Last week was marked by horror, grief and empathy for the kin and friends of the victims of Typhoon Fengshen a.k.a. Frank, thanks to Sulpicio Lines, too long unsanctioned in Pinoy arreglo, our literally fixer culture.

For some of us, however, a subdued mood had already begun the week before into June 19. That eve of new disaster was also the end of official mourning in a service with a Catholic Mass and Tibetan Buddhist chanting for the dead in memory of Beatriz Romualdez-Francia, with her two children, kin and old friends in attendance.

On the evening of June 12, two months before her 65th birthday she had choked on her food and suffered a cardiac arrest ? ?given her invalid state, she quickly gave up her spirit,? e-mailed her brother-in-law Luigi.

?But who?s Beatriz Romualdez-Francia, and what?s her passing got to do with me?? you might ask. Thereby hangs a tale of the ?60?s and ?70s, whose radical departures of thought and spirit still ripple in today?s world. That they do so in ways now undetectable to a younger audience while still impacting on many lives, prods this column to honor memory, perchance for visible and invisible to continue to meet and love.

Beatriz, literally ?She Who Makes Happy? ? ?Betsy,? for short ? lived with her head in global winds and a pioneering spirit that turned her into a kind of medium for the new in our generation. And the beginning of her story would be her birth as an only child of the livewire Amy Benitez-Ramos of Pagsanjan and the dancing Atenean Francisco Romualdez of Leyte, who went to war and disappeared without a trace before Betsy came into the world in the middle of World War II ?a life circumstance she shared with contemporaries like Gemma Cruz and Tweetums Gonzales, who also lost their fathers to that war.
A Daughter?s Genius

Betsy?s mother, who had remarried Dr. Gonzalo Austria, recognized her eldest daughter?s genius. Before she and I met on our first day at St. Theresa?s College in 1959, Betsy had already spent a summer in Oxford for a taste of how it would be to study there, but decided to stay in Manila for college. That year she was flush with pleasure over the Bayanihan?s first triumphant foreign tour, with her dusky dancing cousin Lita Ramos as part of a showcase of hidden gems in a country called the Philippines, too little known in Europe.

It didn?t take me long to realize that Betsy of the soulful, big, brown eyes saw far beyond the insular world of our birth. That she was born to privilege in linked clans ? the Benitezes, Ramoses and Romualdezes, Abellas somewhere in between, Austrias as younger siblings ? was only part of the story. Soon a poet?s disturbing vision would give her college friends a shake with a poem in the literary Orion magazine, mourning the cutting of an old acacia tree to make way for a gas station around her maternal clan?s tree-lined nest/neighborhood on Mariposa Street near Camp Crame. After my mother?s own passionate garden-keeping, Betsy had given me my first lesson in ecology before I even knew the word.

Sharing intriguing, unfamiliar ideas was how she and I became the best of friends in college and into the first years of our youthful stories for the Manila Times? Sunday magazine. There she and cartoonist Nonoy Marcelo tickled each other?s imagination no end, equally close in a barkada that included, how little we suspected, a future National Artist in our lanky layout artist-of-a-few words, BenCab.

Nothing is too outrageous to try at least once. That?s how two colegialas wound up scouring BenCab?s native Bambang in hunt for secondhand clothes and Quiapo for anting-antings like the one Nonoy wore. Betsy and I did not realize it then, but we were being ?nativized? by the larger world, closer to life beyond class and convent walls, closer to the proud-to-be Pinays we were becoming.

With fun as medium of discovery, her next brilliant idea was to convert an old family house on Shaw Boulevard, near Jose Rizal College, into Manila?s first discotheque, with the immemorial name, ?Black Angel? ? a favorite symbol of the mysteries of the human subconscious dotting modernist poetry. There, with more non-convent friends just met, we danced our hearts out to the Bee Gees, the Rolling Stones et al on 45 and 75 rpm records spun by Manila?s wittiest disc jockey, the future film director Ishmael Bernal.

Black Angel Dies; Indios Bravos is Born

Our Black Angel period ended when Betsy?s mom decided to end the risk of more shooting sprees on its grounds by gun-slinging rich brats. But it would live on in our generation?s memory as life next took Betsy and me to New York for further studies ? I, in a structured university course; she, in the blooming counter-culture of Greenwich Village East. There she got together with the Ateneo graduate and aspiring Fil-Am filmmaker, Henry Hunt Francia, whom she eventually married.

