Remembering two great lives

I just finished reading the life story of a couple long gone, and came off feeling that no storytelling could have been done more interestingly, as it is presented with a most tender touch, than what two daughters have caused to be recorded in a half-sized coffee table book aptly titled Remembering Two Brave Lives.

The two remembered brave lives are Angustias Jereos, who was born to a landed couple of La Paz, Iloilo City, and Vicente Bello of Santa, Ilocos Sur of the elite Brilliantes-Bello clan that has contributed many distinguished officials, justices, diplomats, and educators to public service.

The two lives exemplified bravery amidst adversity, lifting the spirits of their two daughters, Vicki Jardiolin Bello, and Ging Pajaro.

Their mother Angustias, nicknamed Puding, was taken care of by an elder brother, after their very own father had frittered away the family’s resources. Her Manong Ias sent her to the elite Centro Escolar de Escolarinas in Manila. Back in Iloilo, she was a successful, highly independent and feisty businesswoman, running a dorm for girls from affluent families. The Iloilo Ladies Hall accommodated 500 girls housed in five buildings at a time. She was a feisty matron, keeping a 22 caliber pearl-hand revolver in her pocket that she would fire when necessary. To penalize a “flasher” that invaded the privacy of one of her dorms, she did not fire at him, but had him strip all his garments and stand on top of a table while the innocent internas stared at his thing in wonderment.

Living next door to the boarding house was a handsome young man, Vicente Bello, a reserve officer, a captain in the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE), and commandant of the Pre-Military Training (IPMT) Corps at the Iloilo Provincial High School. He attended the University of the Philippines and later, earned a law degree and passed the bar exam. Both 28 years old when he and Puding got married in 1936, Vicente gifted his bride with an upright German Kolski piano that survived the enemy’s bombs.

Papang, Vicki writes, adored his wife. “He loved the way she crooked her head. He endured her dramatic outbursts and farted in her face to provoke her.”

The two writers’ unabashed recounting of ancestors’ adventures and misdemeanors include that of their mother’s elder (60-year old) widowed brother who shot to death his very young wife who “with her teenage hormones raging (she) sought vigor and vitality elsewhere”; of her mother’s younger brother who drank his poultry farm day-old chick’s blood as his “Elixir of Everlasting Youth” that explained his smooth, young and radiant skin; of her mother rushing to the aid of her elder brother Menting who was in a Roxas City hospital for a serious medical emergency which turned out to be an embarrassing case of coitus permanentus, his female partner’s vagina having contracted and would not release his belonging. (And I thought such a thing was an exclusive canine habit). Obviously Puding’s brothers had been naughty – an understatement that.

The Bellos lived in a time of plenty. Vicente and Puding owned three Roadsters, and Puding had a stash of jewelry pieces of which however through the years, were pawned one by one to tide the family over. A 2.5 carat diamond was left behind, and now, reset, rests on Vicki’s finger.

Vicki is palpably felt in the story telling, with her simple, Ilonggo-gentle speaking style. Putting out the book was the idea of her painter-daughter Mok; the intro is written lovingly by her son Mahar. Crude pencil sketches add to the book’s primitive attraction. There are sections devoted to vampires and witches – upon whose stories the daughters grew.

The Bello couple’s experience during the war will make a blockbuster film. Vicente, leading an encounter with the Japanese in nearby Calinog, surrendered, along with his men, to save their lives. He was imprisoned in the old Iloilo provincial jail which served as a Japanese garrison and a jail for Filipino prisoners of war. Six months later, Puding was arrested and imprisoned and placed in the cell next to that of her husband.

Puding had been arrested on account of a Filipino spy’s revelation to the Japanese soldiers that she was supplying food to Filipino guerrillas and resistance fighters. The Japanese occupiers had also since discovered the Bellos’ stockpile of gasoline in the basement of one of the dormitory buildings.

“It was a mixed blessing that we had neighboring cells,” Puding recalled. She could hear his cries when someone flung her husband across his cell. And he could hear screams when they hung her by one arm and the other and beat her. Their cries meant they were alive.

During their incarceration, living to each other near but far, would say to each other phrases that the enemy did not understand, such as “Te amo,” “Te quiero”, “Te victoria” to remind each other that a baby was waiting for them to come home. (During this time their baby daughter, Vicki, was taken cared of by a childless couple.)

Puding was not the only brave Jereos heroine. During the war, her older sister, Leonor, one of the first pharmacists in the Philippines, formed her own guerilla group out of the farm hands from the haciendas of Negros Occidental. She led her men on lightning attacks on Japanese encampments in Negros Occidental. After the war, USAFFE recognized her contribution to the resistance in Negros, and her bonafide veteran status.

Upon the Liberation of Iloilo, Vicente was released from the Japanese prison. He joined Puding, who had been released earlier, and Vicki at St. Paul’s Hospital. When they returned to Iloilo, they found all the dormitories gone, except one which they converted into a kitchen. Felipe rebuilt the house, started a vegetable garden and raised a poultry. Puding began buying and selling clothing materials in the open space of the public market, to the tune of observers’ nasty replies of the once-rich working just like them.

But in 1952, in spite of their flourishing business, the couple decided to enter an alien field, establishing a school they named Colleges of the West Visayas (CWV). It was a capital-intensive venture, that ended in the school’s closure two years later. The Bellos were wiped out.

The parents’ resilience was sorely tested. Vicente went back to teaching in the Iloilo provincial high school, and Puding taught Spanish at the Philippine Women’s College where she was a star, teaching and leading convocations and dramatic presentations.

Their parents did not talk about being poor or appearing shabby, writes Vicki. “Ging and I saw their daily struggle to make both ends meet and to make the monthly payments (to a rehabilitation financing corporation). Again, they had been dealt a grievous blow. Because they were brave, proud, and hardworking, they lifted our spirits and we became brave, proud, and hardworking, too.”

In 1957, the Bello couple moved to Manila, where Vicente was taken in as a COMELEC lawyer, but who two years after, simply taught history at the Tondo High School. Puding was hired by the Department of European Languages where she made an impact on her students. The two girls were enrolled at the University of the Philippines in Diliman.

Their two girls had been their parents’ pride and joy. But they broke their hearts when they eloped, one after the other while finishing their studies at the UP in Diliman – Vicki to Sebastian Jardiolin, and Ging, to Rody Pajaro, son of the famous composer, Dr. Eliseo Pajaro. ‘When I eloped, my mother’s hair turned white overnight,” writes Vicki.

But the two girls pursued their father’s desire that they pursue their dreams with excellence. Both finished bachelor and masteral degrees with highest honors, and established successful businesses.

To honor their father’s vocation “as a teacher, his egalitarian spirit and courage against adversity,” Vicki and Ging founded the Vicente Brillantes Bello Scholarship Program (VBBSP) ten years ago. It now supports 300 science scholars in the UP, and in Jesuit educational institutions.

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