have loomed large in my imagination. The Grisons, to a French ear, suggests something large and grey, maybe some megafauna inhabiting only those valleys, tremulously referred to as the Big Grey Ones. The German version is more explicit and arguably even scarier: Graubünden or Grey Leagues, a name worthy of Tolkien. In the heraldic world of vivid canton colours, this comes across as eccentric: argent exists, but not grey. When I was a kid at Swiss school I had to learn all the Cantons, and looked in vain for grey in the Grisons shield, which has only black and white in the upper left hand corner, perhaps as a mixing suggestion.

Another thing about Grisons that hugely impressed me as a child was the dried meat, fearfully expensive small ingots of translucent fat-free meat the color of a blood clot. This, among all the hams, jerkys and biltongs of the planet, has the unique prestige of not looking like it was the result of preservation techniques, spice, salt, etc. Instead, it looks like fleshly incorruptibility of the sort that would get you first beatified, then canonised if you could rustle up a couple of miracles. Like caviar, it is delicious stuff probably best enjoyed in large, quarter-pound portions at breakfast. Instead, one has to forever do with millimeter-thick slices weighing as much as the paper they're wrapped in, and from which all flavour has departed.

Finally, perhaps the most surprising thing about the silent Grisons is that it is in fact the largest canton in Switzerland, though with the lowest population density and approximately 40,000 speakers of Rumantsch. It goes almost without saying that, like most endangered languages, Rumantsch proudly numbers five dialects that fiercely resist the imposition of a standard tongue. Grisons is also the only part of Switzerland whose rivers flow into the Black Sea, another inexplicably romantic fact.

All the above sets the stage for Engadine. Much in the way that in some versions of medical science, the body is represented in miniature in, say, the ear or the foot, it may be that countries contain a miniature, emblematic version of themselves somewhere. In France, it would be the Périgord where any village is The Village, complete with lifesize plaster statue of Joan of Arc in the Church, triangular town square with plane trees and two bars en terrasse who loathe each other since reopening after the 1348 plague. It could be argued that Engadine is in fact Switzerland's acupuncture ear, the Switzerland of Switzerland.

Even the name Engadine has something magical about it. I cannot vouch for how it sounds to a German ear, but to me (French-Italian), it sounds like a caressing diminutive along the lines of Grenadine, possibly a syrup or liqueur made from the fruits of En-Gad, clearly a reference to some Sumerian Eden and its long-lost orchards. And when you speak to Swiss citizens who take their holidays there, you begin to suspect that Engadine is one manifestation of a broad and powerful myth, that of the Mountain Enclave.

The Mountain Enclave is, it turns out, a very European myth made famous by the 1933 novel Lost Horizon. The idea is that there is, within a satisfyingly impassable circle of mountains, a happy valley, preferably endowed with a mysteriously clement climate, a benignant administration and a peaceable population living in archaic bliss. When drowned by cataclysm it becomes Atlantis. When pointed at by Poussin, it is Arcadia. When immune from asteroids it becomes Jurassic Park.  When immune from taxes it takes the form of Andorra. And when both near and inexplicably remote, it is Engadine. Highway A13 from Chur will get you there in ninety minutes, without, so far as I know —again, I've never tried—, any boss battles along the way.

It is not as if Switzerland is short of beautiful views. As Roland Barthes pointed out, "the picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven". But the special thing about Engadine is what it does even to mediocre photographs, the ones you would take through a car window with a cheap phone to post on Facebook. It just looks relentlessly beautiful. It is a special kind of beauty that one usually experiences only in the window display of large toy stores such as F C Weber in Geneva. There you can see a fortune's worth of model trains in a landscape,  and feel the secret thrill of flying over a perfect alpine corner.

Finally, I must confess to three personal reasons for cherishing my own private Engadine. First, Brahms went on holiday there. I am talking here about the old, bearded, paunchy, bilious Brahms who befriended the most unpleasant music critic of his time and encouraged him to rail against the rise of Wagner and other beery, ectoplasmic music. In Sils-Maria he plucked from the surrounding quiet air some of his best, densely woven, chestnut-brown chamber music. Second, Nietzsche had his first enlightenment there, whereupon he wrote Zarathustra, which I understood when I was young but no longer. Third, Claudio Abbado is buried there. I am therefore screwing up the courage for a visit, fully expecting enlightenment, celestial melodies or eternal rest, whichever comes first.