Self (11 page)

As I was sitting on my bed, reading the information in the envelope, two boys came in carrying a trunk.

“Are you Croydon?” I asked the first, a smile on my face. He had a sharply featured face and sandy hair.

“No, he is,” he said with a smirk, jerking his head towards the other, who laughed. They dropped the trunk and left.

A minute later, the first boy, the one I had spoken to, returned. He opened the trunk and started unpacking it. He didn’t say a word or even throw me a glance.

He was Croydon.

He didn’t want a roommate. He had asked for one of the few single rooms in Baxter House. He didn’t get it. He got a double room and me.

One day we were in our room, each at our desk, back to back, studying for a math test. From the corridor, not loud but coming through, we could hear Kleinhenz and another boy arguing. I suppose Kleinhenz
was
a little pompous and disdainful. The argument was not acrimonious or even personal — I found out later that it was about the merits of different systems of education, and that Kleinhenz was quite satisfied about the excellence of his native German
Gymnasiums
— but it was enough for Croydon to grab the garbage can, walk out, throw the garbage can at Kleinhenz’s head and start punching him in the face. Thus would Croydon make him pay for his accent, with the personality it suggested! Kleinhenz put up as good a fight as he could — he brought up his fists in the classical stance of boxers and danced about — but though he was taller and had a greater reach, he was fifteen years old to Croydon’s seventeen, and even if things had been otherwise equal he lacked Croydon’s hard edge of nastiness. With every punch that met its target, my roommate took increasing pleasure in the contest. It ended when Kleinhenz unexpectedly turned and fled down the corridor. My image of him will always be of the multicoloured mask of abuse he wore for days afterwards: the greenish-blue rings around his eyes, the red welts on his cheekbones, the purple cuts on his lips.

Like the other boys, including the one with whom Kleinhenz had been having the argument, I did nothing but watch the fight, mesmerized by its violence. Not the first time, and
certainly not the last, that I would display moral deadness at Mount Athos.

That was Croydon. Not a rogue element at Mount Athos, but a rogue in his element.

(2) I remember McAlister. There were three classes of boys at Mount Athos. There were the elites: the top athletes, the best students, those with a certain charisma, those with famous last names — these could do no wrong. The institution coddled them, humoured them. Beneath these elites floated a slightly oppressed but complacently content middle class, the average element in contrast to which the elites could shine, the spectators who did the clapping and cheering. Lastly, there was a class that was lower and marginal (though it paid exactly the same astronomical tuition fees). These were the “zeros”, the nobodies of Mount Athos, those who were unable to fit in for whatever reason — a curious physical appearance, a social awkwardness, an ineptness of one sort or another.

I was a zero. My acne and messy hair advertised it, my petulance confirmed it, my French name sealed it. Only my good marks and the cachet of Madam Ambassador My Mother placed me in its upper echelons.

But McAlister of the stupid face and the cheap blue suit — he was the zero of zeros. He suffered unremittingly. His ego must have been shattered so many times that I can’t imagine he ever managed to put it back together again, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men with Humpty Dumpty. That’s how I see McAlister: a boy with broken eggshells in his head.

They used to whip him viciously with wet towels; he stopped taking showers after sports, waited till evening, when
he hoped the showers would be clear. They dumped fresh garbage into his bed. They shit on his books and notes. They threw buckets of cold water on him in bed at night when he was asleep, something that was done to me several times. Once he ordered himself a pizza and it was taken from his very hands as soon as it was delivered; he later found the anchovies on his pillow.

I never saw such an unhappy boy as McAlister, poor Andrew McAlister. May his sufferings be memorialized here.

ONE REASON WHY I LOVE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:

(1) On a class trip to Toronto we saw an exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario called “Turner and the Sublime”. I have never forgotten it. We had a guide and we heard the usual art history blather, but I paid no attention to it, for these paintings spoke to me directly. The show consisted of oil paintings and a small number of watercolours. Though I can’t recall any one work in particular, I vividly remember the effect of the whole. I looked upon mountains and gorges, lakes and ruins, meadows and streams, each landscape tinged with such colour, infused with such light, that I indeed felt a sense of the sublime, a sense that has never left me, that has given me my one rough axiom of aesthetics. These vast canvases, probably smaller in reality than the imprint they left on my memory, made me feel powerfully, durably, that beauty has meaning, that beauty
is
meaning.

