Imagined homelands

This image of mountain and water and sky has a strong hold on me. I have had it inside me as far as I can remember.

My father must have drawn that mountain landscape for me dozens, perhaps hundreds of times since I was a toddler. "Please papa, can you draw it again?" On any kind of paper, with a pencil or pen or crayon, he would sketch that scene, with bold, sure lines he would etch it out. I try to think of the order in which the elements were placed on paper. Somehow they always came together in the same way.

First, the wide curve of the lake, usually on the lower right side of the paper. Then, a series of disconnected up and down strokes in the upper third of the sheet that together formed a craggly mountain chain. And finally, the village, on the left side of the lake, at just the spot where we might imagine the beginnings of the mountains slopes. A bunch of little boxes with triangular roofs, outlines of houses really, unspecific, symbols of houses practically. Perhaps there was a church, recognizable by its high tower and a cross, but I'm not sure. Above the village, a few rows of pine trees scattered about, also drawn very fast, with minimal lines. What I am sure of is the strong shape of the mountains, and a few vs drawn in the sky to signify birds. He had always had a talent for drawing. He drew with sharp, strong strokes. Almost telegraphic dashes, usually black, etched with his Parker pen, or perhaps with Caran d'Ache black pencils. No colours usually, no filling in of blue and brown and green.

The picture probably represented St. Moritz, the town near Pontresina that had a lake and where his godmother, Tanta Orsi, lived. Infinite versions of this picture were produced for me, but always drawn in the same way, always containing the same elements. I eventually came to draw it myself, more awkardly and more exhuberantly, making full use of my coloured pencils, employing an absurd array of shades of turquoise and aqua and cobalt blue for the lake and the sky.

But his black, minimalist mountains were the original prototype. He was very good at technical drawing, and for my brothers, he delected himself producing drafts of planes, machinery, architectural landscapes. For me, at least as far as I can recall, he drew that iconographic landscape, an archetypal mountain valley that he carried inside at all times and in all places of the world, and which he inevitably transmitted and engraved in my own consciousness as if I myself had been born there.


-----------------------


The drawn landscape is one thing that represented faraway Switzerland for me. The image would be confirmed whenever we went to visit grandmother nona. I knew it was not invented, it was not abstract in the way that an elephant or a tiger might be, things you would see on TV and in children's books but would never live with. The mountains were where my grandmother lived, and where papa had grown up with a huge extended family full of cousins, and where we went on vacation every two years, crossing the ocean, enduring transatlantic flights from Sao Paulo to Zurich that had a stopover in Africa, in Dakar actually, to refuel. All I remember of those stopovers, when we did not even leave the plane, was a brownish colour -- in my mind's eye I can only see a golden-brown light, and earthy hues.

The Swissair flights were also an essential part of our Swiss cosmology. We were never afraid of flying. Aside from the exciting visits to the cockpit, which my father made sure would happen on almost every occasion, we enjoyed getting the hot wet towels to wash our hands and faces and ears and whatever else needed washing, and then eating airplane food in its cute containers, and we loved getting the stuff that was meant to shut us up, namely, sets of playing cards, memory cards, puzzles, coloured crayons, colour-by-number sheets and little wooden clowns and horses that jerked about when you pushed your thumb into their base, the wire coil inside making the little marionnettes come alive. And oh the extasis, for the little girl that I was, of the small necessaires containing earplugs, a mini-comb, a mini-toothbrush, and a tiny, tiny toothpaste.

Papa made it very clear that flying was safer than any mode of transport, as he would explain that the amazing forces that held the plane aloft were stronger than those that could get it down. He would describe in extreme detail to my brothers and to me exactly how besides the engines it was also currents and drafts that maintained that steel bird up in the air.

Our father, aside from being a supreme purveyor of mountain drawings and F-16 blueprints, was also a meteorology expert. He knew absolutely everything there was to know about the weather, about atmospheric conditions, winds and clouds and storms. He would describe, analyze and interpret the size and shape and colour of clouds, lecture on details of precipitation, air pressure, and so on. This wondrous knowledge may have come to him from his having been an airplane pilot (of small aircraft and gliders), or it may have come from his military service training (I have kept his innumerable fascicles of Swiss military manuals, very thin beige-coloured books printed with intricate, detailed diagrams full of arrows), or even from his boy scout years. Or it may have been knowledge he had simply because he was a mountain boy, a true Swiss mountain boy.

There were many other things that came to represent Switzerland for us during our childhood growing up in South America, including the snow igloos we built in front of our nona's house, the ducks we fed at lake Zurich with our maternal grandmother, the trips to Franz Karl Weber, the huge toy store, as well as riding trams, sledding in the Zollikon forest, and holding paper "lampions" with lit candles inside while watching 1st of August bonfires.

But I now know that the mountains are some of the strongest links we have with that country we only came to know in spurts, in short yet intense bursts, but that became real to us through the stories and images that were given to us unawares.