We just need one great tinkerer, not 100 beauty queens

BEING the son of an unlettered sharecropper, believe it or not, enabled me to watch and appreciate many (not one or two but many) beautiful women early in life, including one who still generates global headlines, Isabel Preysler. We were peasant-tillers of Arrastia-owned land and my late father and I would regularly go to Lubao’s poblacion and into the Arrastia home to advance money for the next crop. And during town fiestas, as dutiful tillers of Arrastia land, we would hitch our carabao to the cart to bring firewood that would fire up their giant vats.

The young girl about my age who often came to visit, and moved with nymph-like grace in and around the big house, was Isabel – before she stole the hearts of a member of the Spanish royalty, Julio Iglesias and now Nobel winner Mario Vargas Lllosa. The first wife of Steve McQueen was also an Arrastia on her mother’s side. The Arrastia women, who were descended from a Basque adventurer who settled in Lubao and became the town’s biggest landowner, were always called “ the beautiful Arrastia women” and that was, to many, an understatement.