Whipping Boy (4 page)

{Courtesy of Aiglon College, Switzerland}

Lady Luia Forbes.

Had she felt so inclined, Lady Forbes could have made quick work of Cesar. Unfortunately, she shared JC’s faith in self-reflection. Although she had more heart than the haggis
*
she prepared at Castle Forbes, she also believed in self-reliance, and the redemptive power of personal struggle. She was fond of telling her charges: “Those who suffer are often nearer to God than those who have never known pain.”

One thing more than any other rescued me from the tyranny of the Belvedere tower. It was called expedition. Modeled on the teachings of Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound and JC’s mentor (before the two educators had a bilious falling-out), expedition, or ex, was a mountaineering program designed to promote “character-training through adventure.”

Exes at Aiglon took two forms: long and short. The so-called longs, chaperoned affairs lasting a fortnight, combined vigorous hikes with
age-appropriate cultural activities. My most memorable long included a series of perilous day climbs, a tour of the Nestlé chocolate factory (a visit I can still narrate minute by minute), and a descent into the dungeons of the Château de Chillon, a lakeside castle commemorated by Byron in a sonnet I once knew by heart.

Longs were fun, but it was the shorts that filled me with intemperate delight.

Though it’s unthinkable today, back in 1971 the school had no qualms dispatching three or four unchaperoned boys into a harsh and unforgiving terrain with a few francs, some beat-up camping gear, a compass, and a map. In his capacity as expeditions master, Derek Berry would sometimes monitor the movements of the younger teams from a distance, aided by a pair of high-powered German binoculars. But as a general rule, surveillance during overnight outings was rare. Where we hiked and camped, and what grub we bought with our five-franc per diems, was left up to us.

{Courtesy of Aiglon College, Switzerland}

Expeditions master Derek Berry in 1971.

My off-campus delinquency was all pretty innocent. I ate white bread, guzzled sodas (banned by JC because of the “drugs” they contained), and played mumblety-peg with knives that exceeded the blade length sanctioned by the
Rules
. The older boys were more daring. One upperclassman I admired regularly skied off-piste during avalanche season. Another hired a helicopter to fly him over the route of an expedition he was supposed to complete on foot. Probably the most extravagant act of weekend dereliction took place just before I arrived. A student deviated from his
authorized itinerary by hitching a ride to Geneva and jumping on a plane bound for New York. He began his transatlantic ex on a Friday and by five p.m. that Sunday he was back at school, with the expeditions master none the wiser.

I enjoyed the autumn exes, but it’s the winter ones that remain most vivid. I had a funky pair of skis fitted with all-terrain bindings that could be adapted both to downhill and cross-country conditions. (The toes were hinged and the heels could be disengaged.) I could even ski
up
hill by strapping on a pair of “skins.”
*
Every aspect of the snowy hikes was exhilarating. They left me feeling filthy and cleansed, exhausted and energized. And they awakened dormant memories of Villars when my father was alive. On Sunday nights it was often a struggle just to climb into bed. Yet I welcomed the fatigue; it allowed me to sleep, nightmare-free, until the floor waker pounded on the door early Monday morning.

Typically, the school day began at seven a.m., with roll call and physical training: ten minutes of fresh-air squat thrusts, jumping jacks, and deep knee bends. PT was followed by cold showers. JC believed daily applications of “heat, cold, and wet” promoted “the irrigation of the glandular and lymphatic systems” by flushing out the “toxins” and “relative stagnation” brought on by sleep. The icy morning hose-downs were only mildly unpleasant, especially by comparison to the warm showers required in the afternoons.

When naked boys congregate, private parts inevitably receive public scrutiny. Although this fundamental law of human nature was
driven home by a few “turtlenecked” changelings who took pleasure in mocking my prepubescent circumcised tackle, that’s not what I recall hating most about the shower room. No. I reserved far greater contempt for the facility’s substandard plumbing and its overseer, the shower captain charged with maintaining the open flow of an undersized floor drain that was constantly getting clogged.

{Courtesy of Aiglon College, Switzerland}

Matron, 1972.

That seemingly minor design flaw triggered broad social consequences for the bathers of Belvedere. The younger boys were forced to wash downstream, in the brackish effluvia of their elders. My memories of showering at Aiglon mostly involve hopping from one foot to the other in a futile effort to avoid an ankle-deep stew of human grease. (And if that weren’t bad enough, Cesar, in his capacity as said shower captain, could legitimately compel me to clear away the Brillo pads of pubic hair that continually blocked the drain.)

