Whipping Boy (7 page)

“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.

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”

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 gone. 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.

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}

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.”