The Last Man
in the Last Valley
of Switzerland

Köbi is the last man left, in one of Switzerland’s most isolated valleys. So isolated he cannot walk out of his house when it snows heavily, because of the incessant avalanches. So isolated he buys hundreds of kilos of provisions every October to last him the entire winter. So isolated he can’t drive down to sell his own cow’s milk. So isolated the municipality down in the valley doesn’t dare go up the mountain to clear the snow once half a meter has fallen. That’s the limit. Once you cross that number you’re just waiting for an avalanche.

And that road. So steep and so narrow.. “even the Jeeps drive right off the turns,” Köbi tells me. “And if you venture out alone, and are taken off the edge by an avalanche.. who will even know?” So isolated everyone who once lived in the valley has left. Leaving behind Köbi.

To survive here, his father told him, you must have everything you need within arm’s reach. Anything further is too far away. And you’d probably die on the way to it. So Köbi stays home. His cheese cauldron is in the next building. His barn is across the road. Even the school he went to is framed through his kitchen window. Life here is measured in meters. Snow in millimeters. And avalanches? Some measured in ‘snow dust.’ Enough to blow you away. And then there’s just emptiness, stuck between mountains, stuck between countries, stuck with Köbi.

Welcome to Zwischbergental, the valley stuck between two countries, mostly cut off from both. Neither would miss it. So remote it wasn’t even worth a name, just a description. Where ‘Zwischen’ means in-between, ‘Berg’ is a mountain, and ‘Tal’ is a valley.

It is part of Switzerland, but like everything east of the Simplon pass, it is oriented towards Italy. The people of Simplon and the rest of the settlements around have always been on the wrong side of the pass, and have historically looked to Italy for work and food. The Simpilers were cut off from both sides each winter — almost half a year — till the Seventies. And so they developed their own dialect of Swiss German, and their own identity. And everyone always spoke Italian too. And when they speak of going over the pass to a Swiss town, they talk of going ‘to Switzerland,’ as if it were another country.

Just as everyone did, Köbi goes to Italy in October, to shop for the coming months. He returns with 100kg of pasta, 40kg of rice, 50kg of polenta. He used to make bread himself, but he buys that now, and freezes it. And so Köbi is ready to survive yet another winter.. not moving a step when it snows more than half a meter.

And Italy is everywhere. It is at the bottom of that road, down which the avalanches tumble. It is the ridge above Köbi, the tops of the mountains that form the eastern border of Zwischbergental. It is where Köbi’s ancestors came from, their photos pinned to his wood wall in the inner room, between the old stone oven and the pope. It is where Johann Squaratti was born, on January 15, 1875.

Johann came from Bergamo (and perhaps Brescia before that), more than 200km away in Italy. He was a shepherd, and he crossed the border and climbed up into the first valley in 1904, to the spot called Bällega, where his grandson Köbi now talks to me.

It was only a summer alp in those days, and the two or three hundred sheep went back down to Gondo in the winter. Zwischbergental hosted around 120 people in those days. Johann didn't have a lot of money, but it was still better for him to stay here. It was even poorer in Italy. Even one of the most remote valleys of Switzerland was better than that.

It was the Italians who first settled Zwischbergental, but then came the plague, and they didn't come any more. And the Swiss bought the farms after that.

Every family had a handful of animals, and as many children as possible. They scraped these slopes for generations, getting as much out of the land as they could, mostly using whatever little they produced to feed themselves. Excess might be bartered for something one didn’t have. There was little to be sold to make money.

The only excess they had, perhaps, was children. Too many to feed, sometimes. So the children were what could be politely described today as being hired out. The now-infamous ‘Verdingkinder,’ who would work for someone else.

Even the children who stayed had hard lives. They worked, and crossed the passes smuggling cigarettes into Italy. How else could one make money here? A handful of coins, a sack of cigarettes, mountain passes at night. Signs given to warn of border guards.

But the smuggling died when they made more roads. And, with government help and more modern techniques, farmers went beyond subsistence. That’s more of a general observation, of course. Everyone just left Zwischbergental. Everyone except Köbi. Most people you find here in summer live in Gondo or Simplon, perhaps tracing their origins here some generations ago. Some come with animals, some for holiday. But they leave before winter.

Nino was a child when he first came to Köbi. There were a lot of kids who came visiting in the summer, along with those of his brother in Gondo, just before the customs post under Zwischbergental.

There were around ten of them, fighting and playing and sleeping above the barn. And one of them, Nino, will take over the farm from Köbi. So there will eventually be another. Another last farmer.

