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On a trip to London in 1985, four of us traveled with Enrique Zobel, our boss. He was booked in a penthouse at the Intercontinental Hotel across from Hyde Park, the rest of us were booked at the Hyatt. We had breakfast together every morning at 8, and after breakfast, he would walk around the round table, picking up the unused little packs of butter and marmalade, and throw them into a huge bowl in a sideboard in the foyer close to the front door. I thought to myself, “Wow! This guy is super-frugal,” imagining EZ to pack them in his suitcase when it would be time to fly back to Manila. The day came, and to my pleasant surprise, I saw him empty the bowl into a tote bag, and hand it to the Jamaican cleaning lady with a hundred-pound note. Needless to say, I chastised myself for thinking EZ would take home the marmalade and butter packs. Ayala had the contract to build the Sultan of Brunei’s 1,788-room palace, designed by National Artist for Architecture Leandro Locsin. When the Filipino supervisors complained that the Bechtel contractors, Americans, were treating Filipino bosses like peons, EZ fired Bechtel, replacing them with Dave Consunji’s team. The Istana Nurul Iman with two gold domes was completed just before Brunei’s independence in 1984. The Sultan was proud! After EZ’s polo accident which had resulted in his becoming a quadriplegic, it would take three months of hospitalization which involved a month in a rinky-dink hospital in Malaga, before he was med-evacked on a special flight across the Atlantic and across the U.S. to the Stanford Hospital in California, where he was confined for another two months. When he finally came home, he was briefly hospitalized at Makati Med where we visited him. Of course, it was a huge, and painful shock to see him lying there, ramrod straight and unable to move anything other than open and close his mouth and eyes. When he saw the tears about to flow, he stopped them dead in their tracks by saying, “You know how I found out I couldn't move? This buxom nurse leaned over me a few inches above my face. Of course, I attempted to reach for her wonderful breasts when I discovered I couldn't move. There was a mirror on the ceiling, and with that, I suddenly realized I was a quadriplegic.” Of course, I laughed, but then, the tears came anyway. There was my beloved boss, stricken, but still seeking to comfort me. What a guy! (EZ happened to be in my office when Teddy Boy Locsin walked in, saw our boss in a wheelchair, burst into tears and fled the room!) His wife Dee looked after him for the next 14 years, overseeing everything related to his care and well-being. Wonderful lady – no wonder EZ loved her so! How did I first meet EZ? I was a writer for the Filipinas Foundation in 1982, working in an office on the third floor of the Makati Stock Exchange Building, also designed by Lindy Locsin, and built by Bechtel, who also built the Ayala-owned Intercontinental Hotel. EZ and George Shultz became great friends while the latter was with Bechtel. When Shultz became the U.S. Secretary of State, he shared a lot of private government information with EZ about therealscoreundermartiallaw. JaimeZobeldeAyalawasaclose friend, long before I joined the Foundation, Ayala’s cultural arm, which supervised the Ayala Museum. Jaime and I contributed stories to Letty Jimenez Magsanoc at the Panorama Magazine, the Bulletin’s Sunday magazine. We would clamber into the Ayala chopper on our building’s roof, and he would shoot typhoon-flooded barrios as far north as Pangasinan – Central Luzon was one huge lagoon from the 1980 typhoon – while I took notes, which photo-essays we submitted to Letty. Another memorable photo-essay was the Morong, Bataan Refugee Center, for the Vietnamese “boat people,” refugees who had fled South Vietnam when the Communists overran it in 1975. When I wanted to work at Ayala, I asked Maurito Blardony, among Ayala’s top executives, to find me a job there as a writer. Jaime was at the Cannes Film Festival with Lino Brocka for a couple of weeks. I told Maurito I wanted to walk into Ayala’s front door as a professional, and not as Jaime’s friend, so that people wouldn’t think I used our friendship to be given a position there. In a couple of days, dear Maurito had found me a job as a writer with Filipinas Foundation. It was two years before I met Ayala’s top boss, Enrique Zobel. I was a member of the Foreign Correspondents Club, FOCAP, for short, and f_ _ _ - up, its derogatory nickname. Of course, we shared a lot of information not otherwise known to the public under martial law. It seemed a waste not to share it with Ayala’s top boss, an influential person, so I told Pinky Valdez, EZ’s assistant, I would give her slips of paper with whatever important confidential information I had, which she could give EZ on the pledge she would not reveal its source. I wasn’t trying to win points, just passing stuff on. We went like that for two years before Pinky called me to come upstairs (the seventh floor executive suite because EZ wanted to meet his Deep Throat. I reminded Pinky that I didn’t want to appear like a sipsip, which is why I did not want EZ to know where his little notes were coming from. Besides, I said, I was in bakyas and jeans torn at the knee (my grandmother had died; ABOVE: Enrique Jacobo Emilio Zóbel-Roxas y Olgado (January 7, 1927–May 17, 2004). Manila Polo Club February 2004. there was no longer anyone to patch the kneehole with a fat red strawberry or an apple). I had a lowly job at the Foundation and my office was on the third floor, I did not feel I had to dress up like an executive. The only time I gussied up high heels and all, was when I would have a famous visiting newspaperman, whom Letty would ask me to take to lunch at the Ayala Executive Dining Room, just to give him a flavor of I-don’t-know-what, Keyes Beech, a Pulitzer prize-winner, writing for the L.A. Times, among a few other important journalists. Roy Rowan of Fortune magazine, whom EZ eventually met. He flew Roy and me in his Aérospatiale chopper, while he herded his cattle, and Roy wrote a great article about him with an accompanying photo of EZ piloting the chopper. Otherwise, it was jeans and bakyas that would happen to be what I was in when Pinky insisted that EZ had waited long enough to meet me, and that he could have cared less about my attire. Reluctantly, and shyly, I walked into his office, many steps away from the door to his desk beside a window. “Oh, it’s a girl!” Two chairs with arm rests faced each other in front of his desk. “Please, sit down,” motioning to a seat. First, he pointed to a sketch of his son on the wall behind him, explaining that Santi had died at 11 from an injury received on the football field, which they had supposed to be influenza. I guess, in his kindness to help me relax, he wanted to share a personal story, which obviously still hurt him in the telling, years after Santi had passed away. I don’t remember what else we chatted about for over an hour, but I do remember that I was so relaxed that I put my feet up on the opposite chair and started to smoke. In those days, one didn’t have to ask for permission to smoke. After much congenial conversations, Cory, his secretary, came in to slip him a note. He just nodded, Cory left, and in came a top executive whom he cussed out in Spanish. The coños flew and the poor man standing, suffered a barrage of insults, EZ pointing out the fellow wasn’t doing his job at all. The man left after a humiliating ten minutes, and sufficiently frightened for the sudden volte-face, from a very relaxed convivial conversation to this barrage of Spanish invectives frightened me. I prepared to make a 10-yard dash for the door, when EZ barked, “Sit down!” as the second executive entered. Like the first executive, the roly-poly man wasn’t asked to sit down. He just stood beside the desk, suffering a humiliating burst of invectives, but this time in English. Same thing, “You’re not doing your job.” Ten minutes, but this time, if I was nervous after the first barrage, I was shaken after the second salvo. Preparing to flee, again, I was barked at to, “Sit down!” In came the next victim, dressed down and insulted in Tagalog. To recall how terrified I was at this point is understating the facts. As the insultee walked out, I said, “Sir, I’m outta here.” “No, you’re not. Relax. Have a cigarette, and give me one too.” I knew he didn’t smoke, but he did, gamely. Resuming his friendly conversational tone, he explained. “Don’t worry; these guys deserve the shellacking, but I understand that you work hard with the Foundation, so we can be friendly,” putting his cigarette out after a few puffs. That was how we met, torn jeans, bakyas, and all. EZ moved to be chairman of the Bank of the Philippine Islands, and since the BPI president, Xavier Loinaz had long asked me to move over to the bank, I did and continued to do odd jobs for Xavier and EZ. Ninoy Aquino had been killed by then. Since the bank stood right across from the Ugarte Field, where all the anti-Marcos demonstrators converged to listen to speeches by Jaime Ongpin and Ramon del Rosario, Jr., and other business anti-Marcos leaders, the foreign press hang out in my office which Xavier had furnished with sofas, and we served coffee. When EZ left the bank and moved to the Enzo Building on Buendia, he gave me a really great office on the second floor, which was a copycat of his own fifth-floor corner office, and similarly, had its own bathroom. To boot, my office also had an outside extension enclosed with a section for my secretary, and another glassed-in room with a computer and a coffee pot and cups on the other end. The Business press wrote their stories there, and now and again, Senator Vicente Paterno did some work on that computer too. I’m a Luddite. I didn't have a desk in this fancy new office with picture windows to the west and to the south, and much light streaming in, with a view of all Ayala Avenue’s skyscrapers. But no desk. In our new offices, EZ, in his interior-designed office, had a much bigger new desk. He gave me his lovely former desk of dark narra with two-toned inlays on each of its six drawers – truly unique, it may be the only desk of its design in the country. “Many important deals,” he said, had been struck at this desk, of course. He wasn’t the Philippines’ top business executive for nothing. In fact, it was under his aegis that the Makati Business Club was formed, as its chairman, to give Big Businesses a voice under martial law. I should have asked him what important contracts were signed on that desk; it’s too late now, but it’s safe to say that a lot of important transactions took place on it. After all, this is the man who built the Sultan’s 1,772-room, two-gold-domed palace in Brunei. All I remember now, since I was present, was his putting in 17 percent into Raul Locsin’s BusinessWorld newspaper. Raul had been too shy to ask EZ himself whether he wanted to put equity into the paper. I asked EZ on behalf of Raul, and he was delighted to be invited to join the paper’s board. I love the desk, and have written on it from 1985 up to the present, writing dozens of articles for the Inquirer and BusinessWorld, and eight coffee table books, including two on the Sultan of Brunei and the country’s independence in 1984. I continue to write coffee table books for corporates, and famous people, my latest being “Children of War,” relating children’s World War II experiences, including lots of EZ stories and a few of mine, as well as something like 40 other children’s war stories. I continue to write, but sadly, it will have to be on a much humbler desk. When I retire to move to Iloilo, I will not be able to bring heavy pieces of furniture such as EZ’s desk, which must weigh at least a ton. I will miss my beloved desk from EZ, but great memories and stories about him are locked in my heart.