The most honest man in the world

He died last Sunday. He had been admitted to Lourdes Hospital in Kalentong a couple of weeks ago for pneumonia, but his condition grew worse and his kidneys were affected. He underwent dialysis three times and seemed to improve. But as things like this often go, the improvement was deceptive. When it seemed like he was ready to be released from the hospital, he died.

He was 86. Not a bad deal all in all. But it was all the family he left behind could do to deal with the expenses. He had been ailing for some time and had been going back and forth to hospitals over the years. Ravaged by glaucoma, he was nearly blind over the last 10 years of his life, a thing that little dimmed his sense of humor and positive outlook in life. To meet his hospitalization, the family had to sell their small place in Naga City. And despite the help of friends and strangers, last I spoke to his eldest son they were still short by P50,000 to pay Lourdes and could not get his death certificate.

A strange pass for someone who held a pretty powerful position, one that could have made him fabulously rich. If only he wasn’t so fabulously honest.

His name was Leon Pilar. For as long as I’ve known him, I’ve always referred to him as Mr. Pilar. Not unlike Sidney Poitier telling Rod Steiger in “In The Heat of the Night,” “They call me Mr. Tibbs.” The “Mr. Pilar” as a sign of respect however would come only later. At first that was just the way my father introduced him to us.

He was my father’s protégé of sorts at the auditor’s office in Naga City, his junior by more than 10 years, I think. He was a regular at our place, a corner of a rundown house that rented for P15 a month, visiting on Sundays for coffee and chess and talk. Those were their passions in life. Quite apart from a violent detestation of the corrupt in public service. They could not imagine how people could be so, life held out no end of small but real pleasures. My father said Mr. Pilar was bright and talented and would go very far in his profession.

I had little doubt he was bright because of one thing. He owned a fairly good library, which was nothing short of grand to me, given the paucity of books where I lived, and given that I hadn’t seen those titles in our school library or the public one. I raided his library, which consisted largely of thrillers, or potboilers, with some literary stuff thrown in. That was where I first read Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming.

Mr. Pilar did get very far in his profession. He rose through the ranks and was designated by Francisco Tantuico as director of Commission on Audit in the National Capital Region in the late 1970s. He was probably the only COA director of the NCR not to have owned a car—and would remain so. What he did own was a jeep, the kind colloquially called “owner.” (I had occasion to drive that jeep much, much later from Naga to Pili, and one of its front wheels wiggled frighteningly.)

During his first month as director of COA NCR, he took a jeepney from Cubao, where he lived, to his office in Fairview and fell in line with the visitors. Unfortunately for him, the guard turned out to be new and did not know him. The guard asked to know whom he wanted to see, and when he identified himself, the guard refused to believe him. This was the pit of martial law when public officials wore power loudly. How could someone who wore a polo shirt and pants that flailed in the wind and had just alighted from a jeepney possibly be an official, let alone the head of that very place?

The guard stood his ground and would not let him in. The impasse was resolved only when another COA official attired in barong Tagalog who was driving through the gate saw the scene, got off, and rushed to clear things. He started berating the guard, but Mr. Pilar, who was sufficiently mollified by the intervention and had begun chuckling at the silliness of it, said it was OK, the guard was just doing his job.

He went to office early and used the bundy clock to set an example to his subordinates. At a time when the auditors of the smallest government offices were making hay while the sun, and Marcos, shone, approving the most scandalous expenditures, he did his job the only way he knew how, preferring peace of mind to a piece of the action. He remained an auditor during Cory’s time, retiring at age 65 in 1990.

He went back afterwards to his favorite spot on earth, which was Naga City, and became dean of the Naga Colleges for some time. He stayed in Naga until his children brought him to Manila in the late 1990s so he could be cared for in his twilight years.

But it is his last years in Naga I recollect, which I got to know on the occasions I went there. Every morning, he would be found in a greasy spoon called New China Restaurant, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and talking with friends—iristoryahan, as Bicolanos call it. There was only one place he could be found at that hour, he chuckled, “at the NCR.”

A quiet reward for a life well lived. Truly some of the realest pleasures in life are small.

But it’s still a crime that his family has to scrounge around for money just to get his death certificate. It sends the wrongest messages about the things, and people, that ought to get rewarded or punished in this country.

Mr. Pilar will be buried this afternoon at the Peñafrancia Cemetery. To his fellow Nagueños, if you can pull yourself away from the fiesta for a bit, you might want to join the funeral and condole with his family. If not, just send a prayer his way to commend him to the Big Auditor in the Sky, however unlikely it is that his life will be audited and found wanting. I personally wouldn’t mind seeing his epitaph read: “Here lies Mr. Leon Pilar:

“The most honest man in the world.”