An audible and collective groan is always heard when I require my classes to read Jose Rizal’s 1884 Madrid diary. The text is old, there is nothing scandalously juicy related in it, all it contains are a detailed list of expenses. On the surface, the text is boring, but when they realize that this simple accounting record actually reflects Rizal’s personality, the students go on CSI mode and history suddenly becomes relevant to them. As expected, Rizal spent a lot on books and magazine subscriptions. For a wired generation that does not use snail mail, Rizal’s recurring expense for postage stamps seems quaint but underscores the fact that he was homesick and wrote home regularly.
Many items in Rizal’s list generates discussion. For example, Rizal bought a skull “and alcohol to clean it.” A skull was necessary for a medical student, but he didn’t buy a cleaned and bleached skull from a store. To save on costs he brought a fresh one direct from a cemetery or a morgue and cleaned it in his apartment.
Since my students are quite frisky they often read sex into innocent things. Rizal seemed to be quite economical and lived on a budget—he didn’t bathe every day—so why did he hire a maid? To clean his room? Imaginative students suggest this was a code—that the “maid” was probably a prostitute. This entry never fails to excite the class leading them to link other expenses to the “maid.” When I ask why Rizal bought a ball of yarn, I expect the answer to be “so he can repair his socks.” Yet the students laugh out loud (LOL) and exclaim, “he bought the yarn to use on the maid!” When I ask why Rizal bought candles, the obvious answer should be to light up his dark room. Students laugh again and exclaim, “he used the candles on the maid!”
I often tell people that my students teach me more than I teach them, and this relationship explains why teachers look and feel young despite their age. Expense accounts from history are like ink-blot tests, they can be understood literally, or students read themselves into them. Of course, we have to guard against over-reading but the exercise of making sense of an old document is practice in the historical method. In previous columns I drew from lists available in the Philippine Insurgent Records (PIR) now preserved in the National Library, the material is trivial to most historians who focus on the forest while I concentrate on the trees. These lists reflect the record-keeping of the Founding Fathers that we have lost today as we move toward a paper-less society.
In 1897, following the Pact of Biak-na-Bato, Emilio Aguinaldo and leaders of the revolution laid down their arms and went into exile in Hong Kong. The enemy gave them a down payment of P400,000. Of course, the balance never arrived, and other conditions of the truce were not followed, so the revolution resumed and Aguinaldo was returned to the Philippines on board an American ship in 1898. The thick folder of expense accounts I consulted in the PIR is significant because no arms and ammunition are listed there. Perhaps that was in some other folder I have not seen or a folder that did not survive because the expenses Aguinaldo approved to be drawn from funds deposited in the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp. (HSBC) are intriguing. A sampling, translated from the original Spanish:
“Three pieces of white silk; three pieces of coco Hong-Kong (type of cotton cloth?), 100 pairs of chinelas de fraja; two pairs chinelas para hombre; one corcho para mujer (cork slippers for Aguinaldo’s wife?); half a dozen black suspenders; half a dozen white suspenders; one black raincoat; one bostifol [Sebastopol hat]; one wool cap; six packets of cotton; six small boxes of shell buttons; two small boxes of needles; one packet of bone buttons; three packets of clay [ceramic?] buttons; two pieces rayadillo cloth of double width measuring 58 x 46 yards; 11 white rubber raincoats; three pairs of ladies slippers; one pair of men’s slippers with gold thread (surely this was for the president); one piece colored anklebone (?) for a saya; one piece of wool drill; three pieces of coco para aparro (?); one thousand hats; one pair borceguis [high shoes, or high-heeled shoes?]; one balutan with sayas in different colors; 25 arpragatas (what we know today as espadrilles).”
The above helps us imagine what they wore. Some of the items bought were obviously for the soldiers (one thousand hats), while others were for the president’s use (bostifol and men’s slippers with gold thread); then there were different kinds of buttons because they did not have cheap plastic ones at the time. There were dark and white suspenders which were either used as ornament or really to pull up loose pants. Other consumables from the list include:
“25 packs of cigarettes; 4 packets tobacco; one can matches; one box petroleum; one can coconut oil; four cans pimiento; 29 cans tomatoes; 29 cans beans (guisantes) half an arroba (12.5 lbs) cebollas de Bombay.”
The basic ingredients for pochero or fabada suggest that Aguinaldo and his men had no problem with uric acid or gout. Going through all these lists completes the picture of the past by providing insights into daily life during the birthing of the Filipino nation.
* * *
Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu
