Whipping Boy (3 page)

The first of the Americans I met was named Paul. His father was an ex-cavalry officer who organized pheasant shoots on country estates throughout Europe and the Americas. His mother was an heiress to a banking fortune who arranged charity events. Paul lived in a château outside Paris. Next was a Kentucky boy named Joseph. Joseph’s family owned horses and McDonald’s franchises. The last of my three American roommates was Timothy, the son of a successful New York stockbroker and a lover of Broadway show tunes.

That left Cesar, an overweight twelve-year-old with an easy smile and an unruly mop of coal-black hair. Cesar (pronounced
say-CZAR
) was rumored to be the son of the chief of security (or some similarly high-level official) under Ferdinand Marcos. At the time, I knew nothing about the Filipino strongman, but I had heard of Caesar Augustus.
*
(In fifth-grade history, I did two units on ancient Rome.)

{© Patrick Roberts}

My pal Woody Anderson (left) with Assistant Master Patrick Roberts.

Shortly after the start of the school year, Cesar approached to offer some practical advice. “You know what that tree is used for?” I recall him saying as he pointed from a fifth-floor balcony at a distant pine. “If there’s a fire and we can’t use the stairs, I’ll have to throw you into that tree. But you don’t have to worry,” he reassured me. “The small branches at the
top of the tree will break your fall, and the bigger ones down below will catch you.”

Whether Cesar believed what he told me or not, I can’t say. All I know is he made
me
believe it. And once I believed it, I began to worry.

{Linda Color, Geneva, Switzerland}

My dorm room, at the top of the Belvedere tower, and the looming pine.

The nightmares started a few days later. They were always the same: a never-ending tumble through the burning branches of a humongous tree. I tried to stay awake to stave off the dreams. With my head under the covers, I’d stare at the bright green numbers on my watch—the same watch my father was wearing when the gurney men wheeled him away—and calculate the time remaining until the floor waker would pound on our door and end my terror, if only until the following night.

I wasn’t especially studious during the year I spent in Switzerland—my bookishness only emerged in high school—but I had a great time hiking, skiing, and goofing off. Sometimes my buddy Woody and I would finagle permission chits and visit the smoke shop at the base of Belvedere, where we’d purchase Mars bars and Sugus candies, and survey the shop’s prodigious knife display. Other times we’d go “surfing,” which meant sliding down the handrail of the Belvedere banister, a spiral of hardwood that ran from the top of the tower to a newel post five floors below. Balance not being
my strong suit, I never achieved the grace of Woody’s descents. Nor could I control my dismount, something most older boys nailed with the flourish of Olympic gymnasts. Still, like all residents of Belvedere, I helped buff the rail to the high sheen of a polished credenza.

The bond between Woody and me extended beyond banister surfing. One time we had a race to see who could change the fastest into the No. 1 Dress uniform mandated for Saturday and Sunday dinners. Woody won by keeping his school tie knotted and threaded through the button-down collar of his shirt, a trick I soon adopted. We were also fierce rivals in foosball, though neither of us played at the level of the senior boys. How could we? Table time tended to be governed by strength and standing, and we had precious little of either. That made us obvious targets for boys in search of easy prey.

Woody handled their unwanted attentions better than I ever did. He was fearless. His knowledge of shark behavior, I suspect, taught him that sometimes the best way to respond to attack is with a swift punch in the nose. I, on the other hand, took my cue from the chamois, the mountain goat mascot of my intramural sports team, and avoided conflict by bouncing from one perch to another, relying on ceaseless movement to keep me out of danger.

That same ceaseless movement (plus more than my share of punishment laps) eventually caught the attention of Derek Berry, the school’s ruddy-faced director of activities. He put me on the track team. I loved running and excelled in the sixty-meter dash until, a month into the season, a teammate, wearing track spikes, stepped on my foot. The resulting puncture wound required the school’s medical officer, Docteur Méan, to stitch me up. (I suspect he did so a bit too hastily. To this day, whenever the barometer drops in wintertime, a sharp pain cramps my foot and summons up memories of the unforgettably named doctor.)

I was, as already noted, the youngest student in the school. That was the most obvious strike against me. There were others. I was the fatherless son of a middle-class mother in a holding pen of privilege, an institution larded with the sons and daughters of royals and movie stars, diplomats, foreign correspondents, army officers, and spies. Strike two. And I was a Jew, one of only six or seven. Strike three.

Anti-Semitism might explain why, soon after my arrival, Cesar began calling me Nosey.

