The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
1573 and 1872, thirty-one revolts had been serious enough to leave
enduring records in history. [17]
Going over these records now, no one can fail to see that the uprisings
were progressive; however lamely inaugurated, poorly armed,
fallaciously led, each was of an aspect more serious than its
predecessor. Any Spaniard with the least skill in reading human history
could have foretold the result. As education spread, as mankind
elsewhere struggled more and more into comparative liberty, as the
sense of injustice grew in the Filipino heart, the day would come when
these people, too, would be driven to unite for the one great
all-embracing, all-inspiring object of national freedom and national
existence, and they would win it.
To this the friars and the governing class of the Philippines were now
contributing by providing the immediate sting that seems always to be
needed when an old and deep-lying resentment is to be goaded into
outward and physical activities. The friars and the governing class
were palpable; their acts of oppression were daily before the people’s
observation; but what they stood for as the emblems of a general
condition was much more important than anything they did. Stories of
men with causes just and righteous that had been ruined at the friars’
dictation in the farcical courts; stories of men and women persecuted
as Mrs. Mercado had been persecuted; stories of men beaten to death,
men strangled and men shot, men deported and women wronged, were
brooded over in thousands of barrios. [18] They but completed the tale
of three hundred years of government with the iron fist.
CHAPTER II
SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The boy that so early and by this savage tuition came to be initiated
into his people’s sorrows was then chiefly remarkable for a gentle,
tractable disposition and a liking for books and study. He had been
born at Calamba, June 19, 1861. In his earliest childhood he seemed
undersized and undervitalized; but when he was six years old there came
to his father’s house his uncle Manuel, a figure of health and a
resolute practitioner of open-air sports, who took José in hand and
with daily exercises and rigorous living built his body to normal
strength and agility. Filipinos have a natural aptitude for athletics;
he verified now the ancestral blood in his veins. He ran and jumped; he
took long walks; he learned to fence, to ride, and to like the sun and
the wind.
By all accounts he must have been a singularly attractive child, even
in a country where handsome children are common. His color was the fine
tint of his people, a light, clean, even brown; his face a delicate
oval, but the chin firm and rather long; the forehead nobly shaped, the
nose almost classical, the lips full but nothing sensual. His eyes had
a hardly discernible slant; when he was animated they flashed out of
black depths a kind of black fire; but when he was quiescent they
seemed gravely introspective. Long afterward his neighbors and
relatives, trying to recall his boyhood, and perhaps overstraining
memory, thought he seemed always much older than his years, a notion
that may have arisen from his unusual habits. He liked to read or be
read to; he liked at times to be alone; he liked to hear his elders
argue; he liked to go to church to see the people there; and he liked
to reason.
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda was his full name, made
up in the Spanish fashion from both sides of his house, paternal as far
as the connecting “y,” and maternal the rest of the road. Philippine
names seem to the Anglo-Saxon mind a riddle that adds unnecessarily to
the burdens of life. This boy was to be known all his life as José
Rizal; his father had been and was always thereafter known as Francisco
Mercado, his mother as Doña Teodora Alonzo. Francisco, the father, and
all Francisco’s younger brothers in a family of twelve called
themselves Rizal as much as Mercado and the rest; none of his older
brothers used Rizal; all of his children bore it as their family name.
Yet family name it was never, according to western standards; for it
was added in 1849 by virtue of a proclamation of the governor-general
and by the whim of the man then head of the house. A strange difficulty
had arisen in the Philippines. The original Tagalog (or other native)
surnames being invincible against the Spanish tongue, Spanish names
were used as substitutes, but not, one might think, with sufficient
variety. Religious fervor overworked the popularity of some of these
until there arose an inextricable confusion: seventeen Antonio de la
Cruzes in one town, all unrelated; twelve Francisco de los Santoses in
a single street. This knot the wise old Governor-General Claveria [19]
cut with ready sword. He provided a list of Spanish names, apparently
copied in alphabetical order from the Madrid directory, and required
the head of each family to take one of these, add it at the rear or
front of whatever other names he was then carrying, and hand it down to
his children. [20] The father of Francisco Mercado met the spirit of
the decree but evaded its letter. He chose for his official name of
names Rizal, which was not on the governor-general’s list, but passed
muster. It is a corruption of the Spanish word ricial, and means a
green field or pasture; being here a poetic recognition, maybe, of the
blessed state of Mercado’s own rentals.
