The best of hands

In the same serendipitous way that I came to acquire a gorgeous mid-1920s Swan Eterna fountain pen in, of all places, the Virra Mall tiangge a few years ago, another beauty practically fell on my lap last week in the form of a 1926 Lever Regulator wristwatch from, of all places, England via Iligan City.

As is my late-night habit, I was cruising the online auction site eBay, which had just recently opened a Philippine branch (www.ebay.ph). You know how it is with these window-shopping sorties – you never really mean to buy stuff, but you end up getting fixated on some object of desire you wish you’d never seen. In this case, I was looking at what obviously was a vintage timepiece, as suggested by its roundish "cushion" shape and the unique wire lugs (i.e., one-piece lugs – where the strap attaches – instead of the more common and modern spring-enabled lugs). What amazed me was its condition in the pictures provided. The dial was spotless, the numbers crisp and clear; the crystal showed no cracks or scratches, and it was, the seller said, in perfect mechanical condition. Could it possibly be true?

The seller – whom we’ll call "Alice" – was based in Iligan City. How? Why? These questions cross your mind when you’re buying blind. EBay has a helpful "feedback" rating mechanism that gives the buyer an indication of the worthiness of the seller, but it’s hardly foolproof, and Alice herself was obviously new to eBay with a rating of exactly one previous transaction. But here was this gorgeous watch on which no one had bid, and there were two hours to go before closing time. The minimum asking price was P1,800 – certainly not a bad price, nor a bad gamble. I put my bid in, and fiddled while I waited for the two hours to pass.

In brief, I won the auction, sent off the money, and got the watch. Happy endings do happen, and not content with just the watch itself, I wrote Alice again to get its story, and here’s what she told me:

Hi Butch,

Thanks for your delight at the watch (my husband is still crying at its loss! LOL)

I am married to an Englishman and he brought the watch here to the Philippines from the UK when he came in 2003 together with many other watches and antiques, etc. He was also a watch collector back in the UK.

The watch dates from the mid-twenties – 1926 – and it belonged to my husband’s granddad. The Lever Watch Company originated in England in the mid- to late 1800s and ceased to exist at the outbreak of WW2, in 1939. My husband told me that his granddad used the watch only for work but as his granddad didn’t work very often then that’s why it’s in such good condition... LOL.

When I listed the item I thought it dated from the 1940s but my husband now says he meant "That’s what it should bring on eBay (LOL) a minimum of 40 British pounds or P4,000." He says he won’t use the eBay Philippines site again because there is little appreciation there of quality or history and nobody seems to have any money (but we know different, huh?).

Congratulations to you! You got a very nice watch at an excellent price. Cherish it like my husband did.

Kind regards,

Alice

I wrote Alice back to assure her that the watch was in the best of hands (ahem) and that it would not be resold for as long as I breathed, and that, contrary to her husband’s impression, there was an active horde of watch dealers and collectors in the Philippines, with infinitely more money than this UP professor had. I just thank God they were sleeping when I came across Alice’s eBay ad. Chalk one up for late-night trawlers.

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Allow me this opportunity to share a few words of praise for my former boss, the political scientist and scholar Francisco "Dodong" Nemenzo, who turned 70 this past week and retired from the presidency of the University of the Philippines. (In his stead now stands Dr. Emerlinda R. Roman, UP’s 19th and its first woman president.)

A confirmed socialist all his life, Dodong was expected to turn UP into a haven for molotov-bomb makers – the kind of hotbed it was in 1970, when I was a freshman and happily a radical – pulling it farther away from the path of modernization that world-class universities have traveled. Instead, to the surprise of many, Nemenzo took up "modernization" as his battle cry, and applied it to UP’s libraries and laboratories as well as to its undergraduate curriculum. Among the results is an P18-million femtosecond laser machine that very few top Asian universities have, and which has helped place our physics department among the region’s best. All of UP’s seven constituent universities are now wired (or better yet, in a growing number of places, wireless); the old, wretchedly long enrollment queues that were part of every UP freshman’s initiation are largely gone, replaced by online registration (you can also get your grades online); and every UP student has a free e-mail account he or she can access from many free terminals on campus. The old General Education curriculum has been revitalized with the infusion of new exciting subjects.

