The girls weren’t the only troublemakers sitting in the back of the Audi. I pulled my weight, too. It wasn’t hard. I campaigned against museum visits, sang Beatles tunes to drown out the Bach, and undermined travel schedules by wandering off at rest stops. Every guardrail of every Esso station became a tightrope stretched over a pit full of poisonous snakes, a volcano covered in molten lava, a lake stocked with piranhas.
It was this sort of impromptu escapism that caused me to scramble onto the roof of a seaside pensione. While searching for pirates through a spyglass fashioned out of two clenched hands, I tripped on a terra-cotta tile and, to avoid breaking my neck, lunged for, and caught, a tree branch. Then, with equal grace and dexterity, I planted my foot in a hornet’s nest the size of a soccer ball. The ER doctor who treated me was so impressed by the broad constellation of welts dotting my body that he rustled up a camera to document the attack.
THREE SAINTS AND AN EMPEROR
After surviving stepsisters and hornets, it was a relief to return to Villars—the alpine wonderland inextricably linked to my father. I made a friend the very first day at school, even before settling in. His name was Woody. I think we hit it off as quickly as we did because we were both newly arrived no-rank Yanks. “That puts us at the bottom of the food chain,” Woody said. I admitted not knowing what the phrase food chain meant, so drawing on his knowledge of sharks—Woody loved sharks—he explained the term and proposed we stick together. I agreed, then dragged my brass-cornered trunk up the spiral staircase of Belvedere, a converted hotel that served as the principal dormitory for the lower-school boys of Aiglon. My room, at the very top of a tower, accommodated five metal bunks in a space originally intended for two. Although the room had a balcony that opened onto a breathtaking section of the Alps that my father had climbed before the Anschluss, I’d be lying if I said I took much notice of the views. My focus was directed inward, at the four roommates I’d be bunking with: three Americans and a kid from Manila.
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.
BANISTER SURFING
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.)
“EAT IT, NOSEY”
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.
“THOSE WHO SUFFER ARE OFTEN CLOSER TO GOD”
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.”
{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.”
EXES
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 uphill 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.
VERRUCAS
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 natu
re 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?
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