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This dear Filipino friend was teary-eyed over lunch in Hong Kong 's Landau Restaurant more than 20 years ago. His 22-year-old daughter was getting married to a German banker. The couple would move to Frankfurt soon after the wedding. He broke down and wept when he spoke about what would happen to Carlos, his special child, whose best friend was the soon-to-be-married daughter. I had seen and talked to him, a handsome, well-spoken, bright young man of 14, athletic, and a very good student. Until that lunch I didn't know Carlos was autistic and possibly bipolar.
In those days, my friend was among the impressive band of Filipinos who were transnational company executives in Hong Kong. My friend, like his peers, traveled a lot to the Southeast Asian capitals, China and occasionally to the States and Western Europe.
He had an acquaintanceship with Manny Pangilinan and Ting Roxas' original band of Filipino multinational finance and management experts, the top men in HK of the Ayala Group and San Miguel, and the succession of Filipino consuls-general. He even developed real friendship with some of them. He went to cocktail parties and had dinners with them. Like them, he lived in a large Mid-Levels flat that had the prized view of the harbor.
In 1990, he came home to Manila with his wife and Carlos.
I got this e-mail from him the other day:
It's now a quarter of a century after Mary and I first met you. Arthritis, gout, diabetes and a heart that sometimes feels like it would fly out of my chest has made me more like the granddad of the man I was during our days in Hong Kong. Now I have to watch my weekly budget. I still manage to be in a few important functions involving visiting foreign VIPs because it's my work. And it's always a joy when our HK friends and professional associates come to Manila to see me-and you too-after they've visited our financially more well-placed colleagues. Our conversation ultimately turns into a recital of the names of our friends who have gone. I often get the feeling that the picture I take with my Nokia cell phone might be the last.
As you know, I spend most of my Sundays hanging out with Mary and Carlos. You and Jeanne have been with us in some of these lunches often enough. You haven't seen Carlos for some months. He has become so thin.
My Nokia has enough memory for more than a hundred still photos and maybe 500 stored messages. It could do many things a computer can but I haven't used any of these functions. I bought this Nokia 6630 about a year ago. Then one day last week it flashed the "Message sending failed" each time I tried to send out a text.
One morning before going to my office I went to the Nokia Service Center. My number-07-was finally called. The charming girl was polite. She told me the cell phone had to be reset. Just then it rang. There was an important message from my office. I have a second cell phone, the cheaper Nokia 1208, and I used that to reply. Then I told the girl, Let's do it.
After only five minutes, my N6630 was functioning properly again. The girl tested it by sending a test message to the N1208.
Then I noticed that the picture on the phone's screen was no longer the photo of a scene in Italy that I like because it reminds me of the view from the window of the hotel Mary and I had stayed in when we went on our first trip to Europe. I asked the girl what happened. She told me it was gone because the unit had been reset to ex-factory values.
What about all the pictures stored in the phone's photo gallery? I asked. She told me they were also gone. You told me to go ahead and reset it, sir, she said.
When I stepped out of the Nokia service center I was in a daze. Among the 100 pictures I had in the N6630 were of family Sunday lunches and dinners, Christmas and Easter dinner at home, Easter Mass at Magallanes Church, the New Year family reunion, Joachim and Ken Chu's visit with the wife of the Mexican consul, John and Jo when they came to Manila from LA, a stolen shot of Dolphy and Zsa Zsa Padilla at Italliani's, lunch at Pazzo's with Rene Tan, shots of Jess Estanislao and others at an Institute of Solidarity in Asia conference, views of Tagaytay and Makiling, malling shots with relatives visiting from Georgia, New York and Texas, my daughters Ruth and Jennifer, sons-in-law and grandchildren visiting from Frankfurt and Boston, photos of the kids I am sending to school, Louie de Rosas' funeral. Carlos is in most of these pictures. He was not as thin in those pictures as he is now.
I felt as if a part of my brain had died. My physical powers, my financial resources and my memories are being drained away. Pictures and objects that help ignite my memory cells are also vanishing. On the drive to my office, I wept.
opinion@manilatimes.net
rq_bas@yahoo.com
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