Gilda's Book

A LIFE OF LIGHT AND CHEER

Book Review : THE LAST FULL MOON
LESSONS ON MY LIFE
by Gilda Cordero Fernando
University of the Philippines Press
GCF Books, 2005


by Romeo P. Virtusio

The only thing we should ever need from a writer is her writing well. Anna Akhmatova led a tragic messy life, but when we read her Requiem, we more clearly understand that the writer--not that we should even try to efface the color and skeins of her life-- stands and lives on the strength of her writing, not much else. No one, no matter how beautiful she is, or how patrician her lineage or blessed her kinships, can outmatch life. Few are those who escape being bruised and wounded, but that seldom makes for good writing.

This book, The Last Full Moon, Lessons on My Life, by Gilda Cordero Fernando, is beautiful, happy, witty, writing. She recalls people, and what makes them what they are, in the tradition of her original genre, fiction, with details that capture the humanity of the subject, and the realness of the time. Her recollections of her mother, for instance, fully engage the reader with what we know of how a relationship between a mother and daughter, both strong and opinionated, can be--stormy and corrosive. The mother, however, a Batanguena beauty queen resides in the memory: beautiful and imperious, fragile and flawed, who earned on her own, from her home, and raised the likes of Gilda. The short chapter on her father- in- law, Dr. Tony, is an affectionate, wonderfully unadorned villanelle to a good simple man. I like the way she recalls the patricians, her father and grandfather and those of her husband's, highly educated, propertied and principled men from the provinces who represented the vitality, and love of country of their generation. Pagsanjan and the costumbres of the people dance in the reader's imagination; I wish there were more entries on Gilda's Batangas side. As a young lady, she enrolled in a dance course of Leonor Orosa (Goquinco); wasn't Leonor a Luna as well?

This book is a touching homage to family. The grace of this book comes largely from the quiet and loving descriptions of the members of their family, how they regard and interact with each other, on occasion misunderstand and even annoy each other. The author tends to make much of her marriage's early sorrows, an artist's temperament clashing with a lawyer's cold cerebralness and his own breeding, and yet the whole book is a love letter to Elo. ("Maybe one of the purposes of marriage is not to make you lesser than you are but to make you realize you can be more than you are.") The author is a gatherer of friends and nurturer of their own vision visions; she mentions some of them in her living will. She devotes a whole Christmas morning to an exclusive party for household help, those who once were and still are. From her mother Gilda inherited the knack for creative enterprise; her mom dabbled in cakes and pastries. The daughter did quite well in small but original trend-setting ventures in folk art, publishing (some of the most outstanding titles in Philippine publishing ever came from her GCF books) and later in big cultural stage productions.

Trudge along with the family up to the hills of their farm in Antipolo, after the war, and two generations later, take lunch in the restaurant that the author's children have built on the property. Tag along with Gilda as she attends the dances of the early post-war, and later on group dates with Elo and the Sigma Rhoans. Gilda's father was a professor in the U.P. College of Medicine, who was the first Filipino who motorcycled around Europe in the 1920s.
Relive with Elo and Gilda their 50th wedding anniversary; they are now deep into what she calls their grace years (grasya ng Diyos). There are episodes in this book that perhaps suggest times of boredom and angst; even horror as in the war, but as you go along this is a story of a life that is being lived triumphantly, and with sweet light and cheer.

The best memoirist is one who has soldiered on , which Gilda, now in her mid seventies, has, and is a writer as well. She is an authentic and abiding Filipino: see how she puts writers from U.P. in their place. She put out her first collection of short stories, Butcher Baker and Candlestick Maker when she was in her early 30s, and then she wrote Wilderness of Sweets. All her fiction rang true, because she knew the language she was writing in, and her emotions were neat and in the right places, and her stories were beautiful and honest. It's sad that she stopped writing fiction a long time ago, and the reader is hardly comforted by even her own assurance that she writes her true stories the way she wrote her fiction.

Anne Applebaum opens her own new book on the Gulag with something from Anna Akhmatova. Anna is in a crowd of women huddled up in the bitter cold to visit their imprisoned menfolk, husbands or sons, in Leningrad. Somebody calls Anna by name, and then another woman asks her: "Can you describe this?" and Anna says, "I can." Merrily, tenderly, Gilda Cordero Fernando does.