In the long and many syllabled cognomen, sounding like a verse of the
Æneid, with which José was baptized, is to be noticed the name
Realonda. This was from his mother’s family, where it also was an
innovation of the ingenious Claveria. Her family had long been known as
Alonzo. [21]
Those that like to go over the first records of great men in search of
phenomena foreshadowing something unusual in after-life will never be
disappointed here. José mastered his alphabet when he was three years
old, and before he was five could read in a Spanish version of the
Vulgate from which his mother had taught him at her knee. [22] In other
ways his debt to her was unusual; she turned his mind in his earliest
years toward good literature, in which she had a discerning taste,
being for her times and environment of rare learning and college bred
in Manila. [23] With other accomplishments she knew and loved good
poetry, could make it herself, and early taught José to make it. He
grew up thus with the advantage of a bilingual background. About him
the common speech was Tagalog; his mother made Spanish fairly familiar
to his ear.
Once she read to him a moral tale, “The Moth and the Candle,”
translating as she went along, and emphasizing the lesson. The moth had
been told by its mother to keep away from the flame, and now see what
happened. A cocoanut-oil lamp was burning on the table as she read;
winged insects were flying about and losing their lives in the blaze.
José became much more interested in them than in the salutary warnings
of his mother. He said afterward that he was not so much sorry for the
insects that lost their lives as fascinated by their fate.
The advice and warnings sounded feebly in my ears [he wrote]. What
I thought of most was the death of the heedless moth. But in the
depths of my heart I did not blame it. My mother’s care had not
quite the result she intended.
Years have passed since then. The child has become a man. He has
crossed the most famous rivers of other countries. He has studied
beside their broad streams. Steamships have carried him across seas
and oceans. He has climbed mountains much higher than the Makiling
of his native province, up to perpetual snow. He has received from
experience bitter lessons, much more bitter than that sweet
teaching which his mother gave him. Yet, in spite of all, the man
still keeps the heart of a child. He still thinks that light is the
most beautiful thing in creation, and that it is worth a man’s
sacrificing his life for. [24]
He had the soul of an artist, you may perceive, and the artist’s
irresistible yearning for expression. Before he was five years old, and
without tutelage or suggestion, he began to draw with pencil and to
model in clay and wax. It was form that most took his attention; to
model images of birds, butterflies, dogs, and men, to draw faces and to
outline designs. [25] For such studies his surroundings could hardly
have been better; as soon as his bent was shown father, mother, and
uncles gave him every encouragement; this is a race that upon any
manifestation of artistic promise looks with a kind of solemn joy.
Uncle José Alberto, his mother’s half-brother, had been a
school-teacher as well as a student abroad; Uncle Gregorio was a great
reader; the atmosphere of the house was friendly to study. After the
Philippine manner it was grave, decorous, reserved; for there is not on
earth, one may believe, a people by nature more serious-minded. The
family was happy to have the benignant friendship of Father Lopez, the
parish priest, a fair antithesis of the typical friar of those days and
a noble inheritor of the purest spirit of the first missions. Father
Lopez was beloved of all the children of the parish. They had sound
reason for their affection; there was no kinder or more useful man. The
friendship he maintained with José seemed more like a page out of
Charles Dickens than the barren realities of ordinary child life in the
Philippines, and the priest to have stepped from some new and Spanish
version of “Christmas Stories.” The boy was to learn by painful
experience how different from certain others of the cloth was the
gentle old curate of Calamba.
Years afterward, when he was entering upon man’s estate, he was induced
to write what he called the story of his boyhood. It proved to be a
juiceless sketch of a few pages covering many years. He was not enough
egotist to make a good autobiographer. He begins by saying he was born
a few days before the full of the moon. Then he adds:
I had some slight notions of the morning sun and of my parents.
That is as much as I can recall of my baby days.
The training I received from my earliest infancy is perhaps what
formed my habits, just as a cask keeps the odor of its first
contents. I recall clearly my first gloomy nights, passed on the
azotea [26] of our house. They seem as yesterday! They were nights
filled with the poetry of sadness and seem near now because at
present my days are so sad.
On moonlight nights, I took my supper on the azotea. My nurse, who
was very fond of me, used to threaten to leave me to a terrible but
imaginary being like the bogy of the Europeans if I did not eat.
He had nine sisters and one brother. Of his father he says that he was
a model parent. [27] “He gave us the education that was suitable to a
family neither rich nor poor. Through careful economy, he had been able
to build a stone house.”
At nightfall, my mother had us all say our prayers together. Then
we would go to the azotea, or to a window from which we could see
the moon. There my nurse would tell us stories. Sometimes sad and
sometimes gay, they were always oriental in their imagination. Dead
people, gold and plants on which diamonds grew were all mixed
together.
When I was four years of age, I lost my little sister, Concha, and
for the first time my tears fell because of love and sorrow. Till
then I had shed them only for my own faults. These my loving,
prudent mother well knew how to correct.
The environment would seem nevertheless to be more propitious for the
breeding of an agitator than of either a moralist or an artist. “Almost
every day in our town,” he says, “we saw the Guardia Civil lieutenant