Nida in memoriam / Garchitorena must resign

Like no other event in the recent past, the berserk and brutal murder of Nida Blanca overwhelmed everything else and set the nation on a binge of anger and outrage, nostalgia for a great and golden past in Philippine cinema, and a sudden sweep into the foothills of national memory. No, I never met Nida Blanca, nor even came across her at a social gathering. I wish I could have interviewed her in all the more than 50 years that I was a journalist, but the cinema and the entertainment world eluded my labors. I remember having conversed at length with Rogelio de la Rosa, Leopoldo Salcedo, the Padilla brothers Carlos and Pempe, and once tippled a small goblet of sweet wine with the lovely Carmen Rosales at a cocktail reception.

That was the first movie generation that preceded that of Nida Blanca, a generation that also included Rudy Concepcion and Arsenia Francisco, the absolutely hilarious comedians Togo and Pogo, then Gregorio Ticman, Patsy and Lopito, Billy (Surot) Vizcarra, Ely Ramos, Jaime de la Rosa, Paraluman, with Dolphy, perhaps the best comedian born in these our woods, coming at the tail-end. I know I have missed a lot of names, many of them movie celebrities of the first water. But the fact that a bulk of my memory of these distant days remains partly vivid proves that as a youngster, I patronized Filipino films as much as I did Hollywood fare.

Philippine society then, as I remember, was not as split and divided as it is now into very rich and very poor.

Hollywood had not invaded our lives then as it has now, and at our ancestral home in Lourdes St., Pasay, we had as many local movie magazines as we had Hollywood stuff, particularly Vanity Fair. And that is why the death of Nida Blanca jerks our mind and consciousness to the "good old days" when Filipino movies were clean, wholesome and vastly entertaining. Why? Because Philippine society then, though already rumbling with the first distant but still muffled thunder of social strife in the Central Luzon countryside, was an idyll to be lived in the cities, particularly Pasay where many of us grew up, later expanded into Metro Manila. We had peace, we had law and we had order. The policeman was always a welcome sight in the neighborhood.

Nida Blanca’s generation still slices into many existing memories, largely among the middle-aged and elders. And Nida lived on, the lovable gamin, tomboy and persnickety troublemaker morphing into a serious actress alongside Dolphy in their long-running TV sitcom John en Marsha which showed her versatility alongside the comic genius of Dolphy. That was the Porontong family, poor almost destitute but honest. And great comedy out of it, lilting, hilarious, rib-tickling, comedy that we hardly see anymore.

Nida Blanca and Dolphy were perfect for this TV genre as were Nida and Nestor de Villa for their movies where they danced and sang and roistered and joked and flipped from one side of the movie world to the other like fish-laden brook-water taking human form and dancing on the banks. Nida reminds me, gamin, child-woman and celluloid genius that she is, of Leslie Caron who was child and woman too, elfin and statuesque, who sang and danced. And when she danced, she fairly took your breath away because her body was lithe and supple, ballet, tango, flamenco and all that, gliding on gorgeous music. Her dancing sequences with Gene Kelly in the movie Gigi where yonder beyond the lights flowed the Seine were of that magical stuff that held you spellbound.

So we had our Nida. And we loved our Nida. And now we grieve for the loss of Nida.

Her movie contemporaries were no less gifted, talented and protean in their performance as those of the first generation led by Rogelio de la Rosa and Carmen Rosales that eventually vanished into the mists. As Nida Blanca glided into view and it was not long that she took everybody by storm, we had Delia Razon, Amalia Fuentes, Susan Roces, Gloria Romero, and – of course – Nestor de Villa, Luis Gonzales, Fernando Poe Jr., and already on scene were Joseph Estrada, Ramon Revilla, Eddie Garcia, Eddie Gutierrez and many more names than I can remember.

The reason this writer grieves more, I suppose, is that Nida represents a bygone age within the larger canvas of our history as a nation.