FOUR MORE REASONS WHY I HATE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:

(3) There was the institution of “gitching”, which consisted in holding down a boy, reaching behind to grab his underwear and pulling it until it ripped. Alas for the boy who had quality underwear that did not rip easily. This action was
prefaced by the long shout “Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiitch!”, which would make the intended victim turn in terror, and was perpetrated to a barking chorus of “Gitch! Gitch! Gitch!” Funny to all except the younger or weaker boy who was the target of this gang attack. It went around the school, with chortles of laughter, I tell you, when it was discovered that McAlister, that shadow against the wall, no longer wore underwear.

(4) There was huge, fat Wilford, who, on a lark, threw me to the ground and sat on me. I can still remember the compression of my chest, the horrifying sensation of my organs being squeezed and pushed about. I struggled to keep breathing. But boys and masters — this was in the dining-hall during lunch hour — seemed to find the sight of a mouse of a boy squashed under an elephant of a boy very amusing, right out of a cartoon, perhaps. I remember that when he got off me and I could sit up, my face very congested, my thoughts confused, feeling faint, the only sound I heard, other than my heart pounding in my ears, was laughter.

(5) There was the night when the light was suddenly turned on in Karol’s and my third-floor room — this was in second year; I had changed houses and roommates — and I awoke to recognize Croydon and his gang standing around my bed, all of them wearing pillowcases over their heads with eye-holes ripped in them, in the manner of the Ku Klux Klan. If I had had three seconds’ warning, I would have seriously considered jumping out the window, trusting the lawn below and my ability to grab tree branches to cushion the blow. But they were hunting for Preston, thank God, and they were just checking to see if he was hiding in our room.

Preston was nowhere to be found. He spent that night, as he had others, hiding beyond the football field, behind trees,
two suitcases in his hands jammed with his schoolbooks, class notes, clothes and other valuables, ready to skulk away should the gang start roaming the school grounds. Which they didn’t. They merely sacked his room, upturning the furniture and destroying anything he had left. He forgot his calculus notes in his room and had to use Karol’s to study for the final exam. But the theft and destruction of material objects, that was routine at Mount Athos, banal, not even worth going into. We were a community, a tightly knit brotherhood — so why should we be allowed to lock the doors to our rooms? Of what spirit of distrust, of suspicion, would this speak? Such was the noble philosophy of the institution, whose masters walked around to the jingle-jangle of the keys with which they made secure their apartments, houses, offices and cars.

(6) Indignities were dished out by masters, too. I recall one who, when asked in class what “pusillanimous” meant — the word was in a book we were reading — looked around, landed his eyes upon me, and said, “Here, this is an example of pusillanimity.” The class, though still no wiser as to what the word meant, burst into laughter.

ANOTHER REASON WHY I LOVE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:

(2) The setting. Such a constant, daily beauty — I was there two autumns, two winters, two springs; I have mentioned the expanses of green grass and the great oak trees and the stately old buildings and even Lake Ontario, but I forgot to describe the shimmering jewel of a little river that coursed through the area — such a beauty would have a durable echo in even the most brutish mind. And the school was a small, self-contained community; within it, away from the forces of disrespect, took place unforgettable moments of friendship. I
remember the midnight munchies with Karol — making toast and peanut butter, scrambling to pull the battery out of the smoke detector when a burnt toast set it off. I remember the two of us walking to the river on a green spring day of such clarity I can’t tell you. We slipped into its calm waters and swam downstream with it, just two heads moving along the surface, insects skimming by, the swaying trees filtering the sun, fish dimpling the surface of the water. It was magic, pure magic. We could have swum like that to the Pacific. I remember a bunch of us playing “brick” in the pool, the brick in question being made of rubber and fitting perfectly into the pool’s excess-water trough, thus giving us our ball and our goal. I remember jogging down to the lake in the dead of winter and discovering the accumulations of snow and ice along its shore and scrambling over them to get dangerously close to the open water, to death, and staying there for an hour, thinking about my parents, turning to see Holt-Royd, a boy two grades below me whom I knew only slightly, standing just behind me. “I thought you were maybe going to jump in,” he said. With calm and simplicity, we talked.

