Whipping Boy

by Allen Kurzweil

  The second reason things improved was even more extraordinary: Cesar disappeared. From one day to the next—poof!—he just vanished.

  He didn’t get expelled. I was sure of that. His poster collection and knives remained in the room. At the time, I didn’t initiate a full-scale investigation into his whereabouts—that would only come much later—but I did ask around. No one could explain his absence. Among the lower-school boys (at least the smaller ones) news of Cesar’s departure provoked palpable relief.

  For me, probably more than for anyone else, the payoff was immediate and wide-ranging. My mood improved dramatically, and so did my schoolwork. At one mark reading, I even managed to get the top grades in my class (of ten students), a turnaround that Belvedere’s ill-tempered housemaster was forced to announce before a dining hall full of boys. I was repromoted to the rank of red badge. I learned to “wedel,” a difficult and outmoded downhill maneuver requiring one to wiggle one’s butt side to side while barreling down the slope. (Think Chubby Checker doing the Twist—on skis.) My exes grew increasingly audacious. One hike included a near-vertical climb up a succession of iron ladders bolted to a rock face, followed by a ten-kilometer ridge walk to a stone hut perched some ten thousand feet above sea level. Derek Berry, a mountain climber allergic to hype, called the trek “fearsome” in his year-end expeditionary review.

  By May 1972, the puncture wound on my left foot had closed, and my verrucas had been eradicated. A star was added to my red badge. My sleep improved, as did my bank shot, and thanks in large part to Woody, I learned to slide down the full length of the Belvedere banister hands-free (though my dismount remained unsteady).

  Graduation took place on the Fourth of July. The commencement speaker, the widow of a distinguished American ambassador, offered her audience some reflections on the nature of courage.

  “Say NO to self-pity,” she urged in a speech that drew a distinction between anxiety and fear. “Fear has an object,” she declared. “Anxiety does not.”

  That difference was lost on me back then, and even now I’m not sure I buy it. Cesar had done a first-rate job fusing those two emotions into a general sense of dread. But where the widow’s talk did hit home was in its closing quotation, an apt, if now overused, line from Nietzsche recently sampled in a ballad by pop singer Kelly Clarkson: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

  I declared my independence from Aiglon by tearing my school blazer to shreds. It turned out that the gesture of subversion was both ineffectual and misdirected.

  REMISSION

  The same month I said my good-byes to Aiglon, my mother said hers to the Marxist. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had secretly married the man six months before, in the kitchen of Emily Dickinson’s house. (This was before the homestead was turned into a museum.) Exchanging vows in the home of America’s most celebrated spinster? What the hell was she thinking?

  Mom must have had her doubts. She didn’t tell me about the ill-fated union until after she had it annulled. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one inclined to hide roommate problems.

  In August 1972, the two of us returned to New York, where the plimsolls, anoraks, and rucksacks I wore at Aiglon reverted to sneakers, parkas, and backpacks. I no longer had to address my teachers as sir and ma’am. The crossbars disappeared from my sevens and I scuttled my schooner-sail fours, but memories of Cesar persisted.

  He visited at night, in dreams of burning tree limbs and endless free falls, and by day, as well. A few months after leaving Aiglon, I had to sketch a map of Europe, circa 1648, for seventh-grade social studies. (We were finishing up a unit on the Thirty Years War.) To accommodate my completionist tendencies, and with an eye toward extra credit, I crammed as many territories as I could onto my map, no matter how small or remote: Iceland, Cherkassy, the Khanate of the Crimea. So it’s curious that I left a penny-size area at the center of my map untouched and unlabeled. The very spot where I had been teased, burned, whipped, and robbed remained blank, an omission that expressed graphically what I refused to say out loud. I wanted to wipe Cesar off the face of the earth. Hardly a practical solution. I ended up dealing with the lingering rage by transforming my memories into a series of amusing narratives.

  {Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

  Me, the year after my year at Aiglon.

