Elizabeth Senn, circa 1971.
“What about the early seventies? I was at Aiglon for just one school year, starting in September 1971.”
“Oh, you’re in luck, Allen.” Mrs. Senn takes a moment to gather her thoughts. “Nineteen seventy-one. Nineteen seventy-one. Well, for starters, that was when students were wearing those frayed bell-bottoms and ratty sweaters. One boy, son of the king of Somaliland, insisted on sporting overalls like the local petrol station attendant. Can you imagine? And all the while his father is under house arrest, translating Shakespeare into, well, whatever language it is that they speak in Somaliland.”
For the next ten minutes, Mrs. Senn details the fashion anomalies that marked my time at the school, then follows up with a similarly thorough catalog of student misfortune, circa 1971. I learn of the classmate whose brother died of a brain tumor; of the boy who lost his girlfriend in a raffle; of a youthful suicide; of the two students who burned down a shepherd’s hut (“It was a relief when we saw both sets of footprints leaving the shelter”); of the governor’s son expelled for possession of unauthorized funds (“Ten francs, I believe it was”).
Her inventory continues: “There were quite a few injuries the year you attended the school. There was that fellow who put the gunpowder in the ski pole. The damage to his fingers was, if I recall correctly, permanent. And then there was that poor girl who raced for the school.”
“What happened?”
“She took a pole too tightly during the slalom. This was when we had bamboo gates on the course. Her parents hired the very best surgeons, but the poor girl’s nose? Well, it was never quite the same after that.”
“That’s horrible!”
“Not so horrible as what happened to young Scurlock. Suffered frostbite during a long ex and lost two of his toes straight up to the first joint. I believe it was the first joint. It may have been up to the second. Anyway, Docteur Méan took care of it as best he could and Scurlock was back at school by the end of the year. And then of course there was poor Woody Anderson. Poor, poor Woody.”
“What happened to Woody? He was a very close friend.”
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“It must have happened just after you left.”
“What?”
“Did you notice the net stretched across the Belvedere stairwell? Why do you think it’s there?”
“To stop boys from sliding down the handrail?”
Mrs. Senn shakes her head. “It’s because of what happened to poor Woody. He was sitting on the banister, at the very top of the stairs.”
“And?”
“And somehow he managed to tip backward and fall head over heels.”
“No!”
“Or would that be heels over head? Anyway, the point is, he hit his neck on the second floor and then again on the first. Poor dear. He was dead by the time he hit the ground.”
“Oh my God!”
“I know. Tragic.” Mrs. Senn describes the grief that spread through the school in the weeks and months after the accident. “There’s a little plaque in his memory, and his father donated some lovely marine biology books to the library.”
The news leaves me reeling. I barely have the energy to bring up the purpose of my visit. But I eventually mumble forlornly that Woody and I had bonded, in part, while trying to avoid Cesar.
The news startles Mrs. Senn. “Trying to avoid a seizure?”
“No, Cesar.”
“Pardon?”
“The boy’s name was ‘Say-CZAR.’ As in the emperor.”
Mrs. Senn gives me a puzzled look and, echoing her husband’s reflection, says, “You’d think I’d remember a name like that.”
But she doesn’t, much to her regret and mine.
The trip turns out to be a total bust. I arrived at Aiglon hoping to find an enemy and leave learning I had lost a friend.
THE REALISTIC INSTITUTE
Back in New York, I go through the annual reports photocopied by the alumni officer. They’re mostly given over to lists of teachers and students, broken down by seniority, honors, and rank, and detailed accounts of long and short expeditions. The report covering the year after my residency includes a half-page obituary for Woody, an otherwise tender tribute marred by an inept remark from our housemaster. Surely he could have avoided the phrase “bouncing personality” to describe a boy who died by tumbling down a stairwell.
