The jailed & the jailers, the ousted & the ousters, and the exiled in one friendly dinner? Only in JP Enrile & Cristina’s wedding anniv!

Only someone like former Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, now 93 years old, could pull off a party like this. On Sunday night, he and his wife Cristina Ponce Enrile celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary at their DasmariñasVillage home.

The couple walked down the aisle in the private chapel of their compound to the song Love Is A Many Splendored Thing; soprano Rachelle Gerodias sang Ave Maria and tenor Lemuel dela Cruz sang The Lord’s Prayer.   

It was an occasion attended by friends and family: daughter Katrina, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren; son Jack Enrile wasn’t present because he’s studying at Columbia University in New York.

It was also a gathering of political allies, loyal friends, and former enemies. As one guest points out, at one table there are the “jailed and the jailers, the ousted and the ousters, the exiled and those that made it impossible for them to stay.” There are also two former presidents — Joseph “Erap” Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo — both accused of plunder, with one cleared and the other convicted but pardoned.

Looking at the scene, where the tables are laden with dishes by Gaita Fores and decorated with flowers by Robert Blancaflor in Cristina’s favorite color lilac, you also see the gamut of political colors (except yellow) and you’re reminded of the old saying that in politics “there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.”

After all, politics is the life of Juan Ponce Enrile, surviving seven presidencies after he left private law practice in the late ’60s. And it was Cristina, now 80 and still a striking woman, who has been holding the family life together — from the time they got married at San Loreto Church in Sampaloc to when they lived in a small room in Enrile’s father’s house, to when they moved to Philamlife Subdivision in Quezon City, to Urdaneta Village in Makati, and in 1975 to this compound in Dasmariñas Village that they bought from Don Jacobo Zobel de Ayala. 

Cristina — who later became Ambassador to the Holy See for almost two years — must have had an idea of the kind of life she would have with JPE during their honeymoon. As he tells guests after the Mass, “After I married my wife, we spent the night at The Manila Hotel, and I had to leave her after breakfast to go to trial for a case.”

Cristina understood his work, his schedule, even when he joined government and became Marcos’ defense minister and together they would impose martial law upon the country. “I am a homebody, it didn’t really matter that he was always out of the house. I took it one day at a time,” she says.

She even understood it seems — or at least has forgiven and accepted — his past dalliances, which he now waves off and says “that’s the past,” and she reveals that when he had girlfriends, “I would swat his puwet with a fly swatter.” 

JPE says, “Wala pang texting noon, walang cell phone. They could not trace where I was. I was no Lucifer,” and says he wasn’t a saint either. 

There was a time when she left him and lived in the US for a year. She came back, she says, because she missed her children.

“She stayed in California, she was going back and forth. I knew she wanted to stay in America, I never restricted her. How did I cope? I was busy with work, the only time I was home was when I’d go to sleep.” 

Asked about their gift to each other for this occasion, Cristina says, “Ni isang kusing wala” but admits that the diamond necklace she’s wearing is a gift from him.

“My presence here is my gift to her,” he says. “Even in my family, on my mother’s side, we never gave gifts for birthdays or anniversaries, and not because we’re Ilocano and kuripot. But every regalo that I give her, from my point of view, is mahal. I always send her roses, yellow not because I’m yellow, red, white, pink roses. Bahala na siya pumili ng gusto niya.”

“It was my dad who wanted to celebrate their 60th because they didn’t have a party on their 50th,” says daughter Katrina Ponce Enrile. “Their marriage is like any other marriage, they fight, they make up, but always have dinner together.”  

Cristina says the secret of their staying together for six decades is that “we’re always together and we have dinner every day.”

“I wasn’t fond of writing love letters, I express myself to my wife, I tell her I love her every day. Kiss her good night, take her to bed.”

They were never separated, they both say, but yes, their daughter Katrina built a separate house for him in the compound for his books and his office. He calls it “kubo.”

“My mom kasi is very maselan,” Katrina says.  “After a while, she just wanted her own space. He works there, but they live in the main house.”

One of the books in his house is The Rubbaiyat of Omar Kayyam, a form of Persian poetry in quatrains, which he memorizes to keep his memory sharp. 

“The first time I saw her, I told myself, ‘I’d like this woman to be my wife.’ Mahinhin siya, maganda at maganda pa rin ngayon. There was something that drew me to her,” JPE says. 

She was 18, he was 31. Two years later, armed with a Harvard masters of law degree, he married the Spanish colegiala he met at a party in Grace Park, Caloocan in the house of the Limjocos, to which he was invited because he was a member of the Bachelors Club. “I was living in Malabon, she was living in Pasay, and her mother was very strict. But like Frederick the Great, I conquer when I have to conquer.”

Spreading his arms, he says that “by 33, I was like Jesus Christ nailed on the cross.”

Now in their twilight years, JPE says they don’t have disagreements anymore. “We are old, we talk about how near is the end, that’s something we discuss openly. It can happen anytime.”

Of the next five years of their life together, Cristina says she looks forward to a “peaceful time with my family, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

Gringo Honasan, former Enrile aide and later a colleague in the Senate, had a taste of the kind of family that Cristina has nurtured in this house.

“When I was assigned to him in the ’70s, I thought it was just another assignment. But in the Enrile household, we were treated as part of the family. They taught their children to be disciplined and dependable and this is what we learned as part of the family,” Honasan says.

In front of friends and family, JPE paid tribute to his wife, saying, “I made a vow to Cristina that I would love her, that I would care for her and protect her and I will live with her till death do us part. I have done this for my wife for more than half a century. We’ve had our trials and tribulations. To live with a woman — and perhaps to live with a man — within such a number of decades has its many glitches. We have had our ups and downs. Pero tao lang tayo, but the most important thing is there must be understanding and accommodation. There is not a family that I know of in our society or in any other society where the couple lives blissfully, happily, every day and every minute or second of their lives in a perfect union. We’ve had challenges in life, we’ve had ups and downs and only God teaches us the way to bring back harmony, peace and cooperative living within the family.”

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Visit the author’s travel blog at www.findingmyway.net. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @iamtanyalara.