THE TALE OF JOSE RIZAL AS UNIVERSAL MAN (Part one of three)

A Life for our Times

The Gardener’s offering on his 152^nd Birthday

Inviting all to have more than superficial knowledge of this incredible man…

UNIVERSAL MAN[1]

Name and Birth

Jose Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was born on June 19, 1861, in the town of Calamba, Laguna. This year marks his 152^nd birth anniversary.

One for “Believe It or Not”: the mother of Rizal never tired of recounting the marvelous incident the day before she gave birth to Jose, her second son. As this devout Catholic prepared for childbed by going to church, for confession and communion, not only the priest behind the confessional grille but others too waiting in line heard the wailing of an infant although there was no baby anywhere, except the one she was carrying in her womb.

As she emerged from the confessional booth she was accosted by an old woman who said to her, “Something is amiss with your child. It’s still in the womb but it is already making itself heard.” The next day she went into labor – a long, hard, agonizing one that almost cost her life. But after prayers and vows to the Virgin of Antipolo, she made it alright – exhausted and alive. The boy was born between eleven o’clock and midnight, Wednesday, June 19, 1861.

Why “Jose Protacio”? Jose is for Saint Joseph, who, because his feast day is March 19, is honored by his devotees on the 19^th of every month, all year long. Rizal’s mother was greatly devoted to Saint Joseph and could not miss an opportunity to give his name to a son of hers who was born on the 19^th.

In the Roman Catholic calendar, the patron saint for June 19 is one Saint Protacio. One wonders if Rizal’s mother already knew that Saint Protacio was martyred in Milan in the second century. If she learned about this only later she must have shuddered at the realization that she had named her son in honor of one(Saint Protacio)who was so stubborn of principle that they cut off his head in sacred martyrdom.

Why “Rizal Mercado” and why “Alonso Realonda”? His father’s double surname was Mercado and Rizal, while his mother’s double surname was Alonso and Realonda. This phenomenon of a double surname was made possible by the so-called Claveria dictum of 1849 that decreed new surnames for the citizenry of this Spanish colony. The Mercados of Calamba opted for the unlisted name Rizal while the Alonsos of Biñan chose the family name Realonda. And it was not uncommon for people to continue using their old surnames. In the case of Jose Protacio, he ended up with four surnames, the old and new family names of father and mother: Mercado, Rizal, Alonso, and Realonda.   

Family and relatives 

Jose was the seventh child in a family of 11 children (2 boys and 9 girls).

Francisco Mercado

His father, Francisco Mercado, was an industrious farmer from Biñan, Laguna. He belonged to a family of wealthy farmers and honest municipal officials.  When Francisco heard of a new friar hacienda in Calamba where land was available for industrious hands, he applied for a land grant. Since the friars were quite aware of the good Mercado record in their Biñan hacienda, Francisco was at once accommodated. He started renting land from the Dominicans, the same religious order who owned and ran the University of Santo Tomas.

In this arrangement, please note:  the Mercados were not “share tenants” or “kasama” but “lease tenants” or “lessees” – “namumuwisan”, not “namamartihan” – “inquilinos” in Spanish.

Share tenants tended to be poor because of disincentives to production: they had to surrender a big percent share of their produce to the owners of the land, such that the more they produced the more they shared – up to 50 percent of everything.

Lessees on the other hand paid a fixed rental for use of the land, such that the more they produced the more they could save and the richer they would be. Francisco proved himself a good producer as his father Juan had been in Biñan.  He was rewarded with more allotments of land.

The Mercados were not pure Malay but descendants of a Chinese immigrant named Domingo Lam-co. They changed their name to Mercado (“market”) to avoid, if at all possible, the anti-Chinese feeling common among Spanish colonizers. Later, Jose preferred to use the name Rizal (“rice or wheat field”) because Mercado was a surname used by so many who were not blood-related and, also, in great part, to diminish public connection to dear brother Paciano Mercado, who was known to be quite close to the martyred Padre Burgos – not a wise advertising move after the events of 1872, the year the three priests were executed.

Teodora Alonzo

His mother, Teodora Alonso, was born in Sta. Cruz, Manila – daughter of the prominent Alonso family of Biñan. The Alonsos were as prominent in Biñan as the Mercados and much wealthier.  She was “a woman of more than average education” according to Rizal in a letter to friend Blumentritt.  “Her father [Lorenzo Alberto Alonso] who was a deputy for the Philippines in the Cortes [Spanish Parliament] was her teacher…He was educated in Europe, spoke German, English, Spanish and French, and was a Knight in the Order of Isabel la Catolica.”

Teodora graduated from the Colegio de Santa Rosa in Intramuros with an education quite extensive as well as a fine command of Spanish. When her father died, her mother went to live in their Calamba property. Thus, Teodora passed her maidenhood in that town and there was wooed and won by Francisco Mercado.

They were quite a couple. By1860, or just within a decade of their marriage, the Mercados (Francisco and Teodora) had become one of the richest couples of the Dominican hacienda of Calamba, no small thanks, Paciano used to say, to the generosity of the Dominican order that enabled them to have the use of the land.

