Meeting Miss Nida

Like her millions of other fans, I, too, was deeply shocked and saddened by the murder of Nida Blanca last week. I hardly knew her on a personal basis, and while I followed the Nida-Nestor Show back in the ‘60s, I haven’t seen more than a few of the 160-plus movies she made in her lifetime.

I did, however, have the privilege of writing the scripts for two movies in which she acted–Miguelito, ang Batang Rebelde (1985), where she played a young Aga Muhlach’s oppressed mother, and Tayong Dalawa, a few years later, where she played the comic foil as housemaid to career girl Sharon Cuneta. She won a raft of well-deserved awards for her performance in Miguelito, which was a relatively low-budget movie that the late Lino Brocka had been asked by Aga’s dad to do to launch his teenage son’s career, and which turned out to be one of my personal favorites among the 14 or 15 scripts I wrote for Lino.

Nida’s husband Rod Lauren probably won’t remember this, but we played darts together many times in the early 1980s, when Rod had a business manufacturing and selling darts supplies. Once or twice Nida turned up, but she generally let Rod just have his fun with the boys.

But it wasn’t in any of these tangential capacities that my most memorable meeting with Nida Blanca took place. That happened much earlier–some 38 years ago, when I was nine and in the second grade. My class was having an "excursion" (funny how that word’s slipped out of Filipino usage–somehow it brings back images of ukuleles and straw hats with your name lettered on them) in Forest Hills in Quezon City; in those days, anything 10 kilometers from school in Greenhills (or Gilmore Ave., as we used to call it) was worthy of an excursion.

I remember being in a maroon-striped polo shirt and khaki shorts, and marching up a hill to locate the source of a brewing commotion. There was a movie shooting–and Nida Blanca was in it!

I saw her seated in a chair–bright and fresh and pretty, and younger than my mom; I was entranced, but found the presence of mind and the gumption to pull out a notepad from my pocket (that tells you what I was going to be, for the rest of my life) and to go up to her to ask for an autograph. She signed my pad with a smile, and I thanked her–I had to, I must have–and ran back down the hill to my friends, delirious with success.

I remember that day well because, somewhere in the picture albums my mom kept for me, is a snapshot that a classmate took of me coming down that hill, fresh from my first encounter with a real live movie star–who just happened to be, come to think of it now, Miss Nida Blanca. Too bad I’ve lost that notepad and the autograph–along with the boy who had them.

To Rod and Nida’s family, my deepest sympathies.

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece titled "Living by Writing," which painted a pretty dismal picture of the writing life as a profession or a means of livelihood. That elicited some inspired responses–not all of them in agreement with me, and perhaps thankfully so. Here’s a couple I thought I’d share with you. I’ve changed the name of the second writer and edited the letter a bit, thinking that she might have meant to address me privately.

"Dear Butch,

"Hello! I am Luis (Chato) Mañeru, one of Manila’s better known translators of historical books published by San Agustin Museum [Flora de Filipinas, Historia de Filipinas], Fundacion Santiago [La Solidaridad], UST Press [Dominicans in the Philippine Revolution], Ateneo Press [Cavite Revolt], etc. I’m writing you from San Francisco where I have been living on sabbatical for a few years now. I have been translating and publishing books since 1990.

"I just read your article ‘Living by Writing’ and sadly must agree with everything you said. I myself toyed with the idea of writing a book on the Mañeru family from the perspective of a 19th-century Spanish immigrant to the Philippines, with a historical perspective of the family entwined with that of two countries: Spain and the Philippines. While I have done just that, I have yet to publish it… will probably publish it privately without hopes of any commercial remuneration.

"Most of my work has been published (about 10 books in 10 years) and I have received generous remuneration from the abovementioned foundations as outright payment for translating–never from royalties. Still, by itself, none has been enough to support any kind of lifestyle that could be considered comfortable. I have always had to treat my literary ambitions as a side dish.

"I’m still doing translations for Filipino and Spanish clients from my home in the US, using e-mail, with two new books being published in Manila this year. I suppose, as some kind of consuelo de bobo, I convinced myself that my translating and the books published with my name on the cover as translator is ‘food for the soul’ to leave for posterity while my 9-to-5 job is ‘food for the body.’ My newspaper friends, like Tere Orendain, Rosalinda Orosa, and Deedee Castillo will agree with this. Historically, however, the same could be true of other writers, painters and starving artists in general.

"Lucky ones like Stephen King are the few who could really make their craft pay. The USA is lucky enough to have a broader reading base (out of a 250 million population) that could allow a successful writer to survive. However, I caution that some writers still have to prostitute themselves; i.e., sacrificing by writing what their readers want… and not necessarily what the authors would like to write.

"It is sad but that is the lot placed on anyone involved in a creative endeavor. Anyway, best of luck."

The second e-mail I’m reproducing came from a former fellow at the UP Writers Workshop in Baguio, where I had praised her work.

"…I read your column the other day and it was a surprise of sorts and I will tell you why shortly. Earlier last week, I had just written my boyfriend a letter that went something like this, ‘I think I’ve deluded myself into thinking I’m a writer when all I ever get are rejection letters one after the other. I don’t even know why I try.’

"Being a recently published author of a book that isn’t doing well, [my boyfriend] tried his darndest to encourage me.

"Sir Butch, I have been writing since I was nine years old and a year later, I announced to my parents I was going to be a writer. They spent the next decade convincing me of other pursuits, but I stuck with the decision, utterly convinced I would die if I forsook my vocation. I’ve written stories that have shocked, amused, entertained people, but these stories were one in a hundred attempts. I write on. I have joined the Palanca for three years straight and I have always lost. I write on. But after getting another rejection slip, I got really dazed. Why am I doing this to myself?

"But the stories wouldn’t stop writing themselves in my head. I have in my laptop three stories in the making and one completely finished in the PC inside my skull. All I need is research to give it flesh. So, even if [my boyfriend] was a dear in trying to be a shoulder and a prop, what really snapped me out of the depression were the stories cooking in the laptop. And they are good stories because I know that I have something to say and I will say it.

"I’m writing because I want you to know that I’m glad I read your column. No, it wasn’t inspiring. It was hardly encouraging. In case you’d like to know, I write [a sitting senator’s] speeches, press releases, column, messages, and what-have-you. It hurts me to see another person’s name over my written work. It KILLS me. But that’s because I’m still 25 and I still nurse the romantic notions. I’m glad to know, though, that even if you say I should throw such notions out the window, I think that somewhere deep inside you, you still have them yourself. Or else you wouldn’t even try. And so I will continue writing.

"I’ve read your work, Sir Butch. It’s not my usual fare but I like your work.

"If I could live the way I want, I would love to spend my days just observing people and writing everything down in a hundred stories and more. I think it isn’t really harmful to put down life and humanity and reality into pages and call them fiction… Literature not only is a record of our history but has shaped it, too. And I’d like to hope I’d make an important contribution one day. A girl can dream, sir, a girl can dream.

"Your column was a surprise because instead of pouring cold water on my romantic notions, it made things even clearer to me. Yes, it’s going to be harder than I imagined (I’m paying all the bills with what little salary I get as a ghost writer, and no, the ‘starving writer’ bit isn’t as romantic as I thought it would be), but I’ll do my writing, fueled by dreams and passion and a total love for life. As writers should! I think that’s what you were really trying to say, sir, and don’t correct me if I’m wrong. Just thanks for telling me."

Right on–and write on!

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