While scanning a directory at the back of the report, I find my first genuine lead. It’s a small one, a tiny one, in fact: the 1973 mailing address for my former roommate. Just seeing his name in print gives me the willies: “Viana, Cesar. Mr. and Mrs. Cesar A Viana, Realistic Institute, Quiapo Shopping Center, Barbosa Street, Manila, Philippines.”
The institutional affiliation is curious—Cesar having ties to something called the Realistic Institute is like Genghis Khan operating the Mongol Empire Charm School—but invigorating. The address, outdated though it is, gives the search newfound purpose and focus.
No phone number is listed, so I head down to the New York Public Library and spend a few hours in a giant hall packed with telephone directories from all over the world. While nearby researchers are looking up numbers in Madrid and Detroit and Caracas, I thumb through tattered copies of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Directory. One of them yields a phone number and clears up a minor mystery. The Kissingerian-sounding Realistic Institute is, in point of fact, a “vocational school for hair and beauty culture.”
Over dinner that night, I ask Françoise, “How do I start up a conversation with a bully I haven’t seen in twenty years?”
“What do you want to say?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What do you want him to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, that’s a problem.”
“I know.”
For more than a week I drag my feet about making the call. Ultimately I muster up the courage to dial the number, but hang up before anyone answers.
“What’s the matter?” Françoise asks.
“I can’t decide whether to sound lighthearted or prosecutorial. Do I say, ‘Hi, Cesar. Guess who! It’s Nosey!’ Come out guns blazing: ‘Did you dupe Paul into launching my father’s watch out the window?’ Maybe I should just play ‘The Thirty-Nine Lashes’ into the receiver and wait for a reaction.”
“What time is it in Manila?”
“About nine at night.”
“Perfect. Stop overthinking and call him.”
As I reach for the phone my stomach is in knots. I dial the number and take a deep breath. I hear a couple of feeble long-distance chirps, the crackle of static, another few chirps, and then, a few seconds later, the dull unchanging buzz of a connection that’s gone dead.
I hang up.
Françoise gives me a look.
“Disconnected,” I say, trying to hide my relief. “I guess that’s that.”
But we both know I’m full of shit. We both know the boy I can’t get a hold of still has a hold on me.
DARWIN AND DICKENS
After deadending in Switzerland and New York, I suspended the hunt. That was in 1991, when professional and personal commitments were keeping Françoise and me on the move. Fieldwork, magazine assignments, teaching gigs, residential fellowships, Aboriginal land claims, conferences (literary and anthropological), book tours, workshops, and family holidays—the Jewish ones in America, the Catholic ones in France—demanded ceaseless relocation.
In 1994, Françoise gave birth to our son, Max. We traveled light during his infancy, jerry-rigging suitcases into bassinets, discarding research files after wrapping up assignments. Yet wherever we went, I carried along the Cesar journal. Just because I wasn’t actively looking for him doesn’t mean he was absent from my thoughts. Reminders popped up in the most unexpected places. At the back of a dingy bar in Alice Springs, a pair of drunks playing foosball recalled my ex-roommate’s unstoppable bank shot. In Vienna, hanging on the
wall of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, a Flagellation of Christ reinvoked the musical whipping. Hot sauce, Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes, Ferdinand Marcos, Montblanc fountain pens, and, more than anything else, vintage Omegas had me reaching for the journal.
Over time, the nature of my note taking underwent a change. Rather than waiting to be waylaid by memories of Switzerland, I began to build on them. When, for example, I noticed that many of the British writers I admired had been victimized by boarding school thugs, I investigated the connections between their educational struggles and the books they produced as adults. Were Darwin’s theories of natural selection inspired by the adversity he faced at Dr. Butler’s school? Were the sour educators in the works of Charles Dickens an indictment of the churlish instructors the novelist endured at the Wellington House Academy? Would George Orwell’s worldview have been so Orwellian had the headmaster of St. Cyprian’s resisted the impulse to break a bone-handled riding crop on the buttocks of the young bed wetter and future author of 1984? And what about the atavistic boys who knock each other off in Lord of the Flies? Could their behavior have been captured with such merciless authority if William Golding hadn’t attended, and later taught, at residential grammar schools? Maybe boarding school misery nourishes later achievement. Wouldn’t that be reassuring!
