Rizal’s lotto windfall
MANY OF us dream about hitting the SuperLotto some day, and we enjoy thinking of ways to spend a fund that should, if prudently invested, last 10 lifetimes. However, many of us never hit the jackpot, not for want of luck, but because we never buy a lotto ticket. Dreams are only fulfilled with action.
Someone should study what really happens to lotto winners. I have a suspicion that winning actually results in misfortune for those who are unprepared for the windfall, especially when they are hunted down by long lost relatives and other low-life hoping for balato. Then there is crazy spending, like the man who bought a van when he didn’t even have a house and lot to park it in. His good fortune led to his murder.
Rizal is someone we look up to as an example of good citizenship and nationalism, but his life is a mine of practical advice too. When he was exiled to Dapitan in 1892, he could have been broken by depression and boredom. Here was a man who knew London, Paris and Madrid like the back of his palm thrust in a town that, then as now, is best described as the end of the universe. Rizal made good of a bad situation, always seeking the silver lining in a dark cloud.
As a student on a tight allowance in Madrid, he regularly bought one-tenth of a lotto ticket. He didn’t win anything, but this shows he believed in luck. His sisters were also into lottery, and their letters often contained lists of lucky random numbers to bet on.
Rizal gambled a bit more than usual in Dapitan: he bought one-third of a lotto ticket and forgot about it. Some time later the mail boat “Butuan’’ arrived bedecked with flags. Ricardo Carnicero, governor of Dapitan, assumed a dignitary was on-board, rounded up the town band and rushed to shore in his best suit. Good news was on board: Rizal, Carnicero and an unidentified Spaniard had won the second prize jackpot of P20,000.
If Rizal were a free man in Calamba or elsewhere his P6,600 share of the jackpot would have been spent in a different way, but considered a dangerous subversive in exile, he spent half of the money acquiring, titling and developing a neglected piece of seaside property. The other half, he sent to his father.
Rizal’s Dapitan letters have little or no political or nationalistic content. They are about how he developed both his land and the community.
What most people do not know is that Rizal was a licensed land surveyor, who grew up in a home built from the earnings of tilling sugar land leased from the Dominicans and his mother’s many businesses.
Rizal could have spent the lotto earnings on consumables, or drowned his sorrows in hashish, which he admitted trying out at 18 when he was a medical student in Manila. Yet he engaged in the business of abaca, opened a little store, ran a school, tended fruit trees and treated patients whether they could pay or not. He described life in a letter to Blumentritt in 1893:
“I am going to tell you how we live here. I have a square house, another hexagonal, and another octagonal—all made of bamboo, wood and nipa. In the square one my mother, my sister Trinidad, a nephew, and I live. In the octagonal my boys live—some boys whom I teach arithmetic, Spanish, and English—and now and then a patient who has been operated on. In the hexagonal are my chickens. From my house, I hear the murmur of a crystalline rivulet that comes from the high rocks. I see the beach, the sea where I have two small crafts—two canoes or barotos, as they call them here. I have many fruit trees—mangoes, lanzones, guayabano, baluno, nangka, etc. I have rabbits, dogs, cats, etc. I get up early—at 5:00. I visit my fields, feed the chickens, wake up my folks, and start them moving. At 7:30 we take breakfast of tea, pastry, cheese, sweets, etc. Afterwards I treat my poor patients who come to my estate. I dress and go to town in my baroto. I treat the people there and I return at 12:00 and take lunch. Afterwards I teach the boys until 4:00 and spend the rest of the afternoon farming. I spend the evening reading and studying.”
He describes the property further as: “a piece of land beside a river that has great resemblance to the Calamba River, with the only difference that this here is wider and its stream is more abundant and crystalline. How it has reminded me of Calamba! My land is half an hour from the sea. The place is very poetic and very picturesque, better than the Ilaya River, without comparison. At some points it is wide like the Pasig River and clear like the Pansol, almost, and like this it has crocodiles in some parts. There are plenty of dalag (mudfish) and pakó (ferns) and little round stones. Hydraulic machines can be installed.
“My land has 6,000 abaca plants. My land is beautiful; it is in the interior, far from the sea, about a half-hour’s walk. It is in a very picturesque place. The land is very fertile. In addition to the abaca plantation there is land for planting two cavans of corn. Little by little we can buy the remaining lands near mine.”
Rizal after winning, started to buy whole lotto tickets, but never struck gold again. Nevertheless he saw opportunity in “worthless” land, bought it cheap and developed it. In the end, Rizal’s Talisay estate, today a historical shrine and nature preserve, was well worth another lotto jackpot.
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