Trafika Europe 11 - Swiss Delights

Michel Layaz

had chosen it specially or received it as a gift. The cars were passed from hand to hand without the slightest hitch. This fine spirit of sharing was put to the test when a model in a class of its own joined our fleet of cars. We each wanted to be the sole owner and driver, even though the notion of a driver suited this car even less than it did the others. Several distinctive features lent this automobile an aura of prestige that occasionally sparked insurrection at the heart of our group. It was much bigger and less true to life than the others (it had exceptionally high tires and a disproportionately large steering wheel), it was shinier and, most importantly, was completely autonomous, in other words, the car had a mechanism underneath that you wound with a key and made the car run on its own for two or three minutes, an enormous length of time, we thought, which ended when the key stopped turning very quickly in the opposite direction to the one that activated, or charged, or fed, the racecar. No epic feat was impossible! The car would, for example, cover the long hallway with stunning speed, crash into the kitchen door, stubbornly try to knock over an armoire, and, to our whoops of encouragement, it would speed off again towards the dining room, repeatedly bumping into chair legs and lamp bases, and find one last open space before coming to a stop wherever its course had led. And so we could begin again, winding up the key and following a new voyage in which each surrounding

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