The Belvedere foosball table provided a similar chance to procrastinate. I spent the better part of a week researching the biometric development of the foosball figurine from the mid- to late twentieth century.
Table soccer players from the ’70s. A detail from my journal.
Françoise tolerated my detours but refused to endorse them. “Where is Cesar in all this?” she protested. “Where are you?”
She had a point. Obsessively charting the physical and material evolution of four-inch figurines kept me from digging into more consequential matters. I had cast my net so far beyond the terror of the tower that I’d forgotten what I was fishing for. The distractions might have dulled the pain, but they would never fully dispel it. All forms of anesthesia eventually wear off.
THE TANK
When my son turned five—this was in 1999—he had a series of run-ins with a seven-year-old known around the jungle gym as Thomas the Tank Engine. Because the boy failed to get the hang of kindergarten, he had been held back. It was during his do-over year that the Tank shunted into Max’s life. Although most of the skirmishes between the two were minor, the kind of playground dustups quickly remedied by a time-out, one incident had more serious repercussions. During the annual Christmas pageant, the Tank settled a property dispute over a Pokémon card by throttling my son with a necktie. Max had a red ring around his neck for a few days, but the psychological impact lasted a good deal longer. School suddenly became scary. On more than one occasion Françoise had to pick Max up early because he felt menaced by his archenemy.
“Did you ever have a bully?” our son asked me soon after the necktie incident.
“I did.”
“What did you do?”
I had no ready or reassuring response. “I tried to avoid him,” I said unhelpfully.
“Did it work?”
“No, not really,” I acknowledged, giving Max a hug that probably offered more comfort to me than it did to him.
I was in way over my head. Max was asking for the kind of counsel I had never received. It made me reflect on what my father would have said or done had I had the chance to tell him about Cesar.
I wanted to protect Max—I wanted him to protect himself—but was at a total loss about what to say or do. He was still too young to hear about the tower.
Four years later, Max again confronted a nemesis, a beefy third-grader requiring no moniker. (His surname, poor little guy, was Hogg.) This time around Max gave as good as he got.
Once more, we had the bully talk. Now nine, Max was old enough for a PG version of the Cesar narrative. It came as a relief to be able to share those ancient memories, even if I did have to sugarcoat the details.
Like most kids that age, Max was full of questions. “How hot was the hot sauce Cesar made you eat? How does foosball work? Did you get wedgies?”
“I don’t think wedgies had made it to Aiglon.”*
“Did you get him back?”
“Once,” I said. “I smacked him in the mouth with a blob of ink from a fountain pen.”
“A fountain pen?” Max was puzzled and unimpressed until I told him in greater detail about the hallway showdown.
The last year my son believed in Santa, he insisted that we set out a snack of carrots and cookies and (at the urging of his aunt and uncle) a bottle of single malt Scotch. Father Christmas proved grateful. Max got what he’d asked for: a foosball table.
“I gather your chimney prevented Santa from delivering the bloody thing assembled,” my British brother-in-law groused as we worked our way through the instructions (and a bottle of eighteen-year-old Laphroaig).
Max’s training began on Christmas morning. Smacking around a cork ball, we traded bully tales, offering each other counsel and consolation. Those father–son foosball talks constituted some of our most heartfelt exchanges. In fact, they resonated so strongly that I ended up writing a children’s book featuring an amalgam of the bullies Max and I discussed.
My two previous novels, both written for adults, had included antiheroes inspired by people in my life. The cranky pornographic bookseller who spits and coughs his way through A Case of Curiosities relied heavily on the respiratory challenges of my mother’s fourth husband, and the anachronistic bibliophile in my second novel, The Grand Complication, emerged from a friendship struck up during the year Françoise and I lived in Paris. But the youthful villain in Leon and the Spitting Image mined a deeper vein of personal history. Although the bully in the tale was named Hank the Tank, a nod to the seven-year-old who had garroted my son, I drew much more heavily on my own memories of childhood cruelty.
