Whipping Boy

by Allen Kurzweil

  “I recall a lot,” Cesar says amiably. “But just in bits and pieces. There are some things that people have told me about that I really don’t remember. You might need to prod me a bit.”

  “That’s not a problem,” I assure him. “I’m more than happy to prod.”

  I pull out the Belvedere house photo and place it between us. Cesar scans the image while sucking on a shrimp. After resting the peel next to his plate and wiping his fingers daintily on a napkin, he begins stabbing faces.

  “That’s me. That’s the kid who built a little gas airplane that made a friggin’ racket. That’s the kid who got care packages of fluff and peanut butter. That’s what’s-his-name, the Pakistani with the stutter. Remember what we used to call him?”

  I shake my head.

  Cesar twists his wrist as if turning the ignition key of a car that refuses to start. “T-t-t-t-t-ta-yub!” he sputters as he cranks. “T-t-t-t-ta-yub! . . . T-t-t-t-t-ta-yub!” The gesture brings to mind the two-fingered rebuke he deployed whenever he called me Nosey.

  Cesar’s memories of Aiglon turn out to be both extremely exacting and highly selective. He recalls his laundry-tag ID number (“I was 323”); the mimeographed list of Briticisms that JC compelled speakers of American English to learn (“Who the hell says ‘fortnight’?”); his favorite pocketknife, a wood-handled Opinel (“with a little metal ring that turned to lock the blade”).

  “Remember the boy with the toaster?” I say.

  “Sure I do.”

  Together we reconstruct a memory of breakfast in Belvedere. Each morning, one of our older housemates—we can’t come up with his name—would enter the dining hall carrying a two-slice toaster under his arm. As soon as he sat down, the fellow would start making toast, and he’d keep making it throughout the meal, distributing toast to every boy at the table without regard to age, rank, or personal affection.

  “I always buttered my toast on both sides,” Cesar says.

  “I usually slathered mine with blackstrap molasses, butter, and cocoa powder.”

  There is one huge discrepancy in our composite memory of the toaster boy. I remember him with great fondness. Not only did he transform an inedible bread product into a delicacy worthy of a French bakery, he subverted, ever so slightly, a culture of hierarchy and privilege. Cesar, by contrast, recalls the frustration of never receiving a second slice.

  “Speaking of bread,” I say awkwardly, “remember the pellets you guys forced me to eat? It was—”

  Before I have a chance to mention the chili sauce, Cesar cuts me off. “I don’t. But remember Bean Day? How JC was always trying to raise money for famine victims?”

  “Oh, right.” I vaguely recall the founder’s well-intentioned initiative—a day during which the whole school ate nothing but beans—and its inevitable consequences: a dorm-wide fart-a-thon of epic proportions. “Maybe that’s why we were forced to keep our windows open at night,” I joke.

  While Cesar is chuckling, I tap the face of my best friend.

  “Anderson,” he says. “I always thought he was a little slow.”

  I bristle. “That’s not how I remember him.”

  {© Erik Friedl from the film Aiglon College}

  Breakfast in Belvedere, circa 1971. Cesar is seated at left.

  Cesar recalibrates. “I’m not saying mentally. But the way he acted? He was like . . .” Cesar throws himself into an impersonation of Woody that includes denigrating guttural sounds impossible to represent in print.

  “You may not know what happened to him,” I say. “When I went back to the school in 1991, I learned that Woody fell down the—”

  Cesar again cuts me off. “I know all about it. I was right next to him when it happened.”

  “Next to him?”

  “Well, nearby.”

  “Was he really dead by the time he hit the ground? That’s what Mrs. Senn told me.”

  “Yeah. Instantly. Like that.” Cesar snaps his fingers. “He landed on his head.” Then, as he reaches for a mussel, Cesar adds, “I had to help scrape up his brains.”

  “What? Are you kidding?”

  Cesar sucks the meat from the shell. “Nope. I got stuck having to scoop his brains into a bag.”

  Shocked by the self-directed nature of the revelation and the unself-conscious slurping that accompanies it, I watch Cesar add the shell to the shrimp peels beside his plate.

  He misreads my stare. “Want to try one?” he asks, picking up a mussel.

  “Uh, no thanks,” I manage as I try to shake the chilling image of Cesar bent over my buddy Woody’s lifeless body at the base of the Belvedere stairwell.

  ATTACK OR RETREAT?

  The rest of the meal, while not nearly so macabre, is no less eye-opening. At one point, I pull out a school directory from 1972. Cesar scans the list and quickly pounces on the name of a girl I never knew. “We used to tease her all the time,” he says with a hearty chuckle.

  “We used to punch her because she was really, really fat. I mean, I was chubby, but she was huge!” The remark, in itself, is unsettling. What disturbs me more is the curiously good-natured comment that follows: “She was great and really very nice.”

  As we swap stories, I’m struck by how many of our shared memories provoke profoundly different feelings. Take showering. I recall hating every aspect of the daily hose-downs, both the cold ones that followed PT and the warm ones that preceded dinner. But for Cesar, the shower room is a locus of pride. “Remember how I was the chief shower checker?” he boasts. “I took the job seriously. I got prizes.”

  “And I got verrucas.”

  “Verrucas?”

  “Ingrown warts. Matron tried removing them with a scalpel. And when that didn’t work, she coated them with pepper paste.”

  “I liked Matron,” Cesar says of the nurse with the daguerreotype looks. “She was very . . . matronly.”

  “How did you end up at Aiglon?” I ask midway through the meal.

  “Some guy with a name like George Winterthorpe III told my mom about it.”

  “Was it easy leaving Manila?”

  “God, no. I was sheltered. When I first got to Switzerland, I was a fish out of water. I believe my mom thought Aiglon was going to be a wonderful experience. She got super feedback from all these people who had been there before. Well, guess what, Allen. It wasn’t wonderful. It was like the military. Like a concentration camp. I actually had to go to therapy because I felt like my mom abandoned me. I turned around and just like that”—Cesar again snaps his fingers—“she was gone. The whole Aiglon thing was really tough. ‘Do this! Do that! Make your bed! Tip your chair? Fifty centimes!’”

  Much of Cesar’s misery appears to be rooted in the daunting physical demands placed on students. Overweight while at Aiglon, he loathed the weekend hikes that I loved. “I got snow blindness one time,” he complains. “And remember how you had to report on what you saw? And don’t get me started on the sleeping bags. Man, they stank!” (Regarding this last grievance, he raises a valid point. The school-issued bags were notoriously malodorous and crusty for reasons better left unexplored.)

  Cesar recalls enjoying only one hike, a short ex that required him to lead a small group of boys up and down three mountains. On the first day of the expedition, he set himself up at a base camp and mustered the troops.

  “I told them, ‘We’re gonna have to work this smart,’” he remembers.

  That meant abandoning the itinerary sanctioned by the expeditions master, disregarding a sacrosanct safety policy spelled out in the Rules—“Never get separated”—and persuading his charges to undertake solo climbs of the peaks that the team was supposed to tackle in unison. When his charges returned to the base camp, Cesar cobbled their separate field notes into a report chronicling an expedition ostensibly undertaken as a group. The work-around shaved a full day off the ex, which the boys spent in a village bar. “We had some wine, laughed our heads off, and played foosball. It was a lesson in leadership,” Cesar adds with no appare
nt irony.

  Sometimes the two of us recall despising the same things but for different reasons. When I ask Cesar if he remembers the pine tree that provoked my nightmares, he says, “Sure. Crows used to nest there and caaaaaw in the morning. I hated how they’d wake us up.”

  “I don’t remember the crows. What I remember is worrying I’d be tossed into the tree if a fire broke out.” I stop short of pointing fingers, worried doing so might end the interview prematurely.

  Cesar has no such qualms. His catalog of boarding school assailants is a lot lengthier than mine. There’s the classmate who swiped the pocket money from his bedside cash box. The “klepto” from Finland who stole his knives. The two upper-schoolers who tried to beat him up. (“They couldn’t,” he notes proudly. “I studied judo.”) The boys who whacked his legs with nettles during a game of capture the flag (“Man, that stung like hell”). The duty prefect who forced him to strip and submit to an ice-cold “punishment shower” until his “skin turned red,” all because of some unspecified late-night mischief.