  I recounted the whipping as if it were a comic pantomime and told tales of madcap expeditions free of adult supervision. When I revealed to my mother the stuff Cesar did to me, she was horrified. Yet rather than endorse her distress and milk it for pity, I downplayed my humiliation and laughed off my pain. Doing otherwise would have forced me to confront feelings I preferred to forget.

  {Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}

  Months after leaving Aiglon, I drew a map for my seventh-grade history class that obliterated my boarding school and everyone in it.

  When I graduated from high school, my mother unknowingly resurrected my boarding school anguish. “Remember how you tried to tell me Dad’s watch had accidentally fallen out of the window? I knew immediately that wasn’t possible. You would never have let that happen. You cried and cried when you finally admitted that one of your roommates, that tall troubled boy who lived in a château, had thrown it out the window. I was so annoyed at myself for having given it to you—that I hadn’t been more firm. I should have kept it, despite your pleading. I should never have given in. Maybe this will make up for my mistake.”

  Mom handed me a box containing a brand-new Omega that she hoped would serve as a worthy replacement for the one lost in the snowbank. It was a thoughtful and extravagant gift, and I had no right to be anything other than grateful. And I was, up to a point. But the watch never, not even for a day, left its velveteen cradle.

  FRANÇOISE

  I gave little thought to Cesar during my early twenties. He’d pop up in conversation now and then, the way bullies do, but when that happened, I continued to cover up the pain in diverting narratives of boarding school hijinks. Humor kept the sorrow at bay. I got through college, had my heart broken a few times, worked at a newspaper in Rome, toyed with the idea of graduate school, and then, in fits and starts, embarked on a career as a journalist. Eventually I found a few editors willing to accommodate a freelance writer whose obsessive research habits all too often got in the way of deadlines.

  In mid-July 1985, I received an assignment from the International Herald Tribune to write about a television station launched by a group of Warlpiri Aborigines in Central Australia. Five hours after I drove into Yuendumu, a desert settlement three hundred kilometers northwest of Alice Springs, a French anthropologist named Françoise Dussart spotted me wandering toward a sacred site off-limits to visitors. Concerned for my safety, she drove up and warned me away. She was sitting in the cab of a Toyota Land Cruiser and cradling a baby kangaroo. How could I not fall in love?

  After four months of courtship—a long-distance affair chronicled in correspondence that now fills a small file cabinet—we decided to live together.

  Françoise packed up her field journals and reel-to-reel audiotapes. I packed up notes for a novel and a personal computer the size of a carry-on suitcase. She flew west, from Alice. I flew east, from New York. We met each other halfway, in Paris, broke and in love.

  For more than a year we lived in penniless bliss. Our needs were minimal, our indulgences restricted. We rented a crêpe-sized fifth-floor Latin Quarter walk-up facing the exhaust vent of a Lebanese shawarma joint and buried ourselves in our work. Françoise had a thesis to write on the ritual life of Warlpiri elders. I had my novel. Once a week we’d either catch a film at the local revival house or share a mango.

  A few months after moving to Paris, Françoise and I blew off work and spent the morning roaming the Louvre. Toward the end of our ramble, I stopped short in front of a fourteenth-century altar cloth depicting the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Françoise caught me staring at one panel in particular, a gruesome scene of flagellation.

  Her forehead wrink
led. “You like that?”

  “No. It’s just that it reminds me of something that happened at boarding school.”

  “Ah, oui, le Cesar,” Françoise said. She had heard my stories. “Do you ever wonder what became of him?

  This was the first time anyone had asked me point-blank a question I often asked myself. “Of course.”

  “So, what do you think he’s doing?”

  “If I had to guess? Probably something in sales. He was always wheeling and dealing at Aiglon. He did a huge business selling posters.”

  “You’re a journalist. Why don’t you find out?”

  {Courtesy of François Dussart}

  Françoise tending to Kirrkirr in Yuendumu, the Aboriginal settlement where, in 1985, we met.

  I let out a laugh. “Fly to Manila to track down the kid who abused me when I was ten? Get me that assignment, and I’ll catch the next plane.”

