Rizal in love

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. This weekend the prices for long-stemmed roses and other flowers will spike, there will be few vacancies in motels, and boxes of imported chocolates will fly out of store shelves. Why should one wait for one day in a year to make a show of love and affection instead of expressing these all year round? Why should I wait for February to write about Rizal’s love life when I can do so even during Holy Week?

The other day, Instituto Cervantes director Carlos Madrid asked me if I had tracked down Josephine Bracken’s grave in the Roman Catholic part of Happy Valley Cemetery in Hong Kong, and I sadly had to admit that it is an ongoing quest. Josephine was allegedly buried in a pauper’s plot in the cemetery in 1902, after she succumbed, according to her death certificate, to “miliary tuberculosis and ulceration of the breast.” There must be a record of the burial somewhere, an indication of the location of the plot, but after more than a decade of sleuthing I still hope to find her grave.

Every schoolboy knows that Rizal immortalized Josephine in the “Ultimo Adios” that was circulated widely after his execution on Dec. 30, 1896. Here she is remembered and bade goodbye with the words: “Adios, dulce extranjera, mi amiga, mi alegria.” (Farewell, sweet foreigner, my darling, my delight)

Not many are familiar with a poem Rizal wrote for Josephine in July 1895, shortly before she sailed from Dapitan to Manila. “A Josefina,” translated from the original Spanish by Nick Joaquin, reads:

“Josefina, Josefina/ to these shores you came in quest/ of dwelling place, a nest/ like an emigrating swallow

“If your fortune you must follow/ to Shanghai, China, or Japan,/ don’t forget that on these shores/ beats for you the heart of one.”

Why Josephine left for Manila is unclear from the poem, but there seems to have been trouble in Dapitan because Rizal is unsure if she will return to him or travel onward to Shanghai, China, or Japan. Josephine did return, to Rizal’s relief, because the rumor in Manila was that she had been sent away. They should have lived happily ever after, but more troubles were to come. They were not married, yet they were living together in a small, gossipy, conservative town. Worse, the domestic arrangement did not sit well with Rizal’s mother and other members of the family, who may not have expressed their disapproval openly but showed it in other ways. When Rizal’s younger sister Trinidad planned a visit in August 1895, he reminded her of his domestic situation and told her frankly that if she could