Original sin

My first thought was that we had a pale replica of Janet Napoles in the United States in the person of Vilma Bautista, former personal secretary of Imelda Marcos. Bautista is the person who sold a Monet painting in London for $43 million, $7.5 million of which went to the gallery and more than $30 million of which went to her. Of her money, the 77-year-old Bautista gave $5.1 million to her nephews and P4.5 million to associates, and plunked down $2.2 million on an apartment in Manhattan.

There was only one problem: The Monet wasn’t hers to sell. Like Napoles, Bautista fell in one fell swoop, though rather swiftly in her case, in keeping with the American pace. New York prosecutors immediately filed conspiracy and tax-fraud charges against her.

That is not the end of the story. The basis of the New York prosecutors for voiding the sale was the discovery that the Monet was stolen property. It disappeared during the night Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos fled Malacañang, and did not materialize until it was sold in London. Imelda held the papers claiming ownership of the property.

The one who bought the Monet in London was a hedge fund billionaire named Alan Howard. He maintains he bought the painting in good faith and plans to sue the gallery which assured him everything was on the up and up. Indeed, to avoid getting into a legal bind, he has offered to make restitution. Figuring Imelda herself could not have owned the Monet legally, Howard has proposed instead to indemnify the Filipino people. Who better to represent them than the torture victims? He has offered them $10 million for a release on any legal claims to the property.

You have the ingredients of a grand novel there: a Monet that wound its way from France to a Third World backwater, a dictatorship that wreaked torture and mayhem on its subjects, the theft of the painting, America’s special place in the hearts of dictators and Filipinos, the reappearance of a lost painting in the hands of a lowly secretary, a lost painting unveiled in the heart of Britannia, neighbor of the painter’s favorite country, a found painting now in the hands of a financial magnate who, stricken by the thought of his newfound property spattered with blood, hopes to wash it with an offering of $10 million to the gods and torture victims.

But I’ll leave the novel for the nonce, and get back to what I was saying. After some consideration, I realized however that it wasn’t that Bautista was a pale replica of Napoles, it was that Napoles was a pale replica of Imelda. Imelda was the original Napoles, although the scale of her own scam either puts her in a class by herself or makes Napoles look like a second-rate, trying-hard copycat.

The Monet alone shows so, which was worth $43 million all by itself. The farce of course was that the original thief got stolen from. You need no further proof that the painting was stolen property long before Imelda’s secretary stole it from her than that Imelda herself never bothered to protest its sale. She never bothered to claim it was hers; she merely lost it at a time when an angry populace made her choose which she preferred to part with, her baubles or her head.

The tragedy before the farce was that Imelda acquired the precious painting by stealing the even more precious food from the mouths of hungry children, or its equivalent. Little wonder Howard was confident he wouldn’t have to deal with Imelda on this score.

What dwarfs Napoles even more beside Imelda is that Napoles, at least on the face of it, did not have someone behind her, using her, manipulating her, partnering with her. Imelda did, who was of course Ferdinand. Napoles just stole money, and “only” P10 billion of it. Imelda and Ferdinand did not just steal money, and not just billions of pesos of it, they also stole lives, they stole liberty, they stole a country’s future. Imelda herself did it with Imeldific outsized-ness, doing her version of fiddling while Rome burned, which was to extol the virtues of the true, good and beautiful while the false, the rotten, and the horrible rioted. Which was to show an eye for fine art and an ear for fine music while being blind to the welts of the flogged, while being deaf to the screams of the mangled.

In these trying times, when the country has been roused to tremendous sensitivity toward corruption, it’s good to remember these things. By all means let us look at the present, and damn where damnation is demanded, but let us look at the past, too, and damn where damnation is demanded. And damnation is all the more demanded there. P-Noy’s plea for the public to have some sense of proportion, to look at the sins of the past, too, and weigh the present in that light, is not without merit.

It’s not just that as corruption goes you will find the mother of all corruption in the past, specifically during Ferdinand and Imelda’s time. It’s also that it’s not at all true that it’s pathetic to bring up the past, bumenta na yon, what matters is the present. The past flows into the present and shapes the present—in more ways than the philosophical one. Completely practically, none of the thieves of the past has been punished, none of their loot has been gotten back. Which is why thieves continue to flourish, which is why thievery continues to riot.

At least in the case of the Monet, we, or our best representatives in those who fought Marcos and were made to pay the price, are getting back part of what has been stolen from us—$10 million out of $43 million. We have not gotten back the bulk of the other paintings and jewelry and bullion the Marcoses stole. All we’ve gotten back are Imelda as representative, Imee as governor, and Bongbong as senator.

People who don’t get baptized retain their original sin.