  I was joking. Françoise was not. She knew long before I did that there was darkness buried under the snowdrift of alpine anecdote.

  The novel I started in Paris was published in 1991. By then Françoise and I were married and living in New York. The book was well received and translated into a dozen languages. European readers, in particular, responded to the tale, which I had set in the eighteenth century. By all outward appearances, A Case of Curiosities had nothing to do with my experiences in Villars. But strip away the period detail and certain parallels emerge. The story, which begins in an isolated part of Switzerland, records the struggles of a fatherless boy apprenticed to a watchmaker.

  That same year, a foreign edition of the novel required a trip to Europe. I had some promotional obligations in Milan on a Tuesday and a few more the following Monday. Five days to kill. So on a whim (or what I convinced myself was a whim) I decided to visit Aiglon, with an eye toward answering the question Françoise had posed in the Louvre.

  PART II

  “WE HOPE TO MAKE YOUR JOURNEY UNFORGETTABLE”

  What must you do, when you are afraid, to overcome your fear? Instead of rejecting, running away from the thing which you fear, you must, by means of an act of faith, go out to meet it, to embrace it, to draw it to you in confidence and affection; in other words you must love it.

  John Corlette, “Meditation on Fear”

  My very chains and I grew friends,

  So much a long communion tends

  To make us what we are:—even I

  Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.

  Lord Byron, “The Prisoner of Chillon”

  BACK TO SCHOOL

  During the train ride to Switzerland, I write the word Cesar on the cover of a new journal. How absurd it is to presume I will need forty-eight pages for the topic at hand. The blank notebook taunts me into writing down all sorts of nonsense. A sample entry: “The ashtrays glisten. The antimacassars are freshly ironed. Even the slots of the screws are all perfectly aligned. But I have to ask myself: Which is crazier, lining up screw slots so that they’re all parallel? Or making a note about that fact in a journal?”

  At each stop, a loudspeaker squawks, “We hope to make your journey unforgettable” in Italian, French, German, and English. I distract myself for much of the trip by leafing through an illustrated copy of the Inferno, a freebie from a Milanese publisher. As we cross into Switzerland, I assign Cesar to the Seventh Circle of Hell, a hot spot Dante reserves for sinners prone to violence.

  When I reach Aigle, the end of the line, I catch a bus to Villars. After a nauseating series of hairpin curves, made all the worse by dense fog that blocks my view, the bus breaks through the cloud line and I’m smacked in the face by a breathtaking vista, a jagged snowcapped mountain chain wrapped in a tutu of mist. Until just then, I had completely forgotten the postcard splendor of the region.

  The bus lets me off directly across from Belvedere. As I grab my backpack, I spot a boy, no more than twelve, standing inside a telephone booth. He appears nervous. He keeps glancing at his watch. As the bus pulls away, the phone rings and the boy lunges for the handset. He says a few words. Then, for a very long time, he listens. I can’t hear the exchange, but I get the gist of it: Stand tall, he’s being told. Suck it up. You’ll be fine.

  But the boy is not fine. He slumps against the wall of the phone booth. His chin begins to quiver. He rubs his eyes with a knuckle and wipes his nose on a sleeve. Only after hanging up does he allow himself to cry. I consider approaching but sense it’s best to leave the boy alone.

  I register at a tiny hotel kept in business by visiting parents, and receive a key from a woman with a giant chin mole further embellished by a single black hair the length of an inchworm. That night I fall asleep thinking about the sobbing boy, wondering if I’d done the right thing keeping my distance.

  The following morning, while walking to the school, I pass three Aiglon students loitering outside the smoke shop where Woody and I bought candy and ogled knives.

  “Who has money?” one of them says.

  “Ali, we all have money,” his schoolmate replies. “It’s just that none of us has any right now.”

  “Hold on. I have three francs,” the third boy says.

  “Right then, hand ’em over,” Ali commands.

  When the boy with the three francs balks, he is reprimanded. “Oh, don’t be such a bloody Jew.”

