Caught between the dazzle and disillusionment of the limelight, she learned to safeguard herself from the antagonists of the day. She paused, she reflected, she moved on—before permanently hurling off the chains that shackled her wandering spirit. For all this, and maybe because of it, Ornusa Cadness has become a bit of a bruiser, but certainly no superficial raconteur. Today, as James Gabrillo discovers, Ornusa is at the climax of her own three-act narrative

It’s a bright, shiny morning and Ornusa is telling me a story.

A story that has been running inside her mind since she was a kid. A fairytale, if you may, that she’s always imagined but never seemed to have found a proper ending for: deep under the sea swam a fish that was quite a character. Instead of joining the school of fishes that comfortably treaded the waters in groups, it preferred to explore the seas by its lonesome. Throughout its daily exploits, it ran into all sorts of mishap, all types of danger. But the fish, Ornusa assures, lived a happy life.  “It didn’t care what any of the other fishes thought,” she recounts. “It never did.”

In her storytelling frenzy, Ornusa was painting the fish as one who reigns over its life, who becomes whatever it wants to be when it wants to, who throws caution to the wind. Ornusa Cadness is all these things.

Today, she sits across me. We’re inside a café. She’s wearing a blue tube top, jeans, and sneakers—laughing like there’s no tomorrow, stressing a point by messing up her hair. She brought a tiny shoulder bag, adorned with sharp silver thorns on its exterior. Heads turned when she entered the room. Rough, rugged, and resolute—could she really be a girl?
 
FIRST, THE BEGINNING
 
Ornusa is leery of being categorized. The phobia is not wholly unjustified. Her adolescent days practically cry out for­ reductive—even Freudian—analysis. Her grade school years were spent at the Maria Montessori School—she loved the place. Throughout high school, she underwent a home study program—not much of a predicament for her either. But things weren’t always idyllic: college was a different story, and this is where this tale really unfolds. Ornusa and her elder sister Dara enrolled together in a Media Studies course at the San Beda College Alabang. Everybody picked on the sisters, Ornusa in particular. “Every male teacher—naturally, obviously—liked me,” she recalls. “But every gay and female teacher hated me. They absolutely hated my guts.”

Like every modern-day antihero, Ornusa has a few scars to trace. “They stereotyped me,” she says. “Just because I was doing a bit of modeling and I had a certain accent, they treated me like I was some vile alien. They’d do things just to spite me. Like they’d call everyone to recite—as in every single one in class—except me. What the fuck was that, right?”

“I’m not a snob—I just can’t see you,” she says, chortling. “Without glasses, the world looks soft and fuzzy. I like it.”

But surely you must’ve done something to piss them off, I tell her. Ornusa says she did nothing but cooperate. “One time they asked us to make a painting about a poem Ninoy Aquino wrote,” she narrates. “So I show them my work and they didn’t want to believe that I made it myself. It sucks man, the way they judged me. ‘Oh, she’s a model. She can’t possibly have talent.’ I hated it. You think people would be more open-minded.”

When she starts shaking her head, I ask her, Ornusa, what about your schoolmates? Weren’t they at least less judgmental? She says some of them became her friends, but most of them she described as:
Narrow-minded.
Bitches.
Assholes.
“In class, girls would mock me: ‘Oh my god, you’re like totally American!’” she recalls. “I’m not even American!” Her father is a New Zealander, while her mother is Thai. She was born and raised in Manila.
Ornusa went on to eschew college, a mere two months before graduation. “Dara and I just suddenly stopped going to school,” she shares. 

Today, Ornusa is wary of the idea of social utopias. But could you blame her? “You’d think that an organized environment would bring out the best in people,” she says. “But you’d be surprised. I have nightmares until now of that school.”

What is our protagonist’s fatal flaw? Was she crippled by home school? Double-crossed by her sudden hunger and wide-eyed anxiety to get out into the world? Too gullible to her peers? Turns out the “fatal flaw” theory is itself fatally flawed, because Ornusa was none of these things. Unlike most literary characters that are one-dimensional, the labels of psychoanalysis cannot pigeonhole her.