There’s a spreading fiction that modern universities are best led by bankers and financial honchos, which Dodong Nemenzo certainly wasn’t. "Finances are always important," he would say, "but even more important is academic leadership." But as it turned out, he wasn’t too bad a money man, either, generating over P800 million in funds for UP’s modernization over five years. (The banker and benefactor George Ty was supposed to have told him once, "If I can deal with the communists in China, why can’t I deal with you?)

I came to work for Dodong in the last two years of his presidency. I had done many speeches for many people – some more savory than others – but I was overjoyed to discover that speechwriting was one chore my new boss would spare me. Dodong, the scholar and critic that he was, relished developing his own ideas and writing his own prose in a punchy, straightforward style that commanded both attention and respect. A provincial boy from Cebu, he had come to UP terrified by the prospect of being embarrassed by his accent in a roomful of cosmopolites, but first-class teachers like the legendary J.D. Constantino (now the Carmelite Sister Teresa) and Dr. Guadalupe Fores Ganzon fired up his confidence and his passion for learning. Never one to be disheartened, when the skittish Americans denied him a visa on the eve of his departure for doctoral studies in the US, he packed his bags for the UK and got his PhD from Manchester.

I was in high school, where his wife Princess was my history teacher, when I first met Dodong; he picked up Princess in the afternoon in his pale blue Beetle, emblazoned with a Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation "peace" sign. Little did I expect to cross his path again, many years later, and what a fortunate crossing it has been for me, to have entered his office and shared his confidences, learning for myself how principled and honest men can still think and fight in these often dispiriting days. We may not have agreed on every point, but he was always ready to listen to our opinions and eager to foster debate among his staff and faculty. Even as president, he knew how to enjoy a good drink and a good smoke (one of the hazards of keeping him company) and revered Indian food, the spicier the better, preferring the streetcorner sutokil in Mactan over the fancier menu of the five-star hotel down the road.

I sound like I’m writing an obituary, but let me assure you that Dodong Nemenzo is very much alive and raring to catch up on his reading, to play with his grandchildren, and maybe even to teach in Cuba. As professor emeritus, he’ll continue to keep an office in Diliman and can teach whenever he wants to.

There have been a few men, next to my father, who have been extraordinarily generous to me with their talent and mentorship – they include the economist Gerry Sicat and the writers Johnny Gatbonton and Franz Arcellana (and, let me not forget, Ed Tiempo and NVM Gonzalez). To that short list I now add Dodong Nemenzo, whose collected essays I look forward to copyediting – not because there will be much to correct, but as a token of my gratitude for his exemplary and memorable leadership. It was an honor and a pleasure to have served with him.

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This comes rather late as reviews go, but let me just put it on record that we managed to see only one movie in this most recent Metro Manila Film Festival, which was – you guessed it – Panaghoy sa Suba, Cesar Montano’s enterprising effort at reviving Visayan movies. That was, admittedly, a big part of the reason we chose to see it – the sense that we were contributing to a worthwhile endeavor, supporting the little guy versus the big studios, and in a cinematically dead language (not Aramaic) at that. I had a couple of other reasons: I like Cesar Montano, who projects a quiet earnestness that makes you tend to believe whatever he’s saying, and I’d also rafted down that dreamlike river in Loboc, Bohol (which I wish more people would see, but then if they did, it wouldn’t stay dreamlike for long).

Sad to say, the storyline seemed devoid of sustained tension, and went off into unnecessary tangents (the lost father); the use of the village-idiot character (Ronnie Lazaro) was clichéd. The most difficult part of all to take was the supposed passage of three wartime years, which was announced onscreen but which seemed to bear no perceptible effect on the dramatic situation or the characterization except for a predictable growth of beards on the menfolk.

For all that, the movie deserves to be lauded for its ambition, and there’s much to like in the acting, as well as in the sensitive, charming translations in the subtitles. I hope that Cesar Montano continues to work on risk-taking projects like this – perhaps with a little more care given to the narrative and the dramaturgy, often the weakest point of even big-time productions whose producers wouldn’t bat an eyelash paying a superstar a fourth of the whole movie budget.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.