[continued from the July 2009 issue]
From riches to rags
Colony Blue Bermuda shorts, and polished calfskin Italian loafers with no socks. He looks like a matinee idol gone sour, with a full head of flowing white hair over a face that looks like it’s seen better days—which it has. Glorious days, in fact, filled with lusty women, polo ponies, and yacht parties—and it seems that his wardrobe is one of the very few things that keep him anchored to that decadent past.
But there are other things. As we shake hands, he tells me I look like my mother and lets me through the gate where I shrug off Bougainvillea thorns and notice some artifacts from a charmed former life: those Borneo jars of all sizes that were ubiquitous in Forbes Park palaces, scattered and cracked along the small front walkway with mad roosters perched on their rims and screaming at me as we enter the house. They sound like they desperately want to rip my nuts off, but I know they are just being hospitable—as are the dozen or so stray cats wandering around the house. The closest one to me looks blind, and starts tiptoeing across an old fax machine and hissing at the chickens.
Inside, the house is a bodega of unpacked boxes, festooned with designer dress shirts, and crudely furnished with old Louis VI chairs and a handful of solid kamagong tables disappearing under mountains of paperwork. Arranged randomly on top of a large work desk smothered with all sorts of readable junk are old framed photographs of Rene looking like every woman’s fantasy—bare-chested on a cigarette boat, in a tuxedo at the grand opening of one of his hotels. The suffering house is a symbol of his life: The Golden Boy of Manila, whose personal style and elegance was unmatched by anybody in Philippine society during the sixties and seventies, has since then been drowning to death in a money pit of embattled court cases, disputed land titles, and other savage legal wars that have all but demoralized him completely.
“I knew Yamashita. He used to let me carry his sword. According to rumours—and i can’t prove this—Marcos believed that a lot of Yamashita’s gold was buried in the ground under the compound.“
He lives with friends he made in jail. “They sleep in the master bedroom upstairs—I sleep over there.” He points to an Elmwood opium bench against the wall with no cushion. In front of it is a round cocktail table also flooded with faxes, letters, receipts, newspaper clippings, search warrants, lab reports, court orders, and other grim reminders of his struggles with the law. “Because I’ve already been broken into twice and I don’t want anybody shooting me through the window,” he explains. There is a distinct sense of paranoia in the air, especially when I glance over at another messy table and find a bulletproof vest lying on top of it. “In the meantime I’m raising chickens as a hobby,“ he says.
“I have seven chickens outside and five chicks in here. The cats are accidental. I never really liked cats. They just sort of wandered in—PUSPUSPUSPUSPUS!“ Good God, I thought, as my heart skipped a beat, startled by his sudden feeding call. “My manicurist in Pasay said, ‘Masuerte yung pusa na may limang kulay.‘ So now one of them just had babies again and two of them are limang kulay (five colours)—so maybe my luck’s about to change.”
Blind optimism may be the only weapon left in Rene’s arsenal. He’s been fighting the law since the late sixties, and since then has been slowly backing himself into a nearly hopeless corner. With an almost Palestinian zeal, Rene’s fight has always been about land, but has spawned into many different battles with varying degrees of ugliness and consequence, and his stubborn refusal to compromise and play by the rules has turned him into a dangerous enemy of the state.
[to be continued in the September issue]