“Nosey, do this.” “Nosey, do that.” To enhance the slur, Cesar took to forming a
C
with thumb and index finger, pressing it around his nose to exaggerate its profile.

Ethnic cliché aside, I’m sure I
was
a little nosy, sneaking peeks at Cesar’s knife collection, asking way too many questions, desperately doing whatever I could to fit in. At dinner one night, I made the mistake of flattering Cesar about his tolerance for hot sauce. (He kept a private stash in the room.) Although he appeared to disregard my pandering, I should have known the gears were turning when I noticed that he’d slipped a slice of bread into his pocket. No one in Belvedere swiped bread. Baked once a month, the notorious
pain intégral
had a mass density that rivaled lead.
*

Up in the tower later that night, I watched as Cesar planted himself by the window and busied himself rolling bits of the purloined
pain
into pea-sized pellets.

“What are you making?” I asked.

“Don’t be so nosy, Nosey,” he replied, adding his two-finger flourish.

Cesar arranged a half dozen bread pellets in single file on the windowsill and saturated each with a dollop of hot sauce. It was obvious by the way he kept grinning at me that I was implicated in his plans. How only became clear after lights-out, when he approached my bunk, cupping a cured pepper pellet in the palm of his hand. “Eat it, Nosey.”

{Courtesy of Aiglon College, Switzerland}

Cesar, age twelve.

I refused so he motioned to Paul, a highly suggestible giant with an uneven gait and pronounced underbite. Paul lumbered over and repeated the command.

I had no choice. I popped the pellet in my mouth and swallowed it whole. The homemade fireball numbed my throat, but that was pretty much it. I felt quite pleased, even slightly cocky, that I had passed the test without flinching.

Cesar walked back to the window, plucked another pepper pellet from the sill, and returned. “Eat it, Nosey,” he said again. “Only this time make sure you chew.”

Cesar was big. Paul was huge. What choice did I have? I placed the second pellet in my mouth and bit down. It had a lot more kick. I was still waving a hand in front of my mouth when Cesar held out another pellet. No command was necessary. It wasn’t long after I bit down on the third fireball that I began to whimper, and then cry, my tears triggered both by the physiological effects of the chili sauce and by the glee of its purveyors.

Cesar eventually authorized me to rinse out my mouth, but by then the damage was done. The episode left a bitter taste in my mouth long after the burning subsided.

Okay, an obvious question: Did I complain to someone in charge? The answer is no. It never even occurred to me to rat out my roommates. For all the rhetoric of communitarian governance, Aiglon was very much a
British
boarding school. The divide between child and adult was as distinct and hazardous as a glacial crevasse. Teachers took a dim view of tattletales, and so did their charges. And even if I had mustered the courage to snitch, where would I have taken my grievances?

{Courtesy of Aiglon College, Switzerland}

The Alps, as seen from the Belvedere dining hall.

The Belvedere housemaster? To quote the man himself: “Not bloody likely.” He and his wife made it perfectly clear that they hadn’t been hired to mollycoddle their charges. During the first week of school, the forbidding couple had forced a homesick twelve-year-old, struck down by the flu, to clean up his own vomit.

JC? He wasn’t an option, either. He would have told me to look inward. A line from
Julius Caesar,
which he often recited during morning meditation, summed up his perspective: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Besides, JC was rarely in residence. Fragile health had necessitated a “rest cure,” which blossomed into an around-the-world pilgrimage, a search for the “cosmic intelligence of the Divine” requiring lengthy stays in the ashram of an Indian mystic and the commune of some Bay Area “Jesus freaks.” (The quotes are pulled from an update he sent to the school.)

I found Group Captain Watts, the acting headmaster during JC’s spiritual road trip, nearly as unapproachable. A Bible-quoting fighter pilot who strode about campus with a chunk of shrapnel lodged in his shoulder—a souvenir picked up while dogfighting Messerschmitts during the Battle of Britain—“Groupie” scared the shit out of me.

If I’d been older, Madame Duttweiler, the Aiglon fencing master, could have provided practical instruction adaptable to my needs. But her lessons in swordsmanship were restricted to upper-school students.

No, my only potential ally, and an unlikely one at that, was Lady Forbes, the school’s eighty-two-year-old elocution teacher. A one-time opera diva fond of cat’s-eye glasses, fake pearls, and capacious leather pocketbooks, Lady Forbes ran a pretty tight ship, often chastening inattentive students with a quotation from some Eastern philosopher or
a line plucked from the Psalms. “Be still,” she would command, her exquisite diction undermined by the hissing of loose-fitting dentures, “and know that I am God.”