Gilda Cordero-Fernando (Source: Inquirer.net)

I first met Gilda Cordero Fernando in the late sixties. I was just two years out of college and an aspiring journalist. She was a multi-awarded author of short stories. A graduate of St. Theresa’s College of Manila with a master’s in creative writing from the Ateneo de Manila, she had published three books, The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker and A Wilderness of Sweets, and a children’s book called Horgle and the King’s Soup.  Her short story, “People in the War,” the poignant reminiscences of a young girl living in Manila under the Japanese Occupation through liberation, is my all-time favorite of Gilda’s writings.  

Gilda was beautiful, elegant, and gracious. And her mind was in constant motion. She was ever re-inventing herself, like the psychedelic figures in Peter Max-inspired cartoons by Heinz Edelmann in the Beatles’ movie, “Yellow Submarine,” that constantly evolve into stars, moons, trees, flowers, and rainbows, and what-nots. There was no end to her ideas, many of which were outlandish and hard to imagine being brought into reality. But Gilda saw them through, and the world became more interesting, more colorful, more entertaining, thanks to her.

To name a few, off-hand and random, she worked with artists to convert wheelchairs into interesting vehicles for the sick, by decorating them to look like chariots, rolling thrones, monuments, sports cars, etc. She deconstructed old sayas (traditional Filipina dress) and put parts of them together for a new modern look and worked with designers to present them in a fashion show called “Jamming with an Old Saya,” with a book to boot. She produced a wildly imaginative ground-breaking play called “Luna: An Aswang Romance,” the likes of which Manila had never seen before. She invited artists to her home to decorate her walls and embed her bathroom walls with broken pottery, marbles, and other small objects. She wore whatever suited her fancy, with aplomb, in the process setting trends. She took up the brush and illustrated her dreams and visions in watercolor at the ripe age of 70. And she held her own funeral 12 years before her actual demise and wrote about it in her Sunday column.

Cordero-Fernando’s “Jamming on an Old Saya”

Whatever Gilda did, strange as they sometimes were, became magical. Whatever she started became a trend.

Her entry into the literary circles was not without difficulty. She was convent-bred, spoke and wrote fluently in English, and didn’t go to the University of the Philippines where most of the writers came from. She told me in an interview for Goodman Magazine in 1975, that having graduated from St. Theresa’s College, she was not expected to “know life.” She was told that her characters did not “live” if they were not dirt poor or dying of tuberculosis and cursing each other to the top of their lungs. She recalled a much-acclaimed story by Andres Cristobal Cruz about a dead pig stuck for days under the toilet of a shanty built over an estero. Sighed Gilda: “Alas, my toilets were called bathrooms and they smelled like rode gardens!”

But she persisted, and she won major writing awards from the Philippines Free Press, Pamana, and multiple Palanca Memorial Awards (1954, 1957, 1964, and 1967, including the Gawad Dangal ng Lahi in 2014). In 1994, the Cultural Center of the Philippines honored her with the Gawad ng Lahi award for her lifetime achievement in literature and publishing. And in 2008, she was the Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi awardee of the Ateneo de Manila University.

Pre-martial law, she wrote a column “Tempest in a Teapot” for the Manila Chronicle’s Woman and the Home Magazine. When the Chronicle was closed down by the martial law regime, she wrote for Woman’s Home Companion a column she called “Far-Out Catalogue,” a listing of unusual finds such as where to get the fastest haircut in Manila, and the only person who could mend your chipped china to look like new.

Gilda ran an antique shop in the old Mabini district, that carried not the usual sentimental old pieces from times past, but unique trend-setting stuff rightfully called Junque, which was what she named her store. She collected and sold old bottles – blues, yellows, greens, and plain ones that were usually regarded as junk. She was also in the market for bird cages – the older, the better, that she had reproduced and sold in her store. She introduced me to the gaudy papier maché folk art of Liliw in Laguna, that she raised to the level of collectors’ items.

She was usually the first to try anything out and was ardently copied. In the Goodman article, Gilda talked about how exhausting it was to be one step ahead of the competition. “We opened with an antique gramophone in our show window. The shop owner across the street put up a gramophone in his. I put up a harp. He put in a harp. A carried Zamboanga mats. The two Muslim shops across the aisle now carry mats….I put bottles in the show window. Some shops used to carry one or two bottles, but now, everyone’s stocking up on them like they were sardines during the war.” Gilda adds that after she bought an antique tuba for display, another shop brought in an entire orchestra – saxophones, trumpets, cornets, etc.

“It’s funny because some things I bought to put up only to set a tone or create a mood – who’s going to buy an old tuba?! – but everybody is so dead serious about copying the stuff.” All she had, she said, was “originality and imagination” to keep one step ahead of the competition, and she was exhausted. “I wish someone would do something I could copy.”

That was not going to happen, because Gilda was an original and her imagination was unlike any other’s.

In the early ‘70s, she worked with Alfredo Roces and other historians, artists, and writers who published the ten-volume Filipino Heritage, a wonderful resource on Filipino history and culture that my daughters loved so much, it became part of their bed-time reading. Learning from Filipino Heritage, she later went into publishing what was famously known as GCF Books. Decrying the earlier drab books on local culture that merely stayed on the shelves, unappreciated, she boldly produced lushly illustrated and well-written coffee-table books that set the tone and the trend in publishing Filipiniana. Her titles, which include Culinary Culture of the Philippines, Turn of the Century, Philippine Ancestral Houses, Streets of Manila, Folk Architecture, Being Filipino, The Soul Book, History of the Burgis, and Ladies Who Lunch, quickly became collectors’ items. GCF Books titles were not only beautifully packaged, they were also eminently researched, truly valuable contributions to Philippine history, arts, and culture.

Cordero- Fernando’s “Turn of the Century”

But Gilda did not stop at book publishing. She was, in the language of the Seventies, groovy, and her talent and curiosity were irrepressible. She went on creating for the culturati -- writing and producing for theater, designing and mounting fashion shows. During martial law, she was part of Los Enemigos (with the late Odette Alcantara) that published spoofs about the dictatorship, including a fashion show depicting the ills of the Marcos regime. She even appeared in Mike de Leon’s movie, “Sr. Stella L,” as part of a group of mourning women, who included the late Odette Alcantara and Sylvia Mayuga, and other Women Writers Rochit Tañedo, Ceres Doyo, Arlene Babst and this writer. We were unpaid extras who were given Royal Tru Orange at the end of the shoot.

Gilda embraced life and people. She befriended young artists and writers and jammed with them, collaborating on projects, feeding on each other’s creativity, with passion and humor. In the last decade, she drew a wider audience who followed her unconventional take on everything in her Sunday column, “Forever 81,” for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Gilda was forever groovy. Despite her years, she didn’t grow old; she lived in the present, keeping up with the times by engaging people of all ages – imagining, collaborating, creating -- and having the time of her life.

In an interview in 2017, published by Businessworld online, Gilda said of herself: “This is my theory in life: Some people create the same things over and over and over — and they make masterpieces. I don’t like doing the same thing again and again, ever. Sometimes I’m doing a play; sometimes I’m doing a fashion show; sometimes I’m doing whatever. I will never do the same thing. My happiness is the change, the movement, the difference in the things I do.” (https://www.bworldonline.com/celebrating-beauty-gilda-cordero-fernando/)