An enigma called Gilda

Spending time with Gilda Cordero-Fernando always ends up in blissful burping. The latest was from a merienda of crackers with a baked dip of artichokes and Gruyere cheese, paired with a perfectly blended chocolate e soaking with fresh green pinipig. Yummy! But it’s never just eating and drinking. With GCF, you dine on history and drink imagination, feeding a grand addiction to being Pinoy.

On the closet doors of her artist’s studio cum sitting room is a series of four life-sized portraits of her household staff carrying rambutan, a pitcher of water, tea and wine. How thrilled they were that Señora turned them all into art. What a privilege it’s been for this friend to watch her live life in several dimensions simultaneously for four decades. She turned 80 last June 4 but doesn’t look a day over 40 – okay, maybe early 50. She dyes her hair as a matter of taste but has never hidden her birth year. Heart problems and arthritis keep her away from the gym now, but the mythic figures on her walls and canvasses tell you that her magic is more potent than ever - living proof of immortality occupying a body designed to wear out. But don’t get her started on that unless you want a sermon – no, not the pulpit kind with fire and brimstone. Her homilies on life and death are chockfull of jokes though she’s deathly serious about the invisible realms. She’s cased that joint, but let’s not get ahead of the story. How many people do you know whose life can be recreated in prizewinning fiction and vice-versa? Whose coffee table books have singlehandedly written FILIPINO in bold psychedelic letters in the sky, scholarly emanations of Philippine soil and culture served up with beauty? They’ve made awards and honors come out of her ears. Inside the same as outside, she produced her books in a home designed Balinese-style by young Lindy Locsin long before he became a National Artist. A jungle of old trees and giant ferns surround it because her corporate lawyer husband Marcelo follows his bliss in gardening, Diyos Ama to her Diyos Ina. Paradise has its problems, but every second Gilda has spent as both light to the world and ilaw ng tahanan unfolds story after story – always with an instructive theme you listen to soberly or laugh about as fancy takes flight with the wisdom of the ever-young. She’s always been her own best story. She’s efficient, decisive and hardworking in whatever job or commitment she takes on but her most impressive quality is a lightness of being nothing can weigh down – not martial law, not the early death of her eldest son Bey and her lone sibling Tess, not the illnesses of aging, not her street torn up for six months, and certainly not a benighted Gloria Arroyo. Her secret? Gilda lives life as mint-new adventure everyday. When we met in the ‘60s, she was a lovely young mother of four, a prizewinning short story writer and the earnest, totally irreverent columnist of “Tempest in a Teapot" in the original Manila Chronicle. She was also an exuberant editorial assistant in the first encyclopedia of Filipiniana. In the ‘70s she edited AIM case studies, held court in her folk arts shop, Junque, started GCF Books, and danced evenings away in the original Hyatt, six-some with Eggie Apostol, Doreen Fernandez and their husbands. In the ‘80s, we flew to Papua New Guinea together to do a book on the South Pacific Festival of the Arts with Jaime Zobel. (There we discovered our shared love for inventive dancing.) But another Gilda emerged when they killed Ninoy. She hosted activist meetings, wrote satire with Los Enemigos and marched in the streets under a pretty straw hat – earning herself the title “Ka Universe." (Odette Alcantara beside her was “Ka World.") When things quieted down in the ‘90s, 37 Panay Avenue bloomed with mythic sculpture and painting, deeper and deeper into Filipino soul. Elmer Borlongan’s elongated humans populated the walls. Julie Lluch’s busts of Diyos Ama at Ina guarded the dining table and sunken living room. The mythic Bagobo Lumabat held up the horizon in the patio, teaching Gilda how to slip between worlds without dying. After a welcome ceremony with chanting and lit candles, she installed him behind a flowering tree raining pink petals. But Typhoon Milenyo knocked down an immortal, breaking his arm and ankle. Gilda was shocked but refused sculptor Bobby Feleo’s offer of repair. Instead she called her family to a burial ceremony under an old tree in the garden. “I wonder what future archaeologists would make of Lumabat," she giggles now. Then she went into meditation with a will and produced a priceless resource of indigenous spirituality in the “Soul Book." Meanwhile she sat her nine grandchildren down and guided them to their inner selves in meditation. Next she had a vision of the writer Pio de Castro, whose hand she held through months of coma before his passing. He was dressed like a grandee, informing her that he was directing the heavenly theater piece she had stumbled into in meditation. Dancing out of every box built by convention, GCF has earned full inner freedom. It’s in full bloom in her memoirs, “The Last Full Moon," a breakthrough in candor perfectly mirrored by her freeform dancing. Lo and behold, she also mounted three theater pieces illustrating three of her books while returning to the painting an eight-year-old Gilda left off. She’s already had three sell-out watercolor exhibits copiously reviewed by fellow-writers delighted by a storyteller painting her stories. But “No more books now, only painting," she says from a wheelchair. When she turned 80, her youngest son, Arcus a.k.a. Marcelo, Jr. now a Citibank executive, gifted his mom with cash for a bash with a cast of hundreds. “No, I want a series of small celebrations so I can really be with family and friends," GCF said. True to form, she’s been casting these parties like a theater director. An enigma wearing the mask of a crone with arthritis remains as young as the day she was born. In her fourth celebration timed to June’s full moon eclipse, she dangled both her legs from one arm of her wheelchair – an octogenarian imp relieving strain on her knees. Thank God Arcus didn’t succumb to the temptation to trade in his mom for 1200 rubber bands when he was boy. How could an immortal have taught us to fly? - HS, GMANews.TV