It is memories such as these that explain the legions of Old Boys who, to their dying day, donate money to the institution, with the McAlisters and Prestons at the forefront of these nostalgics, as if pain and humiliation were the seeds, and time the water, of the plant Amnesia.

ANOTHER REASON WHY I HATE MOUNT ATHOS SCHOOL:

(7) When disrespect is a climate and a system, it becomes contagious.

I remember standing about and watching as a group of boys gitched and did I don’t know what else to Preston, who
struggled like a fish out of water. I watched with a degree of satisfaction, because Preston really was a jerk. I felt the same when his room was wrecked yet again.

The real reason why I hate Mount Athos School is that I was the one who put the anchovies on McAlister’s pillow.

“Ante todo, el viento y el ruido. Aquel día el mar estaba como un espejo sin nada de viento. Yo estaba femando. Oí algo como un grito, un grito de niña, no más, y al darme la vuelta ví un inmenso chorro de llamas viniendo hacia mi. Cayo del cielo azul como un volcán. Vino un viento para dejar sordo, apabullante, como el último suspiro de Dios. Tenía el color de una naranja. Aquello me echó del barco, el ruido tanto como el soplo. Pensaba morir de calor pero me salvó el agua. Nadé hacia la barca, temblando de miedo. La vela estaba en pedazos. Un trozo de algo se estaba quemando, clavado en la popa. Segundos después vinieron las olas. Enormes olas de agua ardiente. Era el
infierno. La barca estaba en llamas. Una ola apagaba el fuego y la otra lo volvía a encender. Yo gritaba y gritaba y gritaba. Me tiraba al agua para salvarme y después me salvaba otra vez subiendo a la barca. Apenas si podía respirar. No podía ver más allá de las llamas. Ya le digo, era el infierno. El infierno. No, no me acuerdo de donde venían las llamas cuando el avión estaba en el cielo. Era un humo grís oscuro, con hebras negras. Olía a petróleo y a gazolina. Y la madera de la barca que se quemaba. No, no pienso que ha sobrevivido nadie. Nada más que cosas flotando en el agua. Me gustaría irme ya, por favor.”

“First there was the wind and the noise. That day the sea was as flat as a mirror and without a whisper of wind. I was rowing. I heard what I thought was a scream, a little girl’s scream, no more, and I turned to see an enormous flaming streak of colour coming towards me. It fell down from the blue sky like a volcano. There was a deafening, roaring wind, like God’s last breath. It was orange. I was blown clear off my boat, as much by the noise as by the wind. I thought I would die of heat, but I was saved by the water. I swam back to my boat, shivering with fright. My sail was in tatters. A piece of burning matter was lodged in the stern. Then, within seconds, came the waves. Huge waves of burning water. I was in hell! My boat was on fire, one wave putting out the flames, the next setting everything on fire again. I screamed and screamed and screamed, one moment saving myself by throwing myself overboard, the next saving myself again by clawing my way back aboard. I could not breathe, I could not see beyond the flames. I was in hell, I tell you, in hell! No, I don’t recall where the flames came from when the plane was in the air. The smoke was deep grey, with wisps of black. The smell was of gas and oil. And the burning wood of my boat. No, I don’t think there were any survivors. Only things that floated in the water. I would like to go now, please.”

My parents’ death was witnessed only by an old man and the sea. I was told that when the old man could no longer answer questions, he fell to his knees and shut himself in prayer.

It so happened that we were studying
The Old Man and the Sea
at that very moment. I reread the book not long ago at the Saskatoon Public Library. My reaction was a blend of blankness and upheaval, for my memory had mixed the work of art with my parents’ death. I can’t see a plane crashing into the sea. The noise, the colours, the burning, the scattering of bodies and luggage — it’s beyond my imagination. But I can see a large fish tethered to the side of a skiff. I can see it being attacked by sharks and other fish until nothing is left. I can see Old Man Santiago climbing up the beach, carrying his burnt mast like a cross, still cursed, still
salao
. Sometimes I have to scold my memory and remind it that my parents did not drown, their bodies found by a fisherman, but died in a plane crash, their bodies found by no one.