Nick Joaquin: Teleserye source

When it comes to love, Filipinos are an intense people. They love their spouses and children to a degree other cultures would find suffocating. What’s more, wives excuse their husbands’ philandering to keep peace in the family, uttering the familiar “What’s important is he comes home to me.”

In the literary classic Reportage on Lovers by 1976 National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin (pen name Quijano de Manila), he reports on a love story that touched “cadaverous cold-eyed newsman Teodoro “Doroy” Valencia.” Titled Boy Meets Girl; or, The Sweet Old Story Retold, Joaquin tells the story of boxer Norberto David in Tokyo for the 1958 Asian Games, who meets Yoko Takeuchi whom he dated casually before going back home. After three years of separation, she had not lost hope they would once again be with each other. Shades of Madame Butterfly, we thought.

Hearing of the presence of Doroy in Tokyo, she approached him in tears with her story. Doroy was moved by this girl who was so much in love. Doroy told Yoko he would see what he could do. He did much more. He had Norberto called, who explained he loved her but was poor, still studying, and couldn’t afford to marry her. Yoko said she didn’t care if he couldn’t marry her; she would come and serve him without obligation, and if he had fallen in love with someone else, she would go back to Japan, happy enough to have served the man she loved. That was all that was needed for Doroy to pull strings, get her a visa, arrange for the ceremony at Nichols, and stand as sponsor to their wedding.

This writer (right) with Danny Rayos del Sol (left) and Ben Cabrera

Nick Joaquin is among our nation’s most celebrated poets, novelists, playwrights and fictionists. Reportage on Lovers is a collection of 10 short accounts of fascinating love affairs, more intriguing than romantic as not all end happily. Since our TV networks are ever on the lookout for fresh teleserye sources from true-to-life bios, or from Mills & Boon type publications like Martha Cecilia’s Precious Hearts Romances, we would like to suggest Joaquin as a great source of material.

Joaquin’s Reportage on Lovers published in 1977 is about real people and because they dealt with the ’60s when we were starting out as a journalist, they are familiar to us like the Laurels of Mandaluyong and the Aranetas of Cubao. Who has not heard of the wild young Bad Boy Banjo Laurel? In The Case of the Girl with the Spotless Body, Banjo was implicated in the murder-suicide of his separated wife Linda Gallegos and friend Armando Silva when both were found dead in Linda’s apartment.

Love stories between foreign beauties and Pinoy millionaires abound, like Miss Universe Armi Kuusela of Finland who married Virgilio Hilario, Miss International Stella Marquez of Colombia and Jorge Araneta, and Miss Asia Angela Filmer of Malaysia and Jose Faustino.

In The Sportsman and the Beauty Queen, 1961 Miss International Stella Marquez thought Jorge, son of the rich and landed Aranetas, spoke Spanish with a funny accent, “like a Gringo talking Spanish.” Standing at almost 5’11”, he was a swimmer, basketball player, boxing promoter, and rode horses whom he was more interested in than women. Soon enough, however, he followed her to Colombia, pursued her for two years until her parents agreed to the marriage. To this day, Stella Marquez-Araneta has proven her worth by setting up the Binibining Pilipinas Beauty Pageant which sends candidates to the Miss Universe, Miss International and Miss World pageants.

Love stories from the ’60s from Nick Joaquin

Joaquin’s last story, Filipinos are Clumsy Lovers tells of London hippie Caroline Kennedy who accepted an invite from Betsy Romualdez to visit Manila. This story is closest to us personally as Betsy owned Los Indios Bravos Café, watering place of local bohemians, while next door stood the Indigo Art Gallery we had put up in 1966 with painter Ben Cabrera later known as Bencab, and his elder brother Badong.   

Caroline quickly shocked the Manila crowd with her opinions on international lovers. Americans are “henpecked,” the French “don’t live up to their reputation,” Italians “only think of themselves,” the English are “ugly,” the Japanese “not impressive,” and Filipinos are “clumsy.”

But she was to quickly change this opinion of the Filipino when she found a Filipino lover she described to Joaquin as “...fabulous…he ignored me until my curiosity was aroused…All were fighting to get me and here was a person who ignored me until I wanted to seduce him. He is a very good companion and a very good lover.”

Of course, everyone knows she married him and they lived in London. The marriage didn’t last but that’s another story Joaquin, who has gone ahead to the wide blue yonder, can no longer write. Meantime, Bencab had returned home and is now 2006 National Artist for Visual Arts.

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Stella Marquez (leftmost) and her beauty queens