Theres The Rub
Barefaced
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:10:00 07/15/2008
I was riveted to our story last Saturday about the Filipino “Barefaced Contessa” who gained notoriety in London for swindling millions of pounds from its citizens. The title by the way comes from a play on words on the 1950s movie, “The Barefoot Contessa.” For those who like to limit their movies to the last two or three decades, that movie, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ava Gardner, told the rags-to-riches story of an obscure cabaret dancer in Madrid who crashed Hollywood. That one was a tragedy; this one, to go by the cheeky title, “Barefaced Contessa,” is a farce.
And one that despite its cinematic potential can’t possibly do us proud, other than in a perverse way. The “Barefaced Contessa” is Elda Beguinua, 63, who passed herself off as a rich heiress in the process of recovering a fortune vaster than Ali Baba’s. By persuading people, not least of them British nationals, to help her in that process, she managed to fleece them of a fortune that might have been an infinitesimal fraction of what she claimed was hers but remains eye-popping anyway. She raked in £2.3 million (P207 million).
What gave the story cinematic potential, quite apart from the “feat” of someone from the boondocks conquering Britain in this bizarre way, was the fact that her victims were largely “complimentary about her in court. They described her as having ‘a terrific memory and a good knowledge on most subjects’ as well as ‘easy to be with, made you feel she was something special, a great lady, strong personality, passionate.’”
Till the end, Beguinua was impenitent, insisting in court that she would have her detractors eat crow when her treasure was finally dug up from various banks and hiding places, whichever was the more secret or harder to extract buried things from. The judge probably thought he was giving her the worst conceivable punishment on earth for her crimes, but his sentence merely reminded me of the story of the turtle and monkey, particularly the part where monkey threw the turtle into the sea to drown it. The judge said Beguinua faced deportation back to the Philippines.
Who knows? She could very well be the next governor of the Philippine central bank.
I won’t go into the impact something like this can have on our image abroad. Though that’s not altogether inconsequential, coming as it does on the heels of the news about Ambassador Lauro Baja being accused by a former maid of exploitation and abuse. Let me hasten to add on that score that most people I’ve talked do not believe the accusation, swearing Baja is a decent fellow who is very probably the victim rather than the culprit here. But for all that, it can’t help us that our embassies have now been held up for ridicule, or at least suspicion.
But like I said, I won’t get into that. My point here is simply this: Why would anyone with Baguinua’s obvious talents want to devote them to swindling rather than helping others, to something crooked rather than honest, to a life of crime rather than a life of creativity? For clearly mounting a con job of this scale suggests uncommon acting abilities and powers of persuasion. Englishmen may be known to be mad as dogs, but they are not known to be fools so easily parted from their money.
One, of course, can always say that some people are just born, or raised, that way, their natural predilection being to a life of crookedness. But here’s the part that raises this story from one of trifling interest to one of national interest: Beguinua’s case is doubtless extreme, but it is by no means unusual. Not for us anyway. For the startling thing is that we as a people like to do that routinely, if not with equally spectacular results. For some strange reason, we like to use our talents to swindle rather than help others, to wreck rather than to build, to do wrong rather than to do right. And for an even stranger reason, we call that “abilidad,” or ability.
We Filipinos are inventive, ingenious and creative. Artistry beats in our hearts. You see that in the ease with which we excel in music and the arts, storming the world with prodigious expressions of it. Any people that can turn the barong Tagalog from a source of shame to a source of pride—from clothes the early Americans forced Filipinos to wear so they could not conceal weapons underneath to the national attire—have got to be wondrously creative. And lest we forget, we invented EDSA People Power.
Yet, we Filipinos are also sly, manipulative and destructive, employing our very inventiveness, ingenuity and creativity for that purpose. We are a country full of lawyers, and yet we are one of the most lawless countries in the world, our lawyers using the law to defeat the law. Can you find any more destructive use of the law than the creative ways with which Jose de Venecia’s cohorts (he led them then) invoked the majesty of the law to trash the impeachment bids against a usurper?
We invented EDSA People Power, yet the same EDSA People Power became the very instrument for bringing back a dictatorship to us. We claim to be the most democratic country in Asia, yet we are the least of it to have distributed the national wealth or to allow the citizens to take part in their governance. Erring drivers give traffic cops the most inventive explanations for violating traffic rules; erring cops give the public the most ingenious excuses for not making traffic flow; Bayani Fernando gives the most creative reasons for putting up campaign posters on the EDSA highway; the Supreme Court offers the cleverest ruses for not allowing Romulo Neri to implicate his boss. Everywhere in the country we have fixers of all shapes and sizes to help us cut corners, get ahead of the line, “bahala na” those who are left behind.
We all wear the face of the “Barefaced Contessa”—some more than others.
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