NEXT, THE MIDDLE
 
Ornusa is leery of being categorized. But she’s remarkably congenial and insightful, so it’s perhaps appropriate for her to have at least one neurotic foible to complement her repertoire. When did it even begin? Two of Ornusa’s childhood playmates were Cheska and Patrick Garcia, who were then child actors appearing on local TV. Ornusa was eight years old when a camera crew came to their house to shoot a casting video. “My mom—it’s always been her dream for me to be an artista like Cheska and Patrick,” she says. “She arranged with a talent agency so I could shoot my casting video. We shot at our garage.”

Soon, Ornusa was starring in her first commercial for a local chocolate candy called Midgets. “It’s on the lines of Goya,” she recalls, cracking up. “My role was a midget. My hands were my legs. It was  creepy.”

Then, she was cast in another commercial, this time for the vitamin syrup Vi-Daylin. “It was as gay as Cherifer,” she snickers. “These brands were so 90s, they don’t even exist anymore.” She could’ve continued doing similarly gummy ads, but Ornusa didn’t find her sudden foray into the limelight as amusing as she fancied it would be. She quit soon after.

Away from rousing exposition and on to sterner complication: when Ornusa turned 14, her parents divorced. She and her two sisters decided to move to New Zealand with their dad. “He said it was just gonna be us,” she recalls. Ornusa pauses, looks around the room, and then buries her face in her hands. “But it wasn’t just us. He got a wife. A mean stepmother.” After six months, the three girls went back to Manila to live with their mom. They’ve never been back to New Zealand ever since.

And then, a pivotal crumb of rising action: Ornusa began modeling at age 16, “to make ends meet.” Her older sister had a friend from the Summit Media magazines and she referred Ornusa, who went on to model for Candy and Seventeen, then eventually graduated to Cosmopolitan when she turned 18. Yet again, Ornusa didn’t like the industry she was impelled to enter. “Even then I thought that modeling was stupid,” she twitters, beaming back to her radiant state. “I’d whine and keep to myself. I think I was a bit of a brat, but it was only because I was worried about falling into stereotypes.”

Ornusa stresses that it’s quite a different case today: “I’m more into it now. I get along with everyone. At one point, I guess, I got comfortable with what I was doing.”

Still, Ornusa claims she has always kept a distance from the modeling world that others have held dear. “I was never a part of it,” she asserts.

Her novella reaches its highlight, the point of soaring interest, in the year 2005. Ornusa was everywhere, her face and body plastered all over dailies and glossies. The press labeled her the “Anti-It” bad girl of the industry, thanks to her devil-may-care attitude towards her career and the people that surrounded her. She’d party indiscreetly all night, regardless of a 7 A.M. call time. “It was a period where every one had a squeaky clean, wholesome image,” she recalls. “And I happened to be known as a party girl. But look, when else was I gonna party?” She was young and carefree, and had no qualms of exhibiting her true self. “I guess I didn’t live up to the expectations of what people thought I should be,” she says. “But I had no regrets. I think it’s better than being an ‘It’ girl.”

One more vignette in our non-linear antenarrative, probably the one that the reader is familiar with: Ornusa had to deal with more unwanted attention when her relationship with Borgy Manotoc became public. It was a relationship that had a lot of good times, Ornusa says, before gossip and backbiting penetrated the partnership. “I felt I couldn’t be my own person during that time,” she admits, the smile on her face betraying the mayhem that coated her words. “People would say, ‘Oh, she’s just famous because of him.’ It was tough. We were in the same line of work and I became a mere shadow of him.”

She detested the scrutiny.  “Other people seem to give him all the credit,” she says. “But he didn’t make me. We had a huge influence on each other, sure. It was a good relationship and I learned a lot from it. Plus, he was a good boy. But I just wanted to be my own person.”

