When we met, in a Manila Spanish tapas bar, she strode onto the terrace with a small entourage of 30-somethings. They comprised her own silent male bodyguard, an equally taciturn young woman in a leather jacket, and a gay ‘aide’ called Vince. All three wore black. Jocelyn, however, was elegantly dressed in a cream suit, forest-green blouse, diamond necklace, diamond earrings, diamond ring; every bit the governor’s daughter. She had her brother’s temperament, she said.
‘He was bossy. A prankster. We used to fight most of the time.’ She even described him as ‘quite a dictator’. This, when she said it, had the same effect on me as when her elder sister told me how her brother had ‘always got away with murder’. I had spontaneously guffawed as though they had made some cringe-worthy faux pas. Neither sibling registered this. Jocelyn continued, oblivious.
‘We had a love-hate relationship,’ she said. Jocelyn remembers her brother scaring off his sisters’ would-be suitors at the gate of the family home by waving a pistol at them from inside the property. Most turned and fled. Today, Jocelyn and her brother have apparently buried the hatchet in the name of national unity, but the antipathy reached such a point that, in 2001, she went so far as to stand against him in the Davao mayoral election. Two Dutertes on the ballot. Not for the first time, big brother won. Those who know the family well say Rodrigo and Jocelyn remain sporadically at war.
Soledad Roa Gonzales, their mother, was close to many priests in the city, particularly the Jesuits. She was a teacher, and, although warmly remembered, she had a fearsome reputation — one former student said misbehaviour in class was often punished by being forced to stand outside ‘and made to feel the heat of the sun’. Nanay Soling was heavily involved in both religious and civic activities; there were few local societies to which she did not belong.
Jocelyn said her mother always spoiled her brother: ‘She would always defend him. But he also feared her.’
The day I met her, Jocelyn’s brother had hit the national headlines for berating police who’d taken his nebulous orders in his war on drugs a stage too far. Kidnap-for-ransom rackets had been exposed.
‘I was laughing,’ Jocelyn told me, ‘because I saw those errant policemen and he was punishing them! I saw the influence of my mother.’
The name ‘Roa’ is Maranao, one of the 18 indigenous tribes that comprise the largely Muslim Moro people of Mindanao. Rodrigo Roa Duterte is fiercely proud of this ancestry; less so of the Gonzales bit, which is Castilian. Nanay Soling gave Duterte his principles, Eleanor said, and his temper: ‘That’s the Spanish.’ And he was devoted to her. In the run-up to the presidential election, he said he could not sleep without a comfort blanket given to him by his mother when he was a baby.
In Davao, Duterte keeps a personal seamstress who has worked for him since 1992 as a cook and housekeeper. Her name is Flor de Lisa Mercade Sepe; unlike her grand name, Flor is tiny, tough, rumbustious, and adoring of the man she too still calls ‘the mayor’. I bumped into her by accident one evening and she regaled me with stories for more than an hour. It turned out it wasn’t just one comfort blanket: they were sheets and there were several. It was Flor de Lisa’s job to mend them if they tore. She pulled one of them, which she was working on, from her bag. In places, it was tissue thin, and had been mended so often that it resembled a delicate embroidered lace patchwork, meticulously and lovingly stitched.
‘The mayor takes them wherever he goes in the world,’ she said. ‘This one’s more than forty years old!’
At 3 am on 10 May 2016, as early presidential election results indicated he had an unassailable lead, the first thing Duterte did was to head straight to the family mausoleum, in Wireless Cemetery, a congested graveyard in central Davao City. He visited the tomb often, Eleanor said, ‘whenever he feels like pouring his heart out to his mother, as though she’s still around.’
She raised her Duterte chin and rolled her eyes. ‘Mama’s boy. I told you.’
There is mobile phone video footage of the tearful president-elect inside the white-walled shrine. A four-foot-high wooden crucifix stands on a small, protruding, spot-lit altar, with a little white porcelain Jesus hanging from it, crown of thorns around his head, arms outstretched, nailed to the cross.