The title of a prototype indie film he shot in the mid ?60s summed up a theme of the period ? ?On My Way to India Consciousness, I Found China.? For those hearing this story for the first time, that?s poetic shorthand for ?on the road to enlightenment came a mortal struggle of opposites.?

Back home not too long after, Betsy asked me wistfully one afternoon, ?But don?t you think the ideal life is half in Manila and half in New York?? Yes, I said without a pause. She soon came up with the next best thing. As the revolutionary ?60s rushed into the ?70s, her next project to bring the world to Manila ? and Manila to itself ? would be Café Los Indios Bravos on Mabini Street in Malate, named after the Filipino Propaganda Movement in exile eight decades earlier.

With an art gallery alongside and artist studios on the second floor, Indios became a rendezvous of choice for local and visiting artists and intellectuals. The new Communist Party of the Philippines had just been founded and the Marcos government was mutating into a dictatorship. How could Indios resist becoming a trysting place for subversives, political and counter-cultural, against a backdrop of old-fashioned bores?

There wasn?t much Betsy could do when the husband of her second-degree aunt, Imelda Romualdez-Marcos, cut off our New York option decisively by declaring a travel ban with martial law. Soon, however, she was researching and writing a book tracing the overweening power of ?Auntie Meldy? back to her humble place in Romualdez clan history. ?Imelda and the Clans? would be a high-born relative?s putdown of both personage and social context.

To this day, there?s no lack of old Indios denizens to blame that book for the drug bust at the café soon after martial law, a reprise of Black Angel?s demise, government version. It hauled off Betsy to Camp Crame for a brief spell that became a permanent reality check. Three decades later, Virginia Moreno recalls that Betsy was released only at the behest of her younger brother Pitoy, Mrs. Marcos?s esteemed couturier.

It remains a pity that in the ensuing confusion and Indios? enforced closing, Betsy?s book of elegant language, insight and wealth of primary sources has been overshadowed by Carmen Pedrosa?s ?Untold Story of Imelda Marcos.? That?s been the luck of the draw so far as the Wheel of Fortune continues turning.

Far from the End

It was far from the end of Betsy?s adventures in the untried, however. By the mid ?70s, it would be no less than the Madame-soaked Cultural Center of the Philippines for a staging of Mahal ? the first Filipino rock opera for which she wrote the lyrics and storyline, tracing the proud tribal roots of our culture and linking it to the counter-culture of the ?70s that it had inspired. Collaboration for its music by Ramon Faustman and Bing Labrador was equally inspired as much by the kundiman and indigenous tribal music as the trancelike Indian raga beloved by our counter-culture, punctuated by loud rock. A lyricist eloquent in both Tagalog and English, Betsy, used the pen name ?Raisa Lahat-Wala? as a name for the death of ego, our generation?s Holy Grail.

Over three decades later, Mahal. became Luigi Francia?s last memory of Betsy. ?I am very glad I visited her last Sunday, where we had lunch with my brother Joseph and his family, and Betsy's caregivers. She was well rested, looked healthy, had a good appetite and even sang the theme song of Mahal. We talked briefly about staging a revival of this pioneering work. I fervently hope it will be,? he e-mailed hours after her sudden passing.

Between those lines were the 15 years that had passed since her constant headaches and debilitation were diagnosed as a brain tumor, paralyzing half her body and keeping her bedridden. If pain is the coin of wisdom, and solitude its air and balm, Betsy, also widowed four years earlier, had more than earned the nirvana she had longed for ? in an exit ?not from life, only this plane of existence,? I can almost hear her saying.

After the news broke, the first call was an inquiry from an old Indios habitué on where one might pay final respects. The query turned out to be from Imelda Marcos, who was at Mariposa by the second night of the wake. Only now do I hear this: it was also she who paid for Betsy?s brain surgery in 1995, buying thirteen more years on earth for a brilliant niece who had dared challenge Madame?s power with her own. I suspect this aunt did not miss the import of Betsy?s passing on Independence Day and memorial ritual on Jose Rizal?s birthday.

Life is strange, and so are people ? one more reason for hope to gleam in dark hour over a changing landscape, inner and outer.

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