  And that’s only the students who made his life hell. The roster of abusive adults is just as long. An assistant master gave Cesar laps for cursing—“even though I’d just gotten stung by hornets!” Our history teacher hit him over the head during class. (Here our recollections again diverge, if only on a minor matter. Cesar is certain the teacher in question meted out justice with a wooden ruler. I’m equally sure he made use of a hardcover textbook, which, by year’s end, was as flexible as a paperback.) Even Lady Forbes, my seemingly irreproachable elocution tutor, earns a reprimand: “She ate french fries with her fingers!”

  Of all the tormentors Cesar endured during his three years at Aiglon, he reserves his greatest ire for our housemaster, the volatile Irishman who tore into me when my grades were in the gutter. “That guy was always on the warpath,” he says.

  “I remember him the same way.”

  “Once I skipped a punishment run because I had to buy stuff for a long expedition. The prick came to my room and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ ‘Well, I had to go shopping,’ I said. And he said, ‘No, you’re supposed to be on your punishment run. You were about to make silver [rank]. You just blew it.’

  “Another time, I told him I had fifty francs stolen, and he said, ‘Where’d you get all that money? You’re not supposed to have that much.’ It’s like I became the person that was guilty!”

  “Technically you were guilty. The Rules prohibited us from having more than five francs at any time.”

  “I guess that was a problem,” Cesar admits.

  Asked about his absolute worst memory of Aiglon, he says, “Probably the time I was quarantined with German measles. No one visited. I was all alone. I spent my birthday in the freakin’ hospital.”*

  “Is that the reason you disappeared? I’ve always wondered about that. One moment I’m rooming with you and Paul, and the next thing I know you’re both gone. Are the two of you still in touch?”

  “Nope,” Cesar says. “I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

  “Oh, he’s alive,” I say. “Google his name. Last time I checked, half the photos online had him at New York and Palm Beach charity events. The other half were from mugshots.com.”

  “I had no idea,” Cesar says. He shows no interest in learning the specifics of his childhood henchman’s grown-up slipups—two arrests and some bench warrants involving a stolen vehicle. From the way Cesar nervously redirects his gaze to the photo, I get the impression that the mention of mug shots hits too close to home.

  “Paul’s not in the picture,” I say. “It must have been taken after he left and before you got sick.” I take a deep breath. “Remember how Paul swiped my father’s watch?”

  Cesar doesn’t respond, at least not directly. “I remember him being pretty harmless.”

  “Paul? Harmless? That’s not my memory. I lived in fear of the guy.” And what you made him do. “Remember how he helped tie me to the bed to reenact Jesus Christ Superstar?”

  “I think everybody picked on somebody,” Cesar says flatly.

  I mention getting whipped to the sound track of “The Thirty-Nine Lashes.”

  Cesar doesn’t respond.

  Not for the first or last time, I’m faced with a choice: attack or retreat. And not for the first or last time, I choose the coward’s course of action, diverting the discussion into a thicket of meaningless detail. “The music was played on Timothy Kann’s tape recorder,” I say. “A portable Philips about yay big.” I spread my hands a foot apart.

  Cesar doesn’t recall the whipping, the interlude, or the tape recorder. He doesn’t even recall Timothy Kann.

  The last lapse is especially curious. How can someone who knows his boarding school laundry-tag number forget the name of a roommate? I give him a few prompts. “New York kid. Father worked for Bache and Co. Liked Broadway musicals. Neat freak. Had a fancy electric toothbrush.”

  {Courtesy of Mugshots.com}

  Cesar’s sidekick in 2004. His profile, as an adult, is exactly as I remember it at school.