They were the first to build a stone house in the heart of town, the first to keep stables and a carriage, the first to have a home library and own a piano. He had multiple farms to run – rice, corn, sugar, etc. She had multiple enterprises to manage – a flour mill, a dye factory, a drugstore and a bazaar.

Country folk came to her sidewalk store on tiangge days to sell and to buy – pork sausages, bottled jams and pickles, candies and biscuits, bagoong and salted dried fish.

She was both a producer and an aggressive marketer. She did not merely wait in town but also went out to the countryside to sell her goods – and people had no doubt that here was one who truly understood the dignity of work.

On one hand, she made sure her daughters went to good schools and dressed and faced society as the ladies that they were. On the other hand, she also made sure they did not consider it beneath them to help with the house chores, to market and cook, to operate their mother’s shops, to make jellies and preserves, sausages and sweets for sale. They were senoritas and senoras, yes, but always kept themselves useful in the spirit of the model parents they were privileged to have.

The Mercados and the Alonsos, for all their land and money and horses and stone houses, were much closer to their field hands than to the absentee landlords then or of a latter day.

Yes, they were ilustrados – they could read, write and figure, took newspapers, went to court, travelled abroad. And they were principalia – they voted for the town mayor, collected taxes, had the preference, after the Spaniards, in town church and town hall, in civic and religious processions, wore European clothes on occasion and practiced all good manners and right conduct.

But they were not a class wholly apart. They were members of a living community, with hardly impenetrable barriers to social mobility. Later, it would be Rizal who would persuade the principales, and with them, and sometimes through them, the peasants and the artisans that they were all equally “Filipinos”, and in so doing justify the opportunities of his privileged birth.

The Mercado brood included: Saturnina (b.1850), Paciano (1851), Narcisa (1852), Olympia (1855), Lucia (1857), Maria (1859), Jose (1861), Concepcion (1862), Josefa (1865), Trinidad (1868) and Soledad (1870).

Hometown in Calamba 

Calamba in the time of Rizal had a population of around 5000. It was then one of the great rice towns in the country, rivaling Biñan in agricultural prosperity.

The town proper had three streets, not quite parallel, running from West to East and converging on the shores of Laguna de Ba’i.

Along Calle Real was the church, the Casa del Gobierno, the Casa de Hacienda, the plaza and the market. Flanking Calle Real were two lesser streets, Calle Ylaya and Calle Ibaba.

The houses of the gentry or principales were along Calle Real. The house of Rizal’s family, the Mercados, had the choicest position: right beside the church, at one edge of the plaza, in the very heart of town. It had a ground floor and an azotea of stone. Its upper story was of fine hardwood and its roofs of red tile. The house was ringed about with orchard and garden, and the property was a little world in itself, with its own mill, granary and poultry house that included turkey and duck.

People from the countryside came to town in ponies, making a picturesque procession as they came in their Sunday best for church and market.

Calamba was a trade center then. Goods bought there were hauled to the lake where boats and barges waited to carry them down the Pasig to Manila.

In one of his poems, Rizal returns in memory to the Calamba of his childhood: “spent on the green shores of a murmurous lagoon.” Without a doubt, the lake made childhood so beautiful: “I recall a simple town, beside a balmy lake, the seat of my delight.”

Aside from Laguna Lake, Makiling Mountain dominated the town of Calamba – one of the very first things to make an impression on the young Rizal for he could see it from the windows and azotea of his home, a presence from which he could not escape. The legend of Mariang Makiling was one of the first stories he heard as a child. Mariang Makiling was believed to be the daughter of the god mountain and was once a visible goddess.

The young Rizal must have noted also how lovely, dark and deep the woods just outside poblacion were – making Calamba just a step from genteel town life to primitive jungle: “I prayed in your rustic temple, a child with a child’s devotion.” He saw God in the grandeur of the age-old forests, and “sorrows were ever unknown to me while gazing at your azure skies, for in nature lay my felicity.”

Later, he became Rizal the Cosmopolite, Rizal the World Traveler speaking twenty languages, but always he remained the little boy from this little town of Calamba, proud of a certain provincial clan – the Mercados of Calle Real. 

Boyhood influences

Privileged and underprivileged: born to a rich family, it is easy to think that Rizal was a privileged child. Didn’t he grow up in a big house where the dining table was never bare? Didn’t he have tutors to teach him at home; wasn’t he sent to good schools here and abroad; wasn’t it therefore so natural for him to rise, given all the advantages and without any handicaps? The truth is he had disadvantages and was born heavily handicapped. He rose because of his efforts to overcome his disadvantages, and his rise was difficult and painful.

Listen to sister Narcisa: “Jose was a very tiny child. But his head grew very large. When he began to walk by himself he often fell, his head being too heavy for his frail body. He had to have a nanny look after him.” Or listen to sister Maria: “He grew up pitifully conscious of his shortness and weakness; and he was continually begging his father to help him grow. His little body did not permit him to compete with boys who were his age but stronger; so he withdrew into himself. Still, the tiny lad went on craving to become big and strong. He persisted in playing giants.” Paciano decided not to enroll Rizal as a boarder at the Ateneo because he was “timid and small for his age.” Father Pastells wrote that Rizal failed to be elected president of the college solidarity because of “his small stature.”

