Whipping Boy (9 page)

I started carrying around a photograph of the boys of Belvedere, circa 1972, so that school kids could compare Cesar’s face to the fictional bully smirking on the jacket flap of the book. It was a pretty good likeness—a lot more accurate than the preliminary sketches. (At my urging, the illustrator had curved the Tank’s mouth downward, narrowed the eyes, and added some flesh to the cheeks.) After most presentations, a small knot of students would surround me, eager to compare notes. So many of them, I discovered, had Cesars in their lives.

The unexpected and uncompromising cross-examinations reawakened my fixation. Questions I thought I had laid to rest suddenly felt more pressing than ever. It couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. I was just getting the hang of a newfangled search engine called Google. Suddenly here was no need to fly to Switzerland or the Philippines to hunt down an ex-roommate; I could pursue him far more effectively with laptop and modem.

Within seconds of Googling Cesar’s name, I got a hit. It turned out Cesar Viana was
not
working in sales, as I’d casually speculated when
Françoise first raised the matter in Paris, nor was he living in Manila.

Cesar Viana was a
professor extraordinário
with an endowed chair in electrochemical engineering at the University of Lisbon, as well as the international president of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, the respected Catholic aid organization devoted to helping the poor.

The news pissed me off. It was hard—no, not hard, it was impossible—to reconcile the Cesar I knew with the four core beliefs of the global nonprofit: charity, friendship, community, simplicity.

{© Bret Bertholf}

The character Hank the Tank was inspired, in part, by memories of Cesar.

Maybe my editor had been right and Max and I had been wrong. Maybe the once-a-bully, always-a-bully hypothesis that legitimated the vengeful finale of
Leon and the Spitting Image
had unfairly pigeonholed the character of the Tank and, by implication, Cesar.

My irritation and dismay lasted about a week. Follow-up web searches revealed that even though my former roommate and the extraordinary professor shared an uncommon name, they were different people. Portuguese Cesar was too old to have been my roommate.

I tweaked the search terms by adding the initial
A
. Doing so netted half a dozen new matches, including a musical director living in Belgium. That made a little more sense. Cesar’s boarding school production of
Jesus Christ Superstar
might well have presaged a career in the performing arts. But further digging revealed that Belgian Cesar, like Portuguese Cesar, was a false positive; he was too
young
to have been my roommate.

In quick succession, I vetted and rejected two more like-named Cesars. The first was the coauthor of “Human Saliva as a Cleaning Agent for Dirty Surfaces,” a technical report that quantified what my grandmother Wilhelmina proved every time she saw me—namely, that spit on a hankie works wonders for removing schmutz. The second near miss was a flute player living in Spain.

A few days later, I broadened the search by adding
Aiglon
to my list of key words. All that did was grow the grim inventory of alumni tragedy started by Mrs. Senn. The web alerted me to a Belvedere boy who had drowned in a yachting accident off the Florida coast and the avalanche death of the son of the ski instructor who had taught me how to wedel.

Some nonfatal updates proved equally disturbing. A sexual predator sneaked into the school, anesthetized three girls, and raped them; a chemistry teacher was relieved of his duties after posting a series of homoerotic fantasies online; an Aiglon headmaster spent two years in a Swiss prison cell after his wife accused him—wrongfully, it later emerged—of abusing the younger of their two sons.

Much to my regret, Cesar Augustus steered clear of such tawdry misfortune. As far as the Internet was concerned, he didn’t even exist. While that frustrated me, it also offered some comfort. It suggested that Cesar Augustus Viana was venturing through life without distinction.

Although the web failed to locate Cesar, it did provide an update on the beauty school where Cesar had previously received his mail. According to a site devoted to Filipino jurisprudence, the Realistic Institute was entangled in a protracted civil lawsuit stemming from a tragic accident. Records revealed that on October 24, 1955—in other
words, a few years before Cesar was born—a fire had broken out in a downtown Manila warehouse near the beauty school where my future roommate would later receive his mail. Panicked by the ensuing smoke and flames, some 180 cosmetologists-in-training charged toward the institute’s only exit. That stampede resulted in four deaths.

Relatives of one of the four victims sued the institute’s owner, a woman named Mercedes Teague. The case dragged on until 1973, when the Supreme Court of the Philippines ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Try as I might, I was unable to establish an explicit connection between Mercedes Teague and Cesar Augustus Viana (beyond the mailing address).

