Epitaph

They said it would be make or break for Renato Corona, he would stake everything in his appearance before the impeachment court. He did, and it was.

The verdict?

Break.

In the end, he did justice only to the unexpected. His lawyers would later say they did not know what he was going to do, they hadn’t helped prepare what he was going to say. I believed them. There are limits to acting, or to the verisimilitude of pretense, as their client himself had shown earlier. They weren’t acting and they weren’t pretending. They themselves had been taken aback. They had expected everything—except this.

For 40 days and 40 nights, led by the mighty legal warrior himself, Serafin Cuevas, the defense had stuck to a legalistic framework, taking all the sting from the trial and turning it into a summer course in Law 101. With  Cuevas’ hypnotic “Yeur heneur” ringing in the halls of the Senate, and Miriam Santiago’s repeated outbursts which had some members of the prosecution cowering and at least one of them covering his ears for dear life as though fending off the maddening wails of the sirens, they had sanitized the trial. They had turned it from the office-stopping thing it was during Erap’s time to a reality show that had no prospect of a second season.

And now this.

To say that Corona completely departed from it is to say that Pat Boone completely departed from what he was when he stopped singing “Love Letters in the Sand” and started singing “Smoke on the Water.” It was by far the most exciting thing to have happened in the impeachment trial, which probably sent ratings soaring for the first time since it began. Corona stopped doing law and started doing—drama. Corona stopped addressing the senator-judges and started addressing—the public. The results were spectacular.

He gave the world a classic example in how to do everything wrong.

Whoever thought of the tack was probably the same one who thought of making Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo apologize for “Hello Garci.” I understand that at the time Arroyo complained about being made to take 10, or however long it took, because she couldn’t get the expression right. Her eyes did not register contrition. Why should they, she demanded, she wasn’t sorry. The results were disastrous. Susan Roces, who did know how to act, would later say, “I looked into your eyes and saw no sorry there.”

It was the same thing with Corona. His whole spiel, a long one which tried the patience of the near-nonagenarian Juan Ponce Enrile, rested on claiming the most startling things and backing it up not with the most strenuous proofs but with thespian fortitude. Specifically, with breaking down at appropriate junctures and crying, as though the depths of his oppression were such that it brought tears to the eyes of even such a hardy soul as he. And while at that, what bully? Bullies don’t cry. “Trust me,” its subtext read. People who have been driven to despair can be so.

There was only one problem: Like Arroyo, he couldn’t act,  if his life depended on it. And it did.

Toward the end of his spiel, he would appear to have discovered true drama and say he would open his bank accounts to the public. Only to take it back by promptly adding, only on condition that the 188 complainant-representatives and Sen. Franklin Drilon did. Which is not unlike someone accused of electoral cheating agreeing before the Senate Electoral Tribunal or House of Representatives Electoral Tribunal to open the ballot box only on condition that all the other candidates did. It didn’t make him look good, it made him look like someone who didn’t know his law.

And then he left in a huff.

Which was as huge a blunder as you could get. It pissed off the one person who had been trying to fend off public opinion from the trial, who had been insisting that the senator-judges, despite their obvious political partisanships, could judge this case objectively, who had been on legacy mode trying to give the country a classic example on how to run an impeachment trial. Enrile rose to majestic fury, feeling the sting of the slap to his face, demanding to know from Cuevas, whose “yeur heneurs” suddenly sounded frail and forlorn, why he couldn’t control his pupil, or client.

What was Corona thinking? That that show of defiance would give him the stature that had eluded him? That it would make him out to be the titan he was in his mind? That it would provoke grudging admiration from the public and a show of force—possibly People Power?—from his followers?

Whatever it was, it was swiftly dispelled by Enrile ordering the security to shut down all the exits from the Senate. Which the guards and police detail obeyed, manning the gates with a fortitude they hadn’t displayed in a long time. From the Defiant One, Corona turned into The Fugitive, to go by old TV serials. Which his handlers tried to save by improvising the line that he had had a sudden attack of hypoglycemia, a word that has now lodged in the national consciousness by way of jokes. When he came back, he simulated the ravages of the affliction, looking weak and weary, his eyelids drooping. Except that being a bad actor he didn’t look abject, he looked like he had beady eyes.

I had thought before Corona took to the stand that he would do a Jack Nicholson and thunder forth with thick eyebrows lifted to contemptuous archness, “The truth? You can’t handle the truth!” Alas, the way he looked in the end could only make the public say that about him. “The truth? You can’t handle the truth.

Before Corona took to the stand as well, his handlers spoke of it as Caesar crossing the Rubicon, saying the die is cast. Which reminded us of yet another famous line Caesar uttered: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Except that in this case, which might as well read as his epitaph, it was:

I came, I wept, I fled.