The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
How hard it is to say farewell, and part;
Through clouds that darken, suns that shine,
I venture—but I leave with thee my heart.
At Madrid he wrote her regularly and with deep affection and received
replies that, his diary says, gave him unbounded joy, as these entries
indicate:
1884. January 10. Received two letters, one from Uncle Antonio
[Leonora’s father] and the other from L. Nov. 30. The letter from
Leonora was lovely with a sweet ending.
January 25. To-night I had a sad dream. I returned to the
Philippines, but oh, what a sad reception! Leonora had been
unfaithful; an inexcusable unfaithfulness without any remedy.
April 13. To-day I received letters from Leonora, Uncle Antonio,
and Changoy. I am well satisfied with what Leonora writes but not
with her state of health. [79]
No trait is more to be emphasized in observing the Filipino people than
their respect for womanhood. It is hardly less than phenomenal. In
Burma the women may have as much power; in Filipinas they have power
and respect as well as affection. Rizal was all of this order; the most
sacred object in the world was his mother; the next most sacred the
woman that should be his wife; after her came his sisters. He had
developed in advance of his times a certain philosophy of feminism that
has since become much more general. In his letters he dwelt upon it. He
thought the Filipino woman might be one of the great instruments for
the deliverance of the country, exercising her power and influence
conscientiously for education and liberty. Therefore, every Filipino
woman ought to prepare herself for this service by utilizing every road
to knowledge and enlarging her understanding of the nation and its
possibilities. He believed that a general effort on these lines by the
educated women would make a profound impression upon the young and be
invaluable in the next generation.
There seems to have been no flaw in his attachment to Leonora; his
career abroad has been searched in vain for a reminiscence of an
escapade. He lived a life of purity and that self-control that he held
to be the first demand of the moral code he professed. Seldom has the
biographer a career like this to write in which appears not enough of
human frailty to spice the narrative. He had made for himself certain
rules of conduct—abstemiousness, temperance, chastity, no wasting of
time, no wasting of health—and to these he adhered with the stern
inflexibility of an ascetic. The artist is usually saved, says Edmund
Clarence Stedman, by his devotion to beauty. Rizal was an artist, and
never has knelt before the ideal of beauty a worshiper more devout. The
beauty of righteousness seemed to rule out of him all promptings to the
coltish excesses of youth; that, and the dignity of his love, and his
conception of the gravity of his mission. He that is called to bring
light to his people must not linger at the wayside inn nor ruin their
hopes by capitulation to man’s grosser senses.
Meantime, the Riveras had moved from Manila to Dagupan, in the province
then called Laguna. The reputation that Rizal had left behind him was
not bettered by the handling it had from the governing class after his
flight. Evil propaganda has always been easy to great power in any
form. In his absence the spies and agents provocateurs of the
Government made it but the day’s work to smear with lies the name of
Rizal. “Some of it will stick,” is the philosophy of the professional
slanderer. In this case the word proved true enough. Mrs. Rivera seems
to have been much affected by the sad decline and fall of her
prospective son-in-law. She was an excellent lady but one that set
exaggerated store by the verdict of society and what Shelley called the
great god “They Say.” Among all colonists everywhere this is a deity of
might. With the slender group of Filipinos that strove to grasp the
skirts of a society drawn disdainfully away from them, the cult
amounted sometimes to a frenzy.
The reports that came from Madrid about Leonora’s lover, or were
affirmed to come thence, were no salve to the mother’s wounded
sensibilities. He was said to associate with sad young dogs,
revolutionists and outcasts and all that, with Filipinos that had been
exiled after the governmental sand-dance of 1872 and with other
agencies of treason. The thought of the career that such a man would
probably have in the Philippines seems to have struck Mrs. Rivera with
inexpressible terror. What her friends and social co-mates would say
when her daughter should be married to one sure to be a pariah if not a
victim of the garrote was beyond her strength to endure.
She had also the strange notion that steals into the minds of some
subjugated people that intermarriage with the dominant color promises
relief from the sting of inferiority. About this time the railroad was
being extended to Dagupan, and a young English engineer, Henry C.
Kipping, came to take charge of the building of the last section of the
new line from Bayambang. His work took him often to Dagupan, where he
met and fell in love with Leonora. He seems to have urged his suit with
ardor and persistence and to have had from the beginning an adroit
partisan in Leonora’s mother. Here had come, as if by the order of
Providence, a means to save her daughter from an unhappy marriage. How
much better to wed an English engineer than a Filipino agitator! With
joy she seized every opportunity to praise the ingenious Kipping, gave
thanks (for she was of a resolute devotion) to the wisdom that had
arranged all this, and even prepared to give it help of her own
devising. [80]
Cold fell her eulogies on Leonora’s ears. When Kipping talked love to
her she told him frankly that she was engaged to marry Rizal, whom she
loved and would always love, and that another suitor was for her
impossible.
