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When my
dear friend, Aber P. Canlas, was laid to his final rest
at Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina City on Tuesday, I
was not around to say good-bye. I was in town and not
too busy at the time, so why was I not there in
accordance with our time-honored tradition of
pakikiramay?
It’s
really a personal quirk. As a rule, I stay away from
such depressing rituals, especially when such rituals
concern a close friend. The exceptions to this rule are
few. I remember the necro for another dear friend,
Arturo “Bong” Tanco Jr., agriculture minister in the
time of Marcos. As his official spokesman, I was
expected to put in a good word at the necrological
services held in his honor at the Department of
Agriculture basketball gym. But the nearest I got to the
center of the action, where Marcos himself was present,
was at the fringe of the crowd outside the gym door. I
was simply not up to the task. It took some time before
I could try to measure the man’s worth and extol his
shining example of honest service that many of those he
worked with remember fondly to this day.
Aber
Canlas and Bong Tanco are in this sense kindred spirits.
This is why I mention the two of them in the same vein.
Both racked up monumental accomplishments during their
stint as public servants—yet remained modest in their
respective lifestyles, indicating they never took
advantage of their positions to enrich themselves. As
far as I know, the two were never close, but both Aber
and Bong never did anything in office that would
diminish their integrity. Bong died practically a pauper
by middle-class standards; Aber died in the same address
where Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos found him—on the
street beside Loyola Memorial Park where he is now
buried.
One
would expect that after all the ambitious infrastructure
projects that the Marcos government had put Aber in
charge of, he would have made quite a pile of money from
legal commissions on the procurement costs alone. Aber
liked to tell me that he did not have to steal or make a
dishonest buck from government contracts because he knew
he could always go back to a lucrative engineering
career when the government was through with him. And so
it came to pass that after the Marcos era, Aber did go
back to his private-sector livelihood of building houses
and buildings. He obviously was understating it when he
said he was “earning just enough to keep my family,
especially my grandsons, out of poverty’s reach.”
Every
time you cruise along Roxas Boulevard, you can’t miss
the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP), which Aber
built in record time, in accordance with Mrs. Marcos’s
ambitious plans for promoting the performing arts.
Inside the CCP complex are other structures that endure
to this day—the Folk Arts Theater, the Coconut Palace
and, yes, the Philippine International Convention
Center.
Like
other ambitious projects pushed by Mrs. Marcos, the
Philippine Heart Center, Kidney Institute and Lung
Center were all built by the miracle worker Aber Canlas—all
in record time. But to this day, these edifices remain
sturdy and proud, none the worse for the apparently
hasty pace at which they were built. And of course, the
LRT 1 along Avenida Rizal is also among his enduring
handiworks.
In my
book—and of course I am biased because he was the
baptismal godfather to my daughter Guenevere —Aber had
the heart of a lion, the skills and intellect of a
Michelangelo and the virtues of a saint.
His only
defect—and we loved to kid him about this during our
drinking sessions—was his habit of dropping “h”s
everywhere and adding “h”s to all words that begin in
consonants. He is a native of Floridablanca, you see.
Somehow, he couldn’t shake off the native Pampangueno’s
speech habits.
And so,
he and our other drinking buddy—former agriculture
secretary Domingo F. Panganiban (now head of the
antipoverty commission)—would guffaw each time he gives
any of his sidekicks an ass-chewing. He would say
something like this: “’Ayup ka, bata, bakit ’indi mo
gawin ang hinuhutos ko sa ’yo?”
To the
very end, Aber was a devoted family man, always closely
watching how his kids and his grandchildren are getting
on with the game of life. Thus, over the last 12 years
or so, he has ceased to be the master builder or miracle
worker for anybody, just a plain engineer selectively
choosing building projects. By the time he reached 70,
he had somehow morphed into something else.
Mark
Canlas de Leon, Aber’s eldest grandson by his eldest
daughter Amy, described Aber in his eulogy as “The Super
Lolo,” with reference to how he patiently took them to
school every day when they were yet in the elementary
grades, and how he patiently nurtured their everyday
progress till they were old enough to fend for
themselves. Panganiban says it was a moving tribute that
was worth a hundred national awards for construction
excellence.
At the
funeral that I missed, Secretary Panganiban recounts how
100 balloons and 100 butterflies were released into the
air just as Aber’s casket was being lowered to its tomb.
On that occasion, by the way, several Cabinet members of
the Marcos era were present to pay their last respects
to Aber. They included justice minister Estelito
Mendoza, former information minister Kit Tatad, former
secretary Vic Macalingcag, Manny Alba, Mel Mathay,
Bayani Fernando, Rafael Alunan, Teodoro Encarnacion, F.
F. Cruz Sr. and F.F. Cruz Jr.
Panganiban says he didn’t realize that five of those
butterflies had landed on his back to rest on his barong
as he made his way near the niche where the casket was
to be lowered. Only when he had touched the casket and
murmured, “Goodbye, pare!” did the five fly off for the
trees beyond the park. Somebody at the back told him
about the five butterflies.
Godspeed, pareng Aber.
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