Consonant to her character since she was young, Ornusa refused the rage that fame rendered. “One time, The Buzz asked if I could do a pre-recorded interview about the cover I did for Maxim,” she recalls. “So, I said, okay. But during the interview, all their questions went like, ‘So, do you have a message for Borgy?’ I said, No, I don’t, do you?” The interview never aired on TV. “I’m not showbiz at all,” she says. “I can’t do it.”

She is berserkly, and sometimes brilliantly, rare. For the same reason, her emotionally charged nature was not always welcome, so Ornusa didn’t walk away unscathed. “I used to cry all the time. Whenever I go to my friends’s houses, their parents would tell me, ‘Oh, so you’re that girl,’” she shares, doleful. “It was the most difficult time of my life.”

Yet whatever hostility Ornusa faced did nothing to dent the strength of her true identity. She was sane enough, just angry for a long time. “I didn’t want it,” she says, expressively devoid of expressiveness. “I  never did.”

FINALLY, THE END
 
Ornusa is leery of being categorized. But she’s also sublime. What that means is that she’s almost always ridiculous. And she likes it that way. She refuses to wear eyeglasses even if her grade is a worrying 275. She doesn’t see so well, especially when she drives, but she’s gotten used to it. “I bump into people I know and I sometimes don’t recognize them. I’m not a snob—I just can’t see you,” she says, chortling. “Without glasses, the world looks soft and fuzzy. I like it.”

Four months ago, Ornusa moved in with her boyfriend, a TV commercial director. Her lifestyle has strikingly changed since then. Most of her time is now spent doing chores. “My life’s so normal now,” she says. “I’m so normal that I eat a lot and refuse to go to the gym. I do eat by the way—I love carbs. But I’ll start going to the gym when I turn 40.”

She’s aware, nonetheless, that modeling will not sustain her forever. “This is the last stretch for me and then I’m off to more serious things,” she shares. “I’m at a crossroad now. My radar meter has just switched from calm to panic.”
Out of nowhere, Ornusa stops, as if she’s finally found her own narrative’s denouement. For the first time since our conversation began, she pauses to reflect. Then, she waves her arms in the air, allowing her actions to speak in behalf of her thoughts, before she bursts: “Fuck, I have to do something now!”

Ornusa is toying with the idea of opening her own business venture soon, one related to food. She also intends to take up short courses related to graphic design and animation—fields she has always wanted to engage in. She’s actually been interested in the arts since she was young. (“I don’t have the heart to sell my paintings so I just give them away.”) A prolific painter, she used to render illustrations for her unfinished short stories. (“I’ve always wanted to write and draw my own children’s books.”) Today, Ornusa reckons she’s ready to take her passions seriously. So, progress.

Like the fish in the half-realized story that perpetually runs inside her head, the 26-year-old swam upstream, away from the familiar, away from the censure of the tsk-tsk squad. Somewhere out of sight, Ornusa will continue to party all night, upset expectations, walk on the edge, be normal, be herself, have the time of her life— but no one will be watching. “I stay happy knowing I’m unknown,” she says. “Because all I ever wanted was to do something and to do it well.”

Heartache is very fertile ground for storytelling but so is happiness, so is sheer normalcy. Ornusa is in-your-face, the type of girl you either like or don’t like, instantly. She says what she thinks is right with an admirable, if slightly stubborn, serenity. Serene she remains until this very day.

“I don’t care anymore what people say,” she says, looking wickedly pleased with her self. “I guess that’s it: You reach an age when you just start to not care.”

Ornusa is free and easy. Ornusa is defiant. Ornusa is off-the-wall. Ornusa has a strong sense of fun. Ornusa wears her erudition lightly. Ornusa was never superior at the expense of others. This much I know: Ornusa is all these things and none of them at the same time. No words could succinctly illustrate the breadth of her character. Like her stories—fairytales, if you may—the riveting ride of Ornusa Cadness is beyond description.