Nothing in Kipping’s reports of these chilly receptions daunted Mrs.
Rivera, her heart being set on this match. She knew well the weight of
parental authority among her people. Also, she had faith in the effects
of absence, if judiciously interpreted and assisted. She can hardly
have read the novels of Charles Reade, but that eminent author would
have found in her a character all made to his mind. She now had resort
to an expedient that was one of favorite practice among his own
villains. Many a reader of his it has left cold, deeming it impossible
or extravagant. Behold, then, vindication for the novelist, and
straight from history. Mrs. Rivera augmented the glacial effects of
separation by stopping all letters between the young lovers. To this
end she bribed two postal clerks. [81] For a monthly stipend they
agreed to bring to her all the letters that Leonora wrote to José and
all the letters that José wrote to Leonora.
Months went by and not a word came from Madrid. Leonora began to droop
under the suspense. Skilfully and industriously her mother plied her
with insinuations and the wise shaking of the head so eloquent to the
anxious. We could and if we would, and that line of ambiguous givings
out. At last, she openly declared that Rizal had found another
sweetheart. Leonora hysterically affirmed her faith in her lover. But
the physical fact persisted that mail after mail arrived from Spain and
not a line from Rizal. “He is sick,” said Leonora, “and I am here, I
cannot take care of him.” The next time the expected letter failed she
said deliberately, “I know José. He has given his word. He will die
before he breaks it.”
The mother seems to have known how to beat down this spirit. At last
she brought to an issue the slow, sure undermining in which she had
been employing her wits. “If you truly love me, you ought to remember
that, after God, you owe to me all you are, and after God, then, you
owe me your duty. I urge this marriage, not because it means anything
to me, but because I am your mother. I seek your true happiness. All
the hope of my life is centered upon it. Do you wish to kill your
mother?”
At this, Leonora capitulated. So great is the maternal influence in the
Filipino household it is likely that most other Filipino girls in the
same conditions would have yielded. According to Miss Sevilla,
Leonora’s sympathetic biographer, the daughter now fell into the
mother’s arms and said:
“I owe you my life; I will sacrifice it for you, and make this marriage
as you wish, but you will find that I shall not live long after it. In
return, I ask you three things, that I shall not again be asked to play
or to sing, that my piano shall be kept locked, and that you shall be
at my side when I am married.” [82]
The next day she burned the letters she had received from Rizal before
her mother had interfered with her happiness. Following a Filipino
custom, she put the ashes into a little box which she covered with a
piece of the dress she had worn when she was betrothed and a piece of
the dress she had worn when she yielded to her mother about Kipping.
The box is still in existence. It bears on its covers the letters “J”
and “L” worked in gold. [83]
The wedding was fixed for June 17, at Dagupan. A few days before this
date, Mrs. Rivera was called to Manila by some business transaction in
which she must take a part. She seems to have forgotten the postal
clerks, or they to have forgotten their employment; for while she was
gone a letter arrived from Rizal to Leonora, and it fell into her
hands. She opened it with wonder and trembling, and lo! it was filled
with tender reproaches for her long silence. He had written to her
regularly by every mail, but all these months had come not a word in
answer. Had she forgotten him?
The next scene may be deemed to justify the writers both of fiction and
of melodrama. Leonora waited in silence until her mother returned from
Manila, for her quick intelligence showed her unerringly who had been
the author of this wreck of her happiness. The moment her mother opened
the door the storm broke. Leonora, for once, defied the restraint the
Filipino girl must traditionally feel in the presence of her parents
and spared nobody in her passionate denunciation of the treachery of
which she had been the victim. Mrs. Rivera seems to have admitted
everything and borne with composure the whirlwind of her daughter’s
wrath. She knew that the discovery had come too late to disturb her own
success. The wedding was close at hand, the banns had been cried, the
guests invited, the peculiar Filipino pride was involved and her
daughter would hold to her word.
Kipping was baptized and became a Catholic. The wedding took place at
the appointed hour. Afterward some of her relatives recalled that it
was a ceremony without joy or good omens. They said that from it the
bride returned in a state of chill lassitude. Contrary to her mother’s
hopes, the marriage proved unhappy, and Leonora survived it only two
years.
CHAPTER VII
AGAIN IN THE PHILIPPINES
Still unaware of the ruin that had come upon his hopes, Rizal was
living in Berlin and working on the last chapters of “Noli Me Tangere.”
He had taken cheap lodging in one of those huge modern German
apartment-houses, in the complex depths of which he could bury himself,
press on with his work, and be as remote as Tahaiti. He had known from
the beginning that he must bring out his book at his own expense, poor
as he was, if it was to be published at all. To a European publisher
the subject would seem too unconventional and outlandish; and as for
the Philippines, not a printer there would venture on his life to so
much as look at it. The type was set (in Spanish) in a small job-office
not far from Rizal’s lodging. Of the report that he himself eked out
his remittances by working at times as a compositor in this shop, there