This story didn’t make us proud to be Filipino.
In a gripping 7,400-word story essay published in the latest issue of The New Yorker, novelist Allen Kurzweil writes about studying in a very exclusive Swiss boarding school in 1971 that counted “a Bahraini royal, the heir to a washing-machine fortune, and an Italian aristocrat whose family tree included a saint, a Pope, and several princes” among its students.
It was at Aiglon College where Kurzweil was bullied by one of his roommates, a 12-year-old “student with an easy smile, a husky build, and an unruly mop of black hair” rumored to be the son of Ferdinand Marcos’ head of security. (Later the author would trace his classmate’s mailing address to Realistic Institute in Manila which turned out to be a vocational school for hair and beauty culture, therefore debunking the myth of a Marcos connection.)
The tormentor’s name was Cesar Augusto Viana, born on April 24, 1958, in Manila, who now lives in San Francisco.
“His name, his size, his command of the school’s pseudo-military regulations, the accuracy he demonstrated when strafing enemies with ink from his Montblanc fountain pen, enabled him to transform our dorm into a theatre of baroque humiliation,” writes Kurzweil.
In one incident, Viana supposedly force-fed the author, who was then 10 years old, “pepper pills”.
“Up in our room one evening, several weeks into the term, I watched Cesar roll bits of brown bread, filched from the dining room, into pea-size balls. As I remember it, he then lined up the pellets on a windowsill and saturated each with hot sauce. After lights-out, he approached my bunk, cupping the pepper pills in his palm,” he writes.
In another, Viana is inspired by Jesus Christ Superstar — particularly the song “Thirty-Nine Lashes”.
“During ‘close time,’ an afternoon recess reserved for indoor recreation, he staged a pared-down version of the song. Cesar cast himself as the whip master, gave his sidekick the role of centurion, and decreed that I play Jesus Christ.
“Once my wrists were secured to the metal posts of my bunk, he ordered another roommate, a stockbroker’s son with a Philips cassette player the size of a shoebox, to cue up the music.
“In the Broadway musical, Jesus is flogged with clockwork precision. But Cesar sometimes lifted his makeshift flail (a belt, if memory serves) only to stop midway through the downstroke.
“Each time I flinched, Cesar’s face contorted into a grimace of ecstasy. The whip barely made contact, but the point was to humiliate and degrade me,” recalls the writer.
Many years later, as he was writing his memoir, Kurzweil decides to confront his tormentor and discovers that Viana ended up in jail twice — first for smuggling cocaine into Norway and then second for being part of a high-end financial scam — and is now regional sales manager at Forever Living Products.
They meet up, the author confronts Viana, but the bully doesn’t remember any of the incidents that scarred his schoolmate — and even found them funny. “When I brought up the whipping…he tittered and slapped the table.”
“Well, it doesn’t sound like you’re writing about me,” Viana tells the writer dismissively. “This is really only your interpretation based on your recollection of events.”
What a jerk.