When I submitted the manuscript to my editor, she raised the possibility of rehabilitating the bully at the end of the story.
“Don’t do it, Dad!” Max pleaded. “Don’t change the Tank. Some kids are evil. Period.”
I sided with Max and told my editor the Tank would not be mending his ways. After which, the gloves came off. Thanks, in part, to my son’s unwavering conviction, the bully ends up receiving a giant helping of whoop-ass. Vengeance may be the Lord’s, but in His infinite wisdom, He sometimes outsources order fulfillment to mere mortals.
FALSE POSITIVES
Leon and the Spitting Image was released in 2003. The publisher dispatched me to classrooms and multifunction “cafetoriums” all around the country to give readings, sign books, and answer questions: How many words do you have to write a day? What time do you have to start working? How much money do you get to make? Does your editor fix all your mistakes? Do you know J. K. Rowling?
Invariably, the Q&As zeroed in on the Tank. Was he based on a real person? What was the worst thing he did? Did you tell on him? Did you really get to cover him in ice cream and hot fudge? What happened to him? Where is he now? What would you do if you saw him again?
I started carrying around a photograph of the boys of Belvedere, circa 1972, so that school kids could compare Cesar’s face to the fictional bully smirking on the jacket flap of the book. It was a pretty good likeness—a lot more accurate than the preliminary sketches. (At my urging, the illustrator had curved the Tank’s mouth downward, narrowed the eyes, and added some flesh to the cheeks.) After most presentations, a small knot of students would surround me, eager to compare notes. So many of them, I discovered, had Cesars in their lives.
The unexpected and uncompromising cross-examinations reawakened my fixation. Questions I thought I had laid to rest suddenly felt more pressing than ever. It couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. I was just getting the hang of a newfangled search engine called Google. Suddenly here was no need to fly to Switzerland or the Philippines to hunt down an ex-roommate; I could pursue him far more effectively with laptop a
nd modem.
Within seconds of Googling Cesar’s name, I got a hit. It turned out Cesar Viana was not working in sales, as I’d casually speculated when Françoise first raised the matter in Paris, nor was he living in Manila.
Cesar Viana was a professor extraordinário with an endowed chair in electrochemical engineering at the University of Lisbon, as well as the international president of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the respected Catholic aid organization devoted to helping the poor.
The news pissed me off. It was hard—no, not hard, it was impossible—to reconcile the Cesar I knew with the four core beliefs of the global nonprofit: charity, friendship, community, simplicity.
{© Bret Bertholf}
The character Hank the Tank was inspired, in part, by memories of Cesar.
Maybe my editor had been right and Max and I had been wrong. Maybe the once-a-bully, always-a-bully hypothesis that legitimated the vengeful finale of Leon and the Spitting Image had unfairly pigeonholed the character of the Tank and, by implication, Cesar.
My irritation and dismay lasted about a week. Follow-up web searches revealed that even though my former roommate and the extraordinary professor shared an uncommon name, they were different people. Portuguese Cesar was too old to have been my roommate.
I tweaked the search terms by adding the initial A. Doing so netted half a dozen new matches, including a musical director living in Belgium. That made a little more sense. Cesar’s boarding school production of Jesus Christ Superstar might well have presaged a career in the performing arts. But further digging revealed that Belgian Cesar, like Portuguese Cesar, was a false positive; he was too young to have been my roommate.
In quick succession, I vetted and rejected two more like-named Cesars. The first was the coauthor of “Human Saliva as a Cleaning Agent for Dirty Surfaces,” a technical report that quantified what my grandmother Wilhelmina proved every time she saw me—namely, that spit on a hankie works wonders for removing schmutz. The second near miss was a flute player living in Spain.
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