The case popped up while I was investigating Cesar’s family background and, more specifically, his father’s rumored ties to Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime president of the Philippines. The unverified connection made sense to me now, in a way that it hadn’t as a child. The temperament of the Filipino strongman meshed nicely with Cesar’s martial sensibilities. Still, I wanted proof.

When the web failed to corroborate the hearsay, I contacted an Australian friend who worked for the United Nations. The same day I sent him a note, he emailed an American colleague based in Manila.

“I have a cryptic request for you,” he told his associate:

               
A very old friend of mine periodically sends me very odd emails asking for obscure information. His latest request sets a new standard, and I am going to pass it on to you for a quick bit of local research. In a nutshell, Allen needs to confirm whether the father of some kid who beat him up in a Swiss boarding school (1971–72) was (or was not) head of security under Marcos?! (I have learnt not to ask too many questions BTW). I will let Allen give you more information on surnames etc. . . . and am copying him on this email.

Matt Sherwin, the young foreign service intern on the receiving end of the email, also responded promptly: “Ha, yes that
is
a pretty cryptic request, but I’m glad to help. Allen—do you have a name that I could try to track down?”

{United States Navy}

Another dead end: Fabian Ver was not Cesar’s father.

I sent the information he requested and, for good measure, attached a PDF of
Teague v. Fernandez, et al
. Matt promptly contacted various Filipino politicians, historians, and journalists. He also checked half a dozen Southeast Asian databases. Cesar’s surname didn’t come up.

“A number of people have asked if I meant
Virata,
who was Finance Minister under Marcos and PM from ’81–’86,” Matt wrote back.

No, I assured him. It’s not Virata.

“What about Gen. Fabian C. Ver, who was in charge of security of Marcos (Presidential Security Command)?”

No, it wasn’t Ver, either.

“I think this confirms that the Marcos claims were fictitious,” I informed Matt in an email thanking him for his help, adding in a postscript: “If business ever takes you near the building where the four girls perished, I’d love to get a JPEG, but don’t put yourself out.”

As I hoped, Matt ignored my feigned discouragement. A few days later, he sent me thirteen JPEGs and the following reconnaissance report:

               
Allen, I couldn’t find a Barbosa Street in Quiapo. The court opinion mentions the corner of Quezon Blvd. and Soler St. as the location of the Realistic Institute. Quezon Blvd. is a main thoroughfare, Soler St. a side street that runs perpendicular to
Quezon, but, at least as of today, does not intersect with it. Soler intersects Evangelista (parallel to Quezon) about 70 meters short of Quezon, where it turns into Florante. Florante is a tight alley of crammed living spaces on one side and an abandoned building on the other. It does not intersect with Quezon; the alley ends with more of these “homes,” on the other side of which is Quezon.

It pleased me to learn I wasn’t the only one who took research way too seriously. Surveying the photographs Matt attached to his email, I was struck by the squalor. It was hard to connect Cesar to the seedy locale. Geographically and economically, Quiapo was a world away from Aiglon. No hay fields, no milk cows, no aristocrats. And it wasn’t the Alps that loomed in the background. It was the faded facade of the Philippine College of Criminology.

{© Matt Sherwin}

The location, in Manila, of the defunct Realistic Institute.

A few months after the search hit an impasse for the umpteenth time, it was revived by Max while we were visiting my mother at her summerhouse on Cape Cod. He approached me as I wrestling with a rope of bittersweet, an invasive vine that has killed off much of the Cape’s native flora.

“Hey, Dad, check this out!”

I took a look. He was holding a battered White Owl cigar box he’d discovered in the bottom of a trunk. I put down my loppers and pulled off my gloves. As soon as I opened the lid, I was transported back in time.

The cigar box was full of Swiss memorabilia: ski patches and postage stamps, a wooden match safe encased in a tiny ski boot, a dried-up sea horse. (How
that
found its way into the box, I can’t say.) A small pink object the size of a Scrabble tile caught Max’s attention. “What
is
that?”

“A Sugus. Your grandfather introduced me to them. They’re like Starburst, only better.”

“No way!”

“Yes way.”
*

Max held up a small Swiss coin. “How much is this worth?”

“Ten centimes? It would have paid for a game of foosball.”

“What’s this?” Max produced a rusty red disk of metal.

“My rank badge.”

I was holding the patch I had torn from my Aiglon blazer on July 4, 1972, running my fingers over the motto (“God Is My Strength”), when Max produced the tape cassette.