Letizia: A Life in Letters

by Renato Redentor Constantino | ABS-CBN News

In April we hope to stage an exhibit compelling enough it might help define 2025, at least for those who will be able to see it. Titled Letizia: A Life in Letters, it will celebrate the 105th birth anniversary of a remarkable woman, a generational intellect, the writer, nationalist, and historian named Letizia Roxas Constantino.

Letizia chose to stay out of the limelight most of her life and because of this, few young folks know her today. But the retrospective, which opens at the Linangan Gallery in Panay Ave. on April 10 till May 30, is meant to supply a bit of light to the mystery. It is an event that hopes to remedy some of the forgetting.

As the exhibit will show through handwritten letters selected from thousands of postal (and a bit of electronic) correspondences spanning close to eight decades, Letizia wore many hats at the same time. She was mother, grandmother, dancer, pianist, comrade, and friend. And above all, as his lifelong collaborator, she was wife, lover, and editor to the historian Renato Constantino.

The couple loved one another fiercely, a love that would guide them as they confronted together the most challenging of times. She cared for her firstborn under Japanese occupation, with bombs periodically dropping on or near her dwellings, while Renato served in the clandestine intelligence service of the anti-fascist Philippine resistance. Together they faced the treacherous McCarthyist witchhunts of the 1950s as they did the great unrest of the 1960s, the long night of the Marcos dictatorship, and the return of civil liberties and restoration of elite rule after the EDSA uprising. They worked together to advance the cause of nationalism—their pursuit of social justice, national freedom, and democracy, unrelenting.

They wrote and published in 1975 the seminal history book, The Philippines: A Past Revisited but Letizia allowed her name to be listed—”With the collaboration of Letizia R. Constantino”—only in the inside title page. By 1978, however, she relented, because Renato would not have it any other way. The cover on their second volume of historical inquiry, The Philippines: The Continuing Past, would carry both their names.

Theirs was a unique love story. There was romance in abundance, for sure. Months before a bed-ridden Renato passed away in September 1999 was spent in part reading to one another love letters they wrote to each other in the 1940s. But it was also very much a lifetime of intellectual collaboration.

Letizia’s diary entry on 25 January 1977, one of legions she kept, illustrates how they worked together:

“R has the gift of cutting through a forest of details to get at the core. Alas, I find too many of the trees too beguiling not to include.

“As I liked to say about our work in Vol. 1, he sees the forest, I get lost among the trees. But – the trees also define and give shape to the forest, so we do complement each other.

“Another thing I liked to say about our collaboration: Without me, his book would be less good; without him, I would not produce anything.”

In an entry in May 1977, as she and Renato worked on The Continuing Past, Letizia would write, “I could say about Vol II and our collaboration in general: You may be reading my words but you are receiving his thoughts.”

Letizia Roxas Constantino was a prolific writer, particularly of letters written virtually daily to family, friends, and colleagues. Many carried prescient political analysis, spanning imperialism, tyranny, dogmatism in the Left, and the dire need to go far beyond the formal trappings of electoral democracy. But she never missed an opportunity write about love, fairness—particularly in relationships, and the myriad aspects of living life fully, through food, friendships, travel, and books.

Visitors to the exhibit might also think she had many hobbies, but if they read the panels closely, they will realize Letizia did everything with a purpose. Ballroom dancing, daily piano practice sessions covering Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff, regular active participation in her neighborhood exercise club, playing solitaire using two decks of cards—it all gave her great joy, certainly, but they were also all meant to keep her mind sharp. Just like the daily notes and clippings she maintained as she pored through, every morning, anywhere from 8 to 12 newspapers and magazines a day, which she mined for stories, facts, angles, and delightful opportunities to share with her growing family.

Regardless of the subject, from the mundane to the unsettling, Letizia always wrote with similar concision, clarity, and elegance, whether she was writing to a great grandchild, to her children, her husband, or to an editor or employee she barely knew.

She was a relentless chronicler who recorded the daily and monthly rhythms of life in a vast array of notebooks and journals. Letizia kept diaries over many decades and she maintained voluminous annotated records of household purchases, services paid, and thoughtful gifts she would—without fail—send to friends and relatives each month for over 70 years, along with accounts of books and pamphlets sold, income from small businesses she and Renato had put together to attain the financial independence they needed to realize, unencumbered, their life’s mission: to seed and water the goal of national and social liberation.

When Letizia turned eighty, the scholar Inday Ofreneo, who was also one of her dear friends, wrote: “She could have been a great concert pianist but love steered her to another direction not as glamorous but no less demanding. Today, we are all the richer for that twist of fate; from piano to pen. Both instruments require a certain harmony, discipline, and strength of spirit.”

“In Letty Constantino,” Ofreneo noted, “an additional but most decisive ingredient is omnipresent: A lifelong commitment to her beliefs, which translates itself into an abiding faith in her people and sustained joy in her work. For such a person, age is just a physical encroachment. Knowing her as a writer (and teacher) of admirable patience and consistency, and as a person of enviable warmth and optimism, unruffled by life’s ironies, one merely hopes to grow old just as gracefully, in rhythm with the times.”

The author is a grandson of Letizia Roxas Constantino. He is the managing director of the Constantino Foundation.

10
Apr