  “Like I said,” Cesar says, “there’s a lot I don’t remember. I got an email from a Turkish kid in Belvedere. I have no recollection of him either.” (I never knew the Turkish kid. He arrived at the school a few months after I left. But his views of Cesar surfaced on a Facebook alumni page: “Don’t you remember me?” he asked my former roommate in the public forum. “You composed a jingle about how I picked my dick every day?” I contacted the alum and we exchanged five or six emails that corroborated many of my memories. “Yes, Cesar was a problem to all those not as big as he was,” he wrote. “But he made sure to stay away from me after seeing me take down another bully within hours of my arrival at school. Since first grade I’ve never taken crap from anybody.”)

  I ask Cesar to name the boys he roomed with during his time at Aiglon. He mentions six or seven.

  “You missed one,” I say.

  “Who?”

  “Um. I roomed with you, too.”

  “Really?” Cesar gives me a doubtful look.

  “There were five of us living together.”

  He still appears skeptical.

  “In a room at the top of Belvedere.”

  “That’s right,” he says at last. “And people would pick on you, right?”

  People? I let it go. No, that’s not right. I’m not letting anything go. I’m keeping everything bottled up—to prolong the conversation and to keep myself in check.

  “Are you in this?” Cesar asks, tapping the house photo.

  At first, I think he’s joking. He has correctly identified nearly every boy in the picture. His failing to find me is like Professor Moriarty failing to recognize Holmes. But when he repeats the question, I know he’s serious. I point to the sad-looking, mop-topped, cross-legged eleven-year-old at the base of the pyramid.

  “That’s you?” Cesar says, shaking his head.

  “That’s me.”

  “Man, you were little.”

  “I was,” I say with a sigh. “I was the littlest kid in the school.”

  A FEW MORE MEETINGS

  Is it really possible that a boy I will never forget has all but forgotten me? I believe it is. I’m pretty sure Cesar isn’t lying. Not about the photo, anyway. After all, if he were up to his old tricks, he’d pick me out of the lineup, recall the happy times we shared, then attempt to rope me into one of his schemes. He doesn’t do any of that.

  I feel foolish for so grossly exaggerating his capacity for evil. Cesar is not the All-Knowing Menace I anticipated. Truth be told, if anyone deserves that title, I do. Far from resisting my questions, he welcomes them, even going so far as to suggest that we meet again before I fly home.

  At our next get-together, I continue to lob softballs. My approach resembles the Gradual-Length Method developed by Monsieur Stump, our ski instructor at Aiglon. Monsieur Stump always started beginners on short skis that were easy to maneuver. Only as our confidence grew would he introduc
e longer skis. He recognized the value of incremental challenge. By the same logic, I guide Cesar over unthreatening terrain. No talk of felony or flogging. No further mention of stolen watches.

  At a certain point, Cesar tells me he’s writing a screenplay.

  “What’s it about?” I ask.

  “It’s about these two people, and they’re both living a lie.”

  “Both living a lie?”

  Cesar nods. “He’s a construction worker posing as a wealthy banker. She’s a shampoo assistant in a beauty salon posing as a famous movie actress. When they meet each other, they’re pretending to be people they’re not. They get to know each other really well and fall for each other. But what will they do when they find out who each one really is?”

  That’s an excellent question, one I’m starting to ask myself. “How did you come up with the idea?”

  “It’s basically about the relationship between me and my wife—just exaggerated to the max. There’s a certain formula that seems to work in Hollywood. I’m trying to stick to part of that formula, but I’m also trying to break away from it. Add some cachet. Towards the end, I want to have a little twist or something.”

  “Everyone loves a little twist at the end,” I say. “What are you calling it?”

  “Parallel Lives.”

  “That’s a good title. I read an essay collection called Parallel Lives a while back.”

  “No, not lives,” Cesar corrects. “Lies. Parallel lies.”

  “Wow. That’s even better.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Parallel Lies,” I repeat. “That’s really good. Just be careful someone doesn’t swipe it.”

  During our second exchange, Cesar brings up his expertise in something called NLP. “It stands for neurolinguistic programming. It’s a very interesting way to break out of certain patterns or blockages. Athletes use it. NLP allows you to reframe your thoughts—to have total control. Basically, it teaches you that all behavior is positively intended.”