Remembering Rod Dula

Some say Rod was the  epitome of our non-traditional ideals and sometimes wacky approach to politics. We were mostly of liberal, even bohemian persuasion. None of us were Maoists in our respectable middle years. Rod was also Euro-centric. He loved Paris above all.

Rod Dula won’t be amused, but I think he’ll  forgive me. A good number of his friends are having dinner tonight in his honor and I’ll not be there for the roll call.

It’s just that I made plans for an out-of-town trip before his beloved niece Golda’s invitation got through to me after several missed phone calls and missent e-mails.

I can’t believe it’s been 11 long years since  Rod, one of the most literate and perceptive Filipino columnists of my generation, departed for the wild blue yonder from where, we all know, there can be no coming back.

“We are mala herba (bad grass),” he loved to say with what we now know as bittersweet irony. “We will never die.”

He was in the full bloom of his mid-50s  in the late evening of July 21, 2002 when, having partaken of a sumptuous Chinese dinner in Ermita, he wrote 30 to a brilliant but abruptly shortened writing career. At the very least, we his many friends were consoled by the thought that he spent his last moments in the bosom of his loving family.

Rod had a zest for life that combined a fine literary mind with wanderlust. A damned good teacher, he was a young professor of English literature at the Ateneo de Manila and served as Joe Aspiras’ protege in the heyday of Philippine tourism before he signed up with Malaya as a columnist sometime after the Cory Aquino regime took power.

Fresh from US exile in 1988, I joined Rod and fellow columnists like Nestor Mata, Ellen Tordesillas and Jerry Barican to write for an independent newspaper that refused to blindly tow the Aquino yellow line with the same fierce irreverence it accorded the fallen Marcoses.

Rod, Jerry and I were early conscripts of the Group of 40, a mixed political-media-business forum of forty-something personalities. We always teased that “40 and up” referred to either age or waistline.

Chaired by Tony Gatmaitan, a gentleman banker and Cory-for-president veteran, we met once a week at the Carlos Valdez building in Makati to discuss the hottest issues of the day. Butch Valdez, Dong Puno, Jullie Yap Daza, Ma-an Hontiveros, Ninez Cacho-Olivares, Rick Blancaflor, Zeny Seva, Susan Calo-Medina, Cito Lorenzo, Andre Kahn and others became regulars and we developed long-lasting bonds despite ideological, partisan and personal differences.

Anybody who was anybody in government, media and politics somehow found their way to our no-holds-barred sessions. All the presidential wannabes and headliners of the day showed up at one time or another — Fidel V. Ramos, Johnny Enrile, Rene de Villa, Danding Cojuangco, Monching Mitra, Jun Magsaysay, Gringo Honasan, Haydee Yorac, Raul Roco, Joe de Venecia, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Doy Laurel, Jovy Salonga, Mel Mathay, Jojo Binay, Lito Atienza, JV Cruz, Narz Lim, Mila Abad, Max Soliven, Teddy Benigno and many more. They came to us or we went to their homes or offices. 

Cory Aquino, of course, never attended gatherings where journalists and others could subject her to what Malacañang kept denouncing as “Cory-bashing.” We would have loved to have her but all our hints and overtures fell on deaf ears.

In fact, during her entire six-year term, President Cory only agreed to meet once with a group of 15 selected columnists in the palace. This was sometime in 1988 or early 1989 and it was never repeated. I’m proud to say that Rod and I were part of that most polite of encounters between any president and media. 

The  only one nobody wanted to invite or was too frightened to gatecrash was the Imeldific One. There were no tears shed for her, although, in retrospect, she would have been a great comedic relief.

The unwritten group agenda was frankly self-serving and a bit presumptuous: to audition Cory’s prospective successors and to get a sense of what lay ahead for post-Edsa Philippine society. In a confessional but friendly setting, our sessions turned into Politics 101 seminars or veritable master classes with politicians and leaders up close and personal, most in their raw and natural state and shorn of media cosmetology and PR packaging. Or so we believed. 

Group of 40 sessions drew coverage in the media, at times wary of its bragging rights as probably the nation’s pace-setting forum of opinion and, to some cynical quarters, a talent pool of sorts for those angling for posts in upcoming dispensations.

We tried hard to stay neutral or at least respectful of differing points of view.  Even the Gringo coup of December 1989 could not close down the Group of 40, although there were incessant claims that all those who were critical of the administration had to be Cory-bashers,  coup plotters or at least complicit with the military rebels.

Still, the group held together after the presidential campaign of 1992 had led members to contending political camps. By the time Eddie Ramos assumed power, however, the dynamics had shifted from the invigorating chaos of Corazonian politics to the relentlessly can-do optimism of  the globe-girdling Fidel Ramos.

 FVR’s reign ended after he had logged 36 state visits, more than all his predecessors combined. It was pointless to keep up with this eternally moving target and Group of 40 just lost count and interest. Erap Estrada made political discussions exercises in futility. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s errant ways could only drive otherwise sane people to suicide or murder. We were history when Noynoy Aquino first blazed across the horizon.

Why rake up these little-known and half-forgotten exploits of the Group of 40 in remembering Rod Dula?

All because Rod was there with us through thick and thin; some say he was the  epitome of our non-traditional ideals and sometimes wacky approach to politics. We were mostly of liberal, even bohemian persuasion. None of us were Maoists in our respectable middle years. Some had flirted with socialism and gotten off that wagon many moons past. Fascism was deemed impossibly old hat, even pathetic. Pro-Marcos sentiments lingered among a few, but these had been muted by FM’s indefensible record of wanton thievery and made-in-hell governance.

