I was appalled that another mortician, a mere tradesman pretending to be an artist, claimed he was going to rebuild and beautify the real face of Ferdinand Marcos. This lout, the mortician, not the even more egregious Marcos, I shall not deign to name. He appeared but briefly on the historical stage before I evicted him. Only a creative master would be able to transform the decaying Marcos into something tolerable to anyone but an earthworm.

Let me elaborate. The once handsome and robust Ferdinand Marcos, a disciplined weight lifter and jogger and avid user of creams and cosmetics, watched morosely as weakening kidneys and other organs robbed him of his physical gifts and turned him, by his 1986 exile after twenty-one years of bloodsucking the Philippines, into a hobbling old man bearing a withered and sinking face. The physical destruction, day by day for three years in Hawaii, became unspeakably worse, and the former leader – for all his crimes, a leader he was – shriveled into a skeleton that made everyone shudder.

His wife Imelda, a woman of doubtful virtue and boundless lust for spending the money of impoverished Filipinos, insisted her husband not be buried and that, instead, the Marcos Mausoleum and Museum be established as a shrine to his public service and, perhaps, a springboard to the presidency for Ferdinand, Jr., a clever playboy and politician affectionately known to all as Bongbong.

Initially, I had examined the corpse and explained even I could not enhance the frightening remnants of her husband. Then build me a new one, Imelda Marcos said. I agreed, but counseled, for sake for verisimilitude, that we maintain the body so everyone can rightly say it is that of the former president. The face remained a daunting hurdle until, after days of contemplation, I shouted: Eureka, I’ll make a mold of his face, an elegant msk, and then, centimeter by centimeter, cover it with wax and other synthetic substances to create a face even better, and decidedly larger, than the one borne by young Ferdinand Marcos. Using the finest Filipino hair, in demand worldwide for wigs, I fashioned sleek eyebrows and a silken hairstyle that is most attractive, even in a refrigerated glass tomb.

Sometimes visitors remark that Marcos has a waxy look. To them I say, go ahead, rip off the mask and see how you like what’s underneath. In fact, this superficial Ferdinand Marcos is the best we’ve ever had.

Click here to see Ferdinand Marcos at rest