Whipping Boy by Allen Kurzweil Read Free Book Online

asked me point-blank a question I often asked myself. “Of course.”
    “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 kidwho 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.

PART II
“WE HOPE TO MAKE YOUR JOURNEY UNFORGETTABLE”
    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”

 
     
     
B ACK TO S CHOOL
    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