Tessie: Ninoy would have been Cory’s number one fan

Ninoy Aquino would have turned 74 yesterday. Had his life not been snuffled out so prematurely, he would have done a lot of great things for this country.

Two weeks ago, I got to sit down with Ninoy’s baby sister, former Sen. Tessie Oreta, during an interview arranged by my best friend Jun Camcam. Inevitably, the topic shifted to Ninoy and Sen. Oreta went down memory lane and talked about her late great brother.

Their father, Benigno Aquino Sr., was a widower with four children from his first wife when he married Doña Aurora, who was 17 years his junior, (Doña Aurora was the flower girl when he first got married.)

The second union produced seven more kids: Maur, Ninoy, Ditas, Lupita, Butz, Paul and Tessie. "But as far as we were concerned, Ninoy was an only child. We were only incidentals," laughs Sen. Oreta, "To our mother, anything Ninoy did was cute."

Sen. Oreta, however, will also be the first to tell you that Ninoy was really different – special actually – from other kids. As a child whenever there were parties at home, Ninoy would disappear and would be found on top of the car (they made them big in those days) delivering speeches with the guests’ chauffeurs as his captive audience.

At dinnertime when there was fried chicken, the thighs and legs would always be saved for Ninoy – but no one resented that. "No one felt jealous because he really tried his best to be an achiever – to be somebody we can all be proud of – somebody you’d support."

And Ninoy tried his best not to give any kind of heartache or headache to their mother. "If ever he did any indiscretion, he saw to it that it never reached our mother’s ears," Sen. Oreta volunteers. "Not surprisingly, our mother became the president of his fans’ club," she tells us laughing at the memory.

"We all loved him in a special way," recalls Sen. Oreta. "He had always been my hero and I always looked up to him."

Tessie was orphaned of her dad at age one and Ninoy had always been a father figure to her. "My ambition then was to be part of his team. I had no ambition for myself back then. I just wanted to be part of a group he was going to lead."

That Tessie loved Ninoy dearly wasn’t really surprising since "he had always been very protective of me."

"He made me feel very secure. I knew that if something not so nice would happen to me, he would be there to bail me out. Of course, I’d hear it from him."

The former senator remembers that when she was still young and single, Ninoy would always come up with "dossiers" of her suitors. Always the protective big brother.

Another one of Ninoy’s qualities that the former senator loved was "his love for life." "He would always have a solution to any problem," she says, adding, "but the solution would have to be the right one, legally and morally. He’d never tolerate wrong-doing."

Her mood turns somber when she remembers Ninoy’s incarceration in 1972. "Ang bata pa pala niya nu’n – and he was going through all that!"

But she felt terrible most of all for their mother because at one point, there was an order that only "immediate family" was allowed to visit Ninoy, "In military language," points out Sen. Oreta, "wife and children only – kaya hindi kasali ang mother namin." Doña Aurora Aquino, however, went personally to Juan Ponce Enrile and the (then) Defense Secretary’s heart melted and issued a memo allowing "the mother to visit Ninoy."

The lowest point of their lives, of course, was when Ninoy was shot on Aug 21, 1983. "It took me a long time to accept his death," she says. "I kept asking myself then: Why did he allow himself to be shot?"

If Ninoy were alive today, what would the scenario have been? "He would have been the first to faint if he found out that Cory had become President," she laughs.

"It was Ninoy’s ambition to be President and Cory was the wife and that was how he would have expected things to turn out."

Unfortunately, fate had other plans for Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. "But I guess he would have been applauding Cory from heaven and became her No. 1 fan."