In his Memorias de un Estudiante his many references to height show him obsessed with bodily stature. Understandably, then, we find him so determined to excel in athletics, but really to make himself “normal”. He eventually excelled in fencing and weight-lifting and boxing till family and friends noticed how skillfully he handled weapons and had become a muscled youth. When the schoolmaster’s son at Biñan made fun of him he lost no time calling his tormentor to account: “He must have been older than I, and he had the advantage of me in height, but when we started to wrestle, I licked him, twisting him back…I let him go considerably mortified.”

Some have suggested that the problem of under-size may have been intimate of nature too driving him to an intense shyness. What may have appeared to be gentlemanly scruples may actually have been self-doubting? He felt himself not macho enough. Much has been made of his “womanizing” or, more accurately, of the many women in his life that led one author to ask: “Why was he unable to sustain a relationship? Does the secret, again, lie in his tiny physique? Was he so hesitant with women because he feared that, physically, he was inadequate?” 

And yet the very doubts that initially handicapped Rizal were the very elements that made him so determined to excel in all fields of endeavor – science, art, medicine, literature, athletics, and thus more than balance off a naturally poor physique.

Cerebrally superior: It was clear from the start that Rizal’s puny build was no measure at all of his intelligence. When his mother was teaching four-year-old sister Maria the alphabet, Maria had such a hard time memorizing and reciting her ABCs. But she and her mother both got so surprised when the baby Jose, at only two years old, who had been sitting by unnoticed began to reel off the alphabet, from A to Z, quickly and correctly. So, it was decided to have him start his regular lessons early, at his mother’s knee, in reading, writing, arithmetic, and in memorizing the basic prayers in Latin, Spanish, and Tagalog. His mother was his first teacher though his mind and hers did not always go in the same direction.

“Minsa’y isang gamu-gamo… (Once there was a moth…)” The custom of story-telling at night was a big influence in boyhood years. “One night the whole family, except for my mother and me, had gone to bed early,” recounts Rizal. “I do not know why, but the two of us were left sitting by ourselves. The candles had been put out inside the lamps with a curved tin blower, which seemed to me the finest and most wonderful plaything in the world. The room was dimly lit by a coconut oil lamp such as burns all night in Filipino homes to go out just at daybreak and awaken the sleepers with its final spluttering. My mother was teaching me how to read in a Spanish book… 

“I did not understand Spanish and so could not put any expression into my reading. She took the book from me. After scolding me for drawing funny pictures on its pages, she told me to listen and started to read aloud…I listened to her, full of boyish admiration. I marveled at the melodious phrases she read so easily from the same pages which had so quickly stumped me at every step. But I may have grown tired of listening to sounds that had no meaning for me… 

“I was soon paying little attention. Instead I watched the cheerful little flame. Some moths were playing about it in circles…Then my mother began to read to me the fable of the old moth and the young moth, translating it into Tagalog as she went along. My attention was caught from the very first sentence; I stared at the lamp and the moths circling about it; the story could not have been better timed.”

The story was of the mother moth warning her daughter moth that flame may be beautiful and inviting, but is deadly, because it destroys whatever comes too near. The daughter moth promises to obey and not go too close to the flame, but secretly decides that she can take a closer look so long as she is careful. So she flies nearer and nearer the flame until, dazzled, she is drawn into it and destroyed.

“But oddly enough,” Rizal recalled, “the light seemed to me even more beautiful, the flame more entrancing than ever. I envied the insects that fluttered round its splendor, and was not at all frightened when some fell dead into the oil. I listened breathlessly as my mother read; the fate of the two moths fascinated me. The flame’s yellow tongue caught one of the insects and after spasmodic quivering it lay still. It seemed to me a great event…It had died a victim of its illusions. At bottom I could not blame it. The light had been so beautiful!” With Rizal this was going to be a recurring theme of contradictions: the curiosity of rational inquiry and the obedience of faith.

Death in the family: His little sister Concha, born next after him, and closest to his child’s heart died when he was only four years old. “For the first time I wept tears of love and grief, for until then I had only shed them out of a stubbornness which my loving and prudent mother knew so well how to correct.” No question that Rizal who was imaginative and high-spirited was also a willful child.

The Biñan experience:  When he was nine, his private tutor in Calamba died and he was taken by Paciano to Biñan to continue his studies in a private school while lodging in an aunt’s house there. He found the town “large and rich, ugly and dismal”. The schoolmaster knew by heart the Spanish and Latin grammar of the medieval period and believed in transmitting this knowledge via the pupil’s buttocks. Rizal’s bitterness against the barbarous methods of instruction never left him.

And yet Biñan was very important to his education. His childhood In Calamba had been extremely sheltered, protected from the world by family and by the walled orchard in which he grew up. In Biñan, abruptly for the first time, and cruelly for one so young, he found himself an outsider – as he would be the rest of his life: an outsider in Europe, an outsider in Asia, an outsider even in the Philippines.

[TO BE CONTINUED]