* * *

Sex and pornography had not yet reared its ugly head, and you had to make it on your own, on your talents. Bomba was still an invisible speck on the devil’s anvil, and no breasts were bared, no slope of thighs leading to you know where unveiled, no French, open-mouth kissing, no lust in the hay, no exploitation of the beast in the loins, no curves, mounds and promontories itching, and gasping and moaning to be violated on screen. And our producers today, just as obscenely, call that art.

Nida touched many lives including those as disparate as Ninoy Aquino and Luis Taruc, touched them as an enchanted fairy would touch them. Ninoy, emissary of President Ramon Magsaysay to negotiate for the surrender of Taruc and choirboy veteran of the Korean War as a teen-age journalist, was made to see and look at Nida Blanca and said, "She is just perfect for the role," meaning the lead female role in the projected film Korea. The two went out, they had a good time, they liked each other very oh so much, but that was all.

In the case of Taruc, the story is that Nida smuggled herself to the hills to understand the plight of the Huk rebels. There she reportedly met Ka Luis who she entranced. Taruc – now 87, I think – was one of the earliest to grieve and rush to Nida’s coffin and spill out the admiration of an old and barnacled revolutionary – once called The Shadow who Walks – for the once lush Nida who levitated in the forest thicknesses of Mount Banahaw to meet him. I wonder what they talked about. Taruc was not Osama bin Laden but as Huk supremo, he eluded the entire Armed Forces of the Philippines, a great warrior for causes that are even more valid today. Taruc’s face was chiseled out of a giant oak and until today, the ridges on his face emit the silent whistle of the forest, and a rifle’s barrel at rest.

Nida was around full throttle during the time of Quirino, Magsaysay, and the young Ninoy when I was journalist hardly out of my cub reporter period. It’s a pity our paths never crossed for I would have written a profile on her. This would be among the many profiles I have drawn up on great and unforgettable people and personalities who stalked the ever revolving stage of Shakespeare, made their mark and flew like fireflies in to the night.

* * *

Francis Garchitorena figuratively swears on a stack of Bibles he will not resign as presiding judge of the Sandiganbayan.

Let’s quote him as reported by the Philippine STAR; "I am not going to resign. If I were to resign for all the things that people say against me, I could have resigned many times over. It is not the first time the world is against me." The waters rise and ebb, Mr. Presiding Justice, and they have never ebbed so low for you as they have today. Your perception is right, the world doesn’t like you. In fact, it doesn’t like you at all.

It would not really matter if you were just a judge in the sticks, your audience largely the yokelry, and whatever you said and did simply the breaking of a twig in the countryside. But you are presiding justice of the Sandiganbayan that holds you to judicial sobriety of the highest order. It also holds you to, if not elegance of language, a mastery of prose that does not crackle into the malicious and obnoxious. But that is precisely your fault. You cannot hold your pungent tongue. I should know because we have tangled a number of times in the past, verbal jousts where you carried language into the gladiatorial pit. That I could take, for I have jousted almost all my life with such men as you are.

But today, the whirlwind of events has borne you and the Sandiganbayan into the eye of a historic storm. The trial of fallen President Joseph Estrada by the Sandiganbayan is "the trial of the century." This is not hyperbole for Erap is the first president arrested, imprisoned and arraigned on plunder, perjury and other charges, which if proved and he is convicted could lead to the death chamber. So it does not surprise anyone why everything that moves about the trial today is a gigantic bomb blast in Afghanistan. You want to take over the trial, don’t you?

You have lost the propaganda war, sir. And that is your folly.

Justice Anacleto Badoy is reaping all the praises and the hosannahs and 90 percent believe him when he says you personally – in person – exerted pressure on him to resign from the Sandiganbayan. You denied this. But the denial found its way to Dante’s Inferno when, in a letter to Supreme Court Chief Justice Hilario Davide, you called Justice Badoy names, dragged his reputation to the mire, and in effect called him a wastrel, a liar, a stumblebum, a rogue not fit to wear the robe of a Sandiganbayan justice. Okay, I agree with your estranged wife Vicky you were not bought by Erap Estrada.

What led you astray was your vanity, your hubris. And something else.