  I arrive early for my ten a.m. appointment at a newly erected alumni center named after Lady Forbes, and take a seat below a portrait of my irrepressible elocution teacher. The painter, a former Aiglon art teacher, has draped a rope of pearls the size of grapes over his subject’s daunting bosom and has blended her hair into the snowcapped mountains that frame her craggy face. It’s a wonderful likeness. Still, the painting doesn’t capture the retired opera diva as I remember her. Had I received the commission, she’d be wearing cat’s-eye glasses and hiking boots, and nibbling on a centipede (a delicacy she had sampled during her travels through Mexico) while reading a chapbook of Sufi poetry.

  A bit after ten, the school’s director of alumni relations, a solicitous chain-smoking American woman, escorts me across campus to morning tea, where I meet a longtime housemaster named Teddy Senn.

  “Caesar Augustus, you say the boy was called? How extraordinary. Awfully sorry, the name draws a total blank. You might consider talking to Mrs. Senn,” Mr. Senn advises. “Mrs. Senn’s memory is not nearly so shabby as mine.”

  The head of the school joins our conversation. “Did you distinguish yourself during your stay with us?” he asks.

  “I was on the track team briefly, but was sidelined by an accident.”

  “What was your rank when you departed?”

  “Red badge star.”

  “Oh, I see,” he says coolly.

  I ignore his imperious disappointment and stick to the subject at hand. “I’m hoping to locate one of my old roommates. Does the school keep up-to-date contact information about alums?”

  {Linda Color, Geneva, Switzerland}

  I sent this postcard to my mother in 1991. On it I wrote, “Dear Mom, I’ve put a big circle (marked A) around the room where I was tortured. The smoke shop (marked B) is where I bought a switchblade after Dad’s watch was stolen. Love, Allen.”

  “It should do,” the headmaster sniffs. “Unfortunately, our database is woefully inadequate. But if you wish, have a look in the archives. Such as they are.”

  The alumni director walks me back to Forbes House, where I spend a few hours sifting through photographs, pamphlets, and back issues of the Aiglon Association News. When I’m done, she kindly offers to photocopy the material I have set aside while I revisit my old dorm room.

  As we’re saying good-bye, I notice a flock of black birds with beaks the color of Swiss cheese circling overhead. “Crows?”

  “No, mountain choughs. Disgusting little creatures. They raid the nests of songsters and eat their young.”

  Belvedere, the converted hotel that lodged me for a year, has undergone a face-lift. The scratchy sisal floor coverings are go
ne. The battered foosball table has been retired. The shower room has been renovated, so it’s safe to assume the drains no longer clog with wads of pubic hair and human grease. Webs of nylon rope crisscross the stairwell. I suppose it’s to prevent books and things from falling on the heads of passersby. Either that or to stop students from surfing the banister.

  As I head up to the top of the tower, my breathing becomes erratic and I begin to sweat. It’s as if I’m scaling the Matterhorn rather than a few sets of stairs. The symptoms intensify when I enter my dorm room and they blossom into a full-fledged panic attack while I’m standing at the balcony, taking in the view. I retreat to a bunk bed and, after a few minutes with my head between my knees, the anxiety subsides.

  MRS. SENN REMEMBERS

  The visit to Villars hasn’t yielded much. No one recalls Cesar. I haven’t even obtained a mailing address. I settle my bill with the mole lady and head off for one last rendezvous before calling it quits.

  “Your husband thought you might recall a bit about the time I spent at the school,” I tell Elizabeth Senn over a pot of tea at the café next to the smoke shop.

  “Mr. Senn is quite the optimist. I fear I’m a bit dotty. I tend to remember only certain things and only certain years. Nineteen sixty-seven, for instance. I remember 1967 very clearly, like it was yesterday, in fact. And 1984. That year sticks with me, too. But the rest of the eighties?” Mrs. Senn shakes her head despairingly.

  {Courtesy of Aiglon College, Switzerland}