Donna’s rare collection

Something pleasantly surprising happened Monday night on my way to Ayala Alabang to deliver a package for my good friend Raoul Tidalgo to his balikbayan friend who’s going back to New York this weekend.

I got lost in that "city within a city" and, believe it or not, I ended up an uninvited guest at the house of Golden Lions couple Donna Villa and Carlo J. Caparas!

I was turning this way and that until I chanced upon a beautiful house at the corner, all lighted up as if in an over-extended Christmas holiday. I asked directions from a capped man alighting from his Expedition and guess who he was – direk Carlo Caparas! I forgot all about Raoul’s package (I guess I’ll just have to send it via Fedex) and got engrossed in a chika-chika with the "golden couple," together with their fast-growing children CJ, 14, and Peach, 12, both bright students at the nearby Montessori school and dreaming to be lawyers someday.

I looked around and gasped at the awesome chandeliers hanging all over the place, so mesmerizingly beautiful that, I thought, they’d perfectly blend with the equally mesmerizingly beautiful houses of such celebrities as Sen./Vice Presidentiable Loren Legarda, Gretchen Barretto and Tonyboy Cojuangco, Ricky Reyes, Regal Matriarch Mother Lily, and Rep. Jules Ledesma and wife Assunta de Rossi.

"My collection," said Donna who, I’m sure, will be forced to sell some of those precious possessions to insistent/persistent friends.

And then she and Carlo started "educating" ignorant me on those hanging treasures all coming from Europe. I learned that they were part of 50 one-of-a-kind conversational pieces with a glossy look, "very rare antique multi-layered European chandeliers (including a rare Murano collection from Italy, etc.) with hand-made stones the likes of green emeralds, amber, blue sapphire, red rubies, champagne pink, aurora borealis (100-year old antique stones) artistically put together and housed in 24-carat antique casings with two to three multi-layered lights, all restored by a European art connoisseur."

Oops! Do I sound breathless? I should. I can’t help it, faced with such blinding jewels fit for a king and a queen. (By the way, the preceding long paragraph is a direct quote from a brochure I saw on Donna’s table.)

The prices are just as, ehem, breath-taking, ranging from P650,000 to P5 million-plus.

Carlo was right. "If you can wear a P10-million ring on your finger, why can’t you brighten up your house with a beautiful chandelier?"

Yeah, why can’t you? If you can afford it!

Now "on leave" from movie-making (after doing the Chavit Singson bioflick), Donna and Carlo are spending quality time with their children. Last December, they went scuba-diving in her native Cebu. At home, Carlo has been sketching using pencil. He showed me a sample of his work and I told him to hold a one-man show.

I asked Donna if she wasn’t selling her chandeliers and she smiled. Knowing her, I’m sure she would. You see, Donna has a keen "business sense." At 14, she sold daing, starting with four fishing boats and ending up with more than 25. At 18, she was a self-made businesswoman, already a millionaire while girls her age were trying to decide what course to take up in college. When she entered showbiz, she got distracted from being an actress and concentrated on the business side as a producer, ending up, along with Carlo, among the few successful ones in the industry.

If she does decide to go into selling chandeliers, Donna may turn into a "chandelier magnate." Mark my word.

The topic shifted to politics, a field not alien to Donna whose great great grandfather, Joseph Patalinjug, was one-time Mayor of Mactan, followed by her uncle, Max Patalinjug, who served as mayor of the same city for 28 years (and whose son, Chito, was an assemblyman from 1978 to 1986). Donna’s real name is Marian Patalinjug.

Which presidentiable are they supporting? The golden couple was mum, but I know that they belong to opposite sides of the political fence (I just don’t know which side Donna is on and which side Carlo is on).

I left Donna and Carlo’s place blinking from the radiance of her chandelier collection. I went to bed dreaming of emeralds and sapphires and red rubbies and aurora borealis, and I woke up gazing at the ceiling flourescent lamp which I had forgotten to turn off the night before.

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