All my hopscotching in microbial gunk ultimately led to an appointment with Matron, the school nurse.

“Dirty little child,” she scolded. “You’ve gone and gotten yourself verrucas.”

I stared up uncomprehendingly. Matron had severe dark features and a starched white uniform reminiscent of a daguerreotype widow. Verrucas? The word puzzled me. Was she talking about Veruca Salt, the bratty girl in
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
?

Without warning or anesthesia, Matron reached for a scalpel and hacked away at the mosaic of plantar warts that had colonized my feet. Because surgery failed to address the underlying cause of the
infection—namely, the toxic slurry of boy bilge into which I waded most afternoons—a fresh batch of warts sprouted soon thereafter. Matron attacked that second bloom by daubing my feet with pepper paste.

{© Erik Friedl from the film
Aiglon College
}

A 1971 film commissioned by the school highlighted a daily routine I hated: cold showers.

I didn’t mind. In fact, I was grateful. My chronic outbreaks of
verruca plantaris
exempted me from PT and cold showers. So while my roommates submitted to jog trots and icy hose-downs, I was permitted to get dressed at a leisurely pace in a dorm room entirely free of menace.

And menace, after all, lurked everywhere. Despite our differing class schedules, Cesar and I often crossed paths. During daily meditation. At meals. In the alcove that housed the foosball table. That’s where our mismatched rivalry found public expression most often.

Like most things at Aiglon, the Belvedere foosball table took a great deal of abuse. Its legs were scuffed, its bumpers shot, its rods misaligned. No amount of ski wax could silence the squeaky bearings, and the battered coin slot required a safecracker’s
touch (plus ten centimes) to release the pitted balls. Yet despite those blemishes, the table was a revered object. In pairs, and in pairs of pairs, the boys of Belvedere would bend over its scarred surface much the way the faithful bow before an altar. Unless one of the boys was Cesar.

Cesar approached foosball, as he did so many things, from a perspective all his own. When on defense, he would sometimes squat down behind his goalie and grip the backfield rods like the handlebars of the Harley in the
Easy Rider
poster taped to our dorm-room wall, an unorthodox crouch that provided an unobstructed sight line and which facilitated ramming the distal end of a metal rod into the groin of an inattentive foe.

In all fairness, Cesar rarely resorted to such dirty tricks. He didn’t have to. He had near-total control over the actions of his men, whether formed from flesh and bone or from injection-molded plastic. His bank shots were especially lethal—they ricocheted off the walls with Euclidean precision—and his brush strokes imparted enough English to curve a ball
around
a player. And when he tired of finesse, or if the adversary appeared prepared for it, he could, in a pinch, fire off a torpedo. Or
begin
to fire, pause to ramp up the tension, and then gently pass the ball to a player better positioned to score. Beyond his extensive repertoire of throttles, feints, and pivots, Cesar possessed an unnerving ability to read his enemy, pinpoint weakness, and, whether by force or by sly misdirection, exploit that weakness to advantage. By the age of twelve, he was already a supremely gifted fake-out artist.

One last observation regarding Cesar’s foosball technique requires mention. Whenever an especially difficult maneuver enabled him to score a goal, his mouth would curl in a grimace of pleasure. I recall that facial expression vividly because I associate it with his most deviant assault against me, an act of humiliation that, by Lady Forbes’s logic, brought me face-to-face with God.

As we were approaching the Christmas recess, Cesar decided to play a prank on me by paying homage to
Jesus Christ Superstar,
a wildly popular Andrew Lloyd Webber rock opera that our roommate Timothy, the lover of show tunes, played nonstop on his cassette recorder, a “compact” Philips the size of a shoe box.

One song, “Trial Before Pilate,” caught Cesar’s fancy more than all the rest. His devotion to it may have been partly narcissistic—the lyrics invoke Caesar by name—but I’m convinced he was also drawn in by the song’s infamous interlude, “The Thirty-Nine Lashes.” Whatever the reason, he decided to stage a dorm-room performance of the song during “close time,” a late-afternoon recess reserved for indoor recreation.

This is what I remember. Cesar cast himself as Pilate and he gave Paul the part of the centurion, a part Paul was born to play, a part he had been playing since the start of school. Joseph, the kid from Kentucky, was cast as the rabble and Timothy handled sound.

That left only one major casting decision: Who should play Jesus Christ?

“Tie up his hands,” Cesar declared.