Sloganeering and grandstanding had no place in our sessions partly because Rod was quick to flash his patented teacher’s withering stare on would-be offenders. You don’t cross swords with a man whose very aura of indignation did not require words to drive you off the stage. The few times Rod spoke, he took command and nailed his points pronto. Like the pope, he was all but infallible. We called him Monsignor, and sometimes, His Holiness. He would respond by bestowing us with  a papal sign of the cross.

I remember the time some of us were livid about GMA’s betrayal of Edsa Dos and he just calmly but firmly butted in. “She is the one person of our generation who ascended  to the presidency,” Rod intoned. “But she blew it. Our record is no better than our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations. Because she failed, we also failed.”

No hysterics but he said it all, his fury reined in by smoldering but still polite contempt. This was early in GMA’s presidency, when she was making pious noises about not running in 2004 to “save the country from further division” and all that jazz. Rod saw through the charade. It would take two more years before FPJ was robbed of the presidency and “Hello Garci” would point the accusing finger to her. But Rod was no longer around to say “I told you so.”

Rod had been in government and saw the Marcoses at close range. He came out of that dark period of our history untouched by scandal and any sense of guilt. He confined himself to the tourism enclave carved out by a kind and competent public servant, “Sunshine Joe” Aspiras, who considered Rod a surrogate son..

Rod wielded much power and influence as Aspiras’ consegliere. But such was his work ethic and the respect he earned that the post-Marcos tourist industry voluntarily extended him courtesies and favors he once commanded in his prime.

Travel and literature were Rod’s life-long passions and the Group of 40 was all the more enriched by being exposed to other worlds and other interests beyond politics and government. Rod was Euro-centric. He loved Paris above all.

The few times he was absent, we all knew he had been bitten by the bug and just had to head for the City of Light before he expired of boredom. At last count, he had made 37 trips to Paris and was hoping to hit 100 before he called it a life.

Mila Abad, in her day the no-nonsense career lady who endowed class and competence to Philippine Airlines’ cabin services, cannot forget being introduced to another Paris beyond travel brochures and guided tours. “Rod took me on walks to so many places I wouldn’t have discovered by myself,” she says of long forays on both sides of the Seine and deep into the Ile de France or Parisian region. “It wasn’t about glamour or shopping. Rod knew history and he loved people. His was a deeply personal and intimate Paris.”

Strange indeed for a man of Bicolano and middle class beginnings who grew up in the quintessentially middle class district of Kamias, Quezon City. The youngest and only boy of three siblings, he was a San Beda boy who went all the way to seminary but fell just short of becoming a monk. All his life, he would lapse into monastic mode and go away for religious retreats, often to the Benedictine Monastery of Transfiguration in Malaybalay, Bukidnon.

Bukidnon, where I grew up, was our special bond. Through Rod, I became friends with other Benedictines like Gang Gomez, fashion designer-turned-monk,  and Ambet Ocampo, whose other calling made him a superb historian.

The Dulas of Bacon, Sorsogon are an exemplary and hard-working  family. Tiks and Gok, his adoring two sisters founded Goto King when times were bad under martial law and inexpensive comfort food was sought by the masses. Much of the business has been sold to Chow King and Jollibee, but not after the Dulas earned a good return on investments. The family later put up Mamma Rosa in Timog-Morato Circle, a fine-dining restaurant that became popular and lasted a number of years.

It goes without saying that Rod loved to eat. He would take dining companions like Ching Suva, Ellen Tordesillas and Zeny Seva to such culinary temples as Sala, Casa Armas, Hap Chang and unknown places in Chinatown.

In the early 1990s, Jullie Yap-Daza started a Thursday lunch group at Myther’s, a tailoring shop near Remedios Circle in Malate. At first there were no more than 14 members like Jake Macasaet, Pocholo Romualdez, Johnny Perez, Cip Roxas, Andy del Rosario, Minnie Narciso, Rod Dula and myself. We went separate ways after a few years but, I understand, Myther Bunag has continued the weekly gatherings in another location.

But to go back to things Parisian, I believe Rod’s Francophile spirit lives on  somewhere in the boulevards and parks of the most beautiful and civilized city on earth.

A few months after Rod passed from this earth, I find my way to Paris and, on a lark, head for the Lousianne, his hotel of choice in the Left Bank. It was where Simone de Beauvoir used to live along Rue du Buci, with quaint antique shops, fruit stands and patisseries up and down the block.

I ask the deskman to call up Monsieur Dula in his room. “No one by that name has checked in,” he says.

A woman walks into the lobby and it is Natasha, the Russian manager who instantly remembers me from a past visit with Rod.

“I”m sorry our dear friend hasn’t arrived,” she says very apologetically. “Perhaps very soon? I never know when he’s coming, he just pops in.”

I have to break in with the sad news that he’s gone—gone ahead.

“I just thought Rod would be here,” I say in all seriousness and she shakes her head in disbelief. “But why?” she asks.

“Rod always told me that all good people who die go to Paris,” I  continue my spiel. “That’s why I came to your hotel to find out. He thought of Paris as heaven and he wouldn’t stay anywhere else but here at the Louisianne.”

Natasha can’t help laughing. “Rod has a point and I can only agree with him.”