The Benito sisters, Nieves and Lourdes, the eternal Odette who liked to refer to herself as the Black Swan, were not only tall and willowy, they were the perfect hosts, each in her own fashion.
Where the more cerebral Mrs. E (the name by which Nieves B. Epistola was called by her students and proteges in the ’70s) selected her own society that hung around her porch on M. Viola street at the UP Diliman campus, Odette, the queen of hearts, flung open the doors of the old Heritage Art Center at its original location in San Juan to all and sundry. She was its moving spirit when it changed location to Cubao. And when it burned down and moved to another location, her Blue Ridge home acquired a democratic gravitational pull of its own, attracting artists, chess players, ideologues and environmentalists.
Mrs. E liked to tell stories about her kid sister: how she gifted her with Benjamin Spock’s book which became Odette’s bible in raising her four sons; how bored Odette was with being a corporate banker’s wife and how she went into a rice-selling business, to Ate Nievs’ chagrin. Mrs. E thought of giving Odette an art book this time and that started her on art dealing. The sideline turned into a main line until Mario Alcantara and sons took over the business.
Even when she was the doyenne of that mini-cultural center, venue for book launches, concerts, bazaars and plays, including Miss Rita Gomez’s unforgettable performance of The Human Voice under Anton Juan’s direction, I intuited that Odette’s heart was not into the day-to-day running of a business, even if it allowed her to interact with her kind of crazy wonderful people.
Her office opened to a balcony where she’d be seen with nose buried in a book or bent over a chessboard while a heated argument went on at the Manansala Café below. Once, I saw Mario looking totally pissed off because Odette suddenly jumped into a car with a bouquet of flowers to meet Miss Gomez somewhere and left him to handle a gallery full of visitors. It was a quintessentially Odette gesture to give artists a sense of their importance in her, and by extension, the community’s, life.
Famed for her punning, this talent of hers found a creative outlet when she and some friends formed the core of Los Enemigos. If humor could help bring down a more than 20-year-old dictatorship, Los Enemigos should share part of the credit.
It was as an environmentalist, however, that Odette hit her stride. As she said, “This is a rainbow coalition where the left, right, center can come together.” Sometimes her alliances with whoever was environment secretary at the moment, from Fulgencio Factoran to Victor Ramos to Angelo Reyes and Lito Atienza, would make her friends flinch. But if it could increase the country’s forest cover, she would’ve wined and dined the Devil itself.
She wasn’t anyone’s patsy, though. On his first day of office at the vital Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Atienza turned up wearing his signature Hawaiian shirt unlike the outgoing Reyes whose military training made him dress more formally to give importance to the office.
Odette described the incoming secretary’s shirt as “kukur couture.”
I asked, “How’s that again?”
“Kukurtinahin!” she gasped and laughed.
Her commitment was so total that she turned around the awful garbage situation in her exclusive subdivision. Blue Ridge became a model community where members learned composting and waste segregation. Troops of schoolchildren would fill her sala where she, actor Roy Alvarez or her other amigas/amigos in the cause would lecture and demonstrate how easy cleaning up the environment is. There was always a feast of suman and other kakanin and juice afterwards so the children would get a firsthand exercise on how to dispose of biodegradable banana leaf wrappers in her backyard by burying them.
At one of Gilda Cordero Fernando’s parties in the mid-1990s, wary that all that would come out of Odette’s mouth would be another mini-lecture on garbage (a joke that went around was: “There’s nothing in Odette’s mind but basura!”), I made small talk, wondering aloud what the key to longevity was.
Her answer came quick: “I’m going to live long because I’ve decided to take on toxic waste. Ridding the planet of it will take forever!”
Illustration is Odette as I see her now: from black swan to green butterfly
.jpg)
