Chronicles Revealed

Chapter 19: Invaluable Opinions

Eli Viado called me up last week. He had just arrived from the U.S. and he would like to see me. Though we kept in touch through the social media, It has been quite a long time since we last met in person and his call came as a pleasant surprise to me. Good for the both of us we still had the same cellphone numbers; otherwise I wouldn't have answered the call. I don't answer unregistered numbers.

Eli is one of the few close friends I have going back to college days. We worked in different banks but kept in touch. It was not too difficult for either of us to go up the supposedly steep ladder of corporate success. There wasn't a year that I was not promoted and so was he. He was with sales while I was with operations, two sides of the same coin. Subsequently, he transferred to another bank, only to resign a few years later to immigrate to the U.S. with his entire family.

Eli was a very bright student but you wouldn't believe it in the way he conducted himself in school. The professors knew his abilities and they ignored his oddity. It was simply how brilliant people behaved. Look at Albert Einstein. They are exempted from the rules and norms that guide and govern normal people like me. When exams came he almost always topped it, yet no one saw him study or read a book or review whatever notes he may have had, scoring as high 100% and none less than 95% n the exams. He was very good at accounting and could solve a problem ahead of the professor. But he knew how to hold his punches, so to speak. One thing that made him odder was that he did not want to embarrass anyone. The professor always finished first. He was a brilliant man with a soft heart.

Eli hardly brought anything with him to school, just a notebook he folded and placed in his left back pocket. He dressed simply and didn't go for signature shirts and jeans and he was full of humility in the way he relates to people and friends around him. Though his parents had provided him with a car of his own, Eli preferred to commute to and from school. Some thought he came from a poor family or something. The truth of the matter is that Eli came from a very affluent family better off than many rich people we knew.

His father was a corporate lawyer and a businessman while his mother was a well-known gynecologist and both had very successful practices. I met Eli's parents once or twice in their house when Eli invited me to a birthday party. I found them genuinely cordial and kind. Eli is one fruit that fell very close to the tree. The father's business got better every year. They lived in a big house with a garage for four vehicles in a posh subdivision.  Despite its size, it had a refreshing ambiance to me.

If you were looking for Eli in school, though, you will invariably find him in the library. Not too many knew he was the classic bookworm. It is where we actually came to know each other. We liked the same books and the same authors. Like me he didn't read textbooks in the library. We read literary and philosophy books.  Oh yes, he graduated Summa Cum Laude while I simply graduated.  Maybe, I read the wrong books!

We became close and inseparable friends and I didn't exactly see why he was so comfortable with me.  I was actually socially and intellectually inferior to him.  However, he never patronized or condescend on me.  He some sort of look at me as his equal, more like a brother I thought, though I didn't know in what way. I never took advantage of our friendship and I managed on my own.  I never copied from him, particularly during exams. What was important, however, is that we were friends.

He had something important to attend to in the afternoon, so Eli asked me if we could meet and talk at Ayala center in the morning, the next day, about 10:30 AM, in a coffee shop. I said yes, no problem. Let's see each other at the Concierge and go to the coffee shop from there. I looked at it more as an opportunity to get an independent opinion on the information we had in our USB recordings than to see a friend again. In another scenario, the arrival of Eli would be a singular delight for me. I felt like I was betraying or manipulating or exploiting him, somehow.