Kamel and the Camellia

I read Maximo Viola’s “My Travels with Rizal” when I was an undergraduate student. It was a translation from the original Spanish published by the Philippine Historical Association in 1961 and was not particularly engaging except for the description of their stay in Austria in May 1887 where Viola wrote:

“In one of our excursions in Vienna, Rizal met a Viennese lady of extraordinary beauty and irresistible attraction. This lady seemed to have entered our hero’s life for the sole purpose of momentarily tempting our country’s apostle of liberty with the cup of mundane pleasure. For up to then Rizal had led a life worthy of his namesake, St. Joseph. This, however, was a solitary case. During our six months together I can’t recall any other incident wherein he succumbed to temptation.”

After college I read the original Spanish text and a subdued, more accurate translation of Viola than the preceding. This one, published by the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission in 1961, details how Rizal:

“…encountered the figure of a temptress in the form of a Viennese woman, of the family of the Camellias or Margarite, of extraordinary beauty and irresistible attraction, who seemingly had been expressly invited to offer for a moment the cup of mundane pleasure to the apostle of the Philippine freedom who until then had enjoyed among his intimates the fame worthy of his glorious namesake, St. Joseph. With the exception of this case I knew of no other slip of Rizal during more than six months of our living together.”

In the first translation we have a “Viennese lady.” In the second translation the “lady” steps down a few notches to become “a Viennese woman, of the family of the Camellias or Margarite.” In the original Spanish, Viola does not mince words and described the woman as an “hetaira” (prostitute). All this goes to show that one has to be careful about things one reads in translation, but more importantly, it shows how biases or blinders color historical texts. Viola was writing about his friend Rizal, who also happened to be the national hero of the Philippines. Hence, he tried to explain this “isolated” case where Rizal went out with a woman of ill-repute, or in Tagalog, kalapating mababa ang lipad (low-flying dove).

First published in 1848, the novel “La Dame aux Camelias” by Alexandre Dumas fils has spawned numerous stage and film versions, including a Broadway version (“Camille”) and a musical (“Marguerite”) that transposed the 19th-century French setting into Germany in 1944. “La Dame aux Camelias” was set to music by Giuseppe Verdi, who transformed it into “La Traviata.” Verdi also changed the name of Dumas’ heroine, Marguerite Gautier, into Violetta Valery. It is not well-known that the Camellia flower or thea japonica was named in honor of a Jesuit missionary who died in Manila in 1706.

I started to review Rizal’s travels and Viola’s memoirs after meeting the new Czech ambassador to the Philippines, Jaroslav Olsa, and his deputy chief of mission, Jan Vytopil, who are interested in finding historical links between the Philippines and the Czech Republic that go beyond the MRT fiasco and Rizal’s friend Ferdinand Blumentritt. Well, one of the earliest Czechs to visit the Philippines was a Jesuit brother, Georg Joseph Kamel, for whom the flower Camellia is named.

The Jesuit historian Pedro Murillo Velarde, writing in the 18th century, said this of Kamel:

“Brother Jorge Kamel, Temporal Coadjutor, was born in [Brno] Moravia, April 21, 1661. He entered the Bohemian Province in 1682 and came to this Province in 1688. He worked hard here in his position of pharmacist, and gave himself to it with much diligence, establishing in our college a pharmacy for the relief of the members of the province. That turned out to be a great service to the whole neighborhood of Manila and to all the islands, because of the supply and variety of remedies it offered for every kind of illness. The citizens began to come to him with great confidence, and much more so when they saw his great ability. It happened occasionally that someone committed a slip of the pen, or that the curanderos (of whom there are plenty here without science or art) prescribed a greater dose than the case required. Then the brother would change this and reduce it to the proper dose with very definite improvement.” (translated from the original Spanish by Leo Culum, SJ, in a 1956 article in Kamel)

Brother Kamel is lost to Philippine history and is often remembered only because of the flower that bears his name. But this Jesuit missionary was the first to write about Philippine flowers, fruits, trees, etc., and parts of his writings have come down to us through British botanists. Kamel made many drawings of plants which are still extant in Europe, and on these he noted the local Philippine names in Tagalog, Kapampangan and other languages. He was the first to ever draw the tarsier.

In the Jesuit records of Bohemia we have a reference to Kamel’s mission to the Philippines in the obituaries of recently departed Jesuits: “We gave these to the other world; but one we transferred from the old world to the new, our Pharmacist, found worthy of Christ’s holy missions in the East Indies.” We often think badly of religious in the Spanish colonial period, but Kamel changes that. Kamel also changes the lewd connotation of the flower with his name.

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