She counted 38 affairs and kept silent. She made a scene once (involving a gun), and spoke harshly to another. Cristina Castaner has been married to Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile for 56 years now, and says she has learned to deal with the rollercoaster that is their marriage.
In an exclusive interview with Prof. Solita Monsod, Mrs. Enrile recounts that during the early part of her marriage to her high-profile husband, she once packed a gun and asked her driver to take her to a house where she believes her husband was keeping a mistress. She let loose a few bullets at the gate and left.
Then she went to her husband's office and proceeded to wreck it. She opened a drawer full of papers, picked up a plant on a pot and dropped it there. Her husband's then aide-de-camp Gregorio Honasan was the only one able to calm her.
She recalls that there was one time she flew into a rage when she heard of another affair. Sen. Edgardo Angara who dropped by their house for a business meeting "was the one who held and pacified me," she says.
She recounts that throughout their marriage, Sen. Enrile denied her only one thing: a divorce.
At the height of Sen. Enrile's publicized affair with his then chief of staff Gigi Reyes, Mrs. Enrile went to the United States. There, she worked on their divorce papers. "He called and said 'over my dead body will I give you a divorce,'" she says.
"I met Gigi once and it wasn't nice," she says. "I gave it to her."
She says she has forgiven her husband over and over again, and has learned to accept his affairs as part of his flaw. But she does keep a list of all the 38 women "and the names I called them."
Bawal ang Pasaway kay Mareng Winnie airs every Monday, 10:15 PM on GMA News TV Channel 11.
