The Long View
Testimonial of a matriarch
By Manuel L. Quezon III
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:25:00 03/27/2008
WHEN NEWS came of the passing of Chito Madrigal Collantes--and who could have failed to notice she was gone?--the first thing that entered my mind was a story told by Harold MacMillan.
MacMillan, of the publishing family and a former prime minister of the United Kingdom, recounted a story he'd heard about one of his predecessors, Benjamin Disraeli. To give him the status of a gentleman, the aristocratic Bentinck family bought a country estate for him to use; but they didn't give it to him until 18 years had passed and Disraeli had already been ennobled.
Near the end of Disraeli's life, one of the Bentinck heirs, just 23 and who'd just succeeded to the title of Duke of Portland, received an invitation from the (by then) ex-prime minister.
MacMillan narrated: "To his horror he discovered he was the only guest.... When he came down to dinner, there were just three of them, Disraeli, the private secretary, and himself. Disraeli said good evening to him, and not a single word was spoken by anyone throughout that long Victorian dinner, not one single word. Disraeli sat there impassive, glittering with all his orders, wearing the lot--the Star of India and all the rest. His face was white, and tight like a drum; he was an old, old man.
"Then at the end of the dinner he spoke, and he said: 'My lord duke, I have asked you here tonight because I belong to a race that never forgives an insult and never forgets a benefit. Everything I have I owe to the house of Bentinck. I thank you."
Madrigal lived a long enough life, a grand life, but managed to do so without turning it into a parody of her past. That is to say, she lived long enough to witness the passing of her own era without becoming a living museum piece, the chief mourner at the funeral of a vanished way of life.
Which is not to say she didn't pay eloquent tribute to her generation.
In the prologue of her autobiographical coffee-table book, "Picture Me," she wrote: "I have become acutely aware that many of those I grew up with and with whom I spent many years, are going, will soon be gone, like in some inexorable death auction. Soon there will be nobody left to bear witness to the truly interesting times we lived through. I do not agree with that well-known Chinese curse about interesting times being a burden. They are a gift from God. But I am not here to dwell on the past, to regret what is no more, or even to point out how much better our lives were. I am here to fulfill a task I have imposed on myself, which is, to tell it as I saw it."
Reviewing her book, I saw on its pages something quite remarkable--it was not only a testimonial to an individual life now gone, but in a sense, a continuing dialogue with the present. Having been a columnist herself, Madrigal knew the virtue of the written word: it offers up a permanent way to have the last word--a matriarch can continue laying down the law from beyond the grave.
She made this observation, circa 1997, when her book came out: "As for high society, which took much of my time in the past, I must say that its days are over. Finished. Society, as we knew it in the 1950s till the 1980s is dead. It has been killed by new contending forces and has sunk without a trace. The rise of new classes, a drastic change in public ideology and the social contract, the expanding economy have done it in. It's almost as if there had been a revolution. The detritus is the new cafe and club society we see parlayed and hyped up in the lifestyle sections of the press today."
Ten years later, Reuters quoted "eventologist" Tim Yap's "Detritus Manifesto:" "There is this mind-set, which I think is so passé, that says: 'The country is in shambles and the country is having a hard time and you are out there partying.' But this generation is guiltless when it comes to that."
He might as well have directly engaged the Madrigal matriarch in a dialogue.
For Madrigal observed, "I miss the good manners of the good old times, the sense of well-being and sure-footed security that growing up in a nice home, in a proper family atmosphere provided. I regret the ostentation and pushiness that today go with being 'in society,' the quasi-vulgarity of taste, the maneuvering to get your photo in the papers, the bribery and cultivation of society reporters and columnists."
Yap (also, incidentally, a columnist) also told Reuters, "Right now, the young generation is a generation that works really hard and wants to reward itself."
No stranger to the joys of the rewards of effort herself, Madrigal offered up a blunt observation: a reward is best savored as a private pleasure, not a communal trophy, and not as an advertisement.
"One good thing about martial law was the abolition of society pages.... Call me old-fashioned, but I continue to be shocked by people who aggressively seek the limelight and even corrupt media to achieve their self-aggrandizement. In my time good form demanded that we avoid too much exposure," she wrote.
Perhaps the only person who cheered the publication of this passage was Carmen Guerrero Nakpil for whom the idea of being passé is just another vulgarity at par with newfangled terms like "eventologist."
Indeed, it was in the closing pages of her book, in her valedictory, so to speak, to younger generations, that Madrigal imparted a clear-headed advice: "Especially in the context of prevalent conditions, widespread poverty, crime and social injustice, it behooves us all not to give scandal by conspicuous consumption. I am upset by the contemporary lack of restraint, the excessive display in clothes, entertainment .... And then they complain about being burglarized, mugged and kidnapped!"
Perhaps she would have said, what is truly passé is to refuse to recognize that things become passé for good reason.
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