“I used to be a rose,” insists Köbi, half-joking, half-pleading, half-singing to his audience of no one in the dead-end valley... “but now I’m only a thorn.”

Köbi went through women as quickly as the avalanches that keep cutting him off from the rest of the world. When he was young, he’d have three or four girlfriends at a time. But living in one of the most remote valleys in Switzerland comes with many problems. “No woman wants to stay here. Maybe a month or two. And then: Tschüss!” Or maybe it was just him.

And his first love: he was 16, and Melanie Horst was 14. She’d come for a summer holiday in the school house, down the road from him. She had hair between red and blonde.. “like chestnut…”

And things were never quite the same after she’d left. Köbi kept a book (“like a farmer’s herd-book” says Nino, the child who came visiting and is now his apprentice) in which he’d keep a record of the women he had been with. He’s lost the book over the years, and the women too. “There must have been 36.. 38..” Maybe it’s good the book can’t be found.

What sort of women does Köbi like? “The kind that doesn’t hang around till evening!” It was easier in the town of Naters, where Köbi spent ten years starting when he was 16. “I never looked for them.. they always found me.” The women there didn’t know him, and he would sometimes give them a fake name so he could remain anonymous. “It was better there.. if it was here they’d find me at night!” And later.. “I have seen the devil work inside the woman. Tifeli!”

And so Köbi loved and was loved, but in a place like this, with a man like him.. everyone knew how things would turn out. How everything must here: disappearing at the end of the day, by the end of the summer. In the end, there is only darkness, and cold, and the certainty of the next avalanche.

And, today? It should be autumn but it feels like winter. We have spent the morning making cheese.. once upon a time, every family here would have made it. Now, this is the only place you can find it. Past the door plastered with postcards of mostly naked women, and the little fridge where the money is hidden.

Bello, and his successor Balu, wait outside in the dripping cold. Köbi bought Bello a decade ago. “They wanted 1,200 francs! But I gave them 800…” Bello has an insatiable appetite for fetching, even if he sometimes loses track of the bit of wood he brings you since his eyes have turned milky with age, or perhaps the gloom of the barn. And even though he has been named for a bark (and not the Italian word for beauty), he is always silent.. silently melting my heart as he looks into my eyes in the half light. Eyes clouded over, ears tuned to the sound of the rumble of my Subaru so that he always turns up as I arrive. There was an earlier Bello too, who now looks at us from above, framed in the kitchen.

Rafael, Köbi’s boulder-like brother from Gondo, pops in for a visit. We gather around the kitchen table. Balu disappears to his bed under the bench. Bello has a few millimeters of wood he smuggles in for one last game. Nägerli and Tomas the cats are trying to get on to the table and Köbi is not a fan of this.. but everyone gets their way in the end. Köbi loves to give the impression of a hard, grumpy man, a man countless women have tried to domesticate, the rock against which they have broken themselves. But there is a softness inside, and his kitchen is filled with the warmth of animals and humans. All of us, here, somehow because of him.

We have gorged on a massive tin of pasta and tomato sauce. In spite of being drowned in liquid the pasta was still hard. The men had talked of making omelettes, but everyone had been too late this morning. We were like boys on holiday. What was time, anyway, in a place like this, for men like us? We could, if we wanted to, smuggle cigarettes, romance women, live between countries, or be cut off from the world by avalanches.

There was only the twitch of his bushy mustache as it rose and fell as he chewed on something imaginary while he looked at Facebook videos. And then the phone was put away, the reading glasses (still with a little round sticker stating its power) came off, and the shapeless blue hat was pulled forward till it covered his nose: only white bristles stuck out. Köbi started snoring in spite of everything. In spite of the radio right in front of him, in spite of the house music thumping from the next room where Nino disappeared.

I watched Köbi, fascinated. Nägerli jumped up on the bed, meowing loudly, waking Köbi. Instead of showing any signs of irritation, he wanted to open the window for the cat, but it ran off, and Köbi disappeared under the folds. The smiley cushion was lifted up and put on his chest, and it rose and fell, echoing the movements of his mustache.

“I have seen everything in my dreams,” Köbi once told me. “Heaven and hell…” Sometimes, after these daydreams, he doesn’t know if he has really seen something or dreamt it, and asks Nino if it was real.

And there I sat, upright on the sofa in front of Köbi, under the Maria and the fly paper, assaulted by music, and fell into a deep sleep of daydreams.

Zwischbergental, Switzerland. 2021–2022