Renato and Miriam, a most awaited act

THIS TIME she did not go solo, as is her regular act; she had a quartet to back her up, piping choo-choo-wah and, even with just that, managing to contribute a worthy measure of dissonance to her grating, out-of-tune style.

It was Wednesday’s featured outrage at the trial of the impeached chief justice, Renato Corona, and it came across as particularly dreadfully special.

Miriam Defensor-Santiago and her trucklers inflicted themselves with a savagery that screamed in contrast to the calm of their target witness – not to mention the fortitude, a quality that a target before him, one of the prosecutors, had lacked: risking a citation for contempt, he pressed his palms to his ears to switch off Santiago and stop himself messing in the wrong place at the wrong time – for which he might, come to think of it, have got off on a legitimate health excuse.

Proving himself as tough viscerally as he is large physically, the later target, Administrator Eulalio Diaz III of the Land Registration Authority, just sat there and took Santiago and her fawning four quietly.

They pronounced Diaz biased for the prosecution on the tenuous syllogism that, as an appointee of President (Noynoy) Aquino, he was not only presumed to adopt his wish to be rid of Corona as his own, but expected to act on it, as he in fact did by supplying the prosecution with papers giving the impression that Corona owned properties more than double the number he actually owned. Diaz maintained that he had simply supplied the materials the prosecution had asked of him, would have done the same service for the defense, and also would have left it alone to sort, evaluate, and use them as it pleased.

Anyway, the final determination of what to keep in and what to leave out had been done at the trial, making Diaz’s appearance unnecessary. But Miriam was not to be deprived of her performance; after all, and easily, she is the member of the impeachment court that most reflects its nature – sui generis.

The wonder is what sort of act Miriam is reserving for when Corona comes to testify – if he does come to testify. To be sure, she has proved herself also capable of saccharine outrage.

How can anyone forget her act with Toby Tiangco (Navotas Representative), the young congressman who came coiffed and dapper, handsome in a mephistophelian way, and, incidentally, irrelevant? He testified for the defense and found his champion in Miriam. The after taste still lingers. Toby was not quite Romeo to Miriam’s Juliet, but more Julius Cesar, except alive, to her Mark Anthony.

Indeed, Renato and Miriam are a most awaited act.

But Renato seems not too eager to do it – for all his protestations of being falsely accused, not too eager to seize his day in court and face his accusers, not even as he looks more and more guilty by his absence.

Why? Is it Miriam? Is he afraid that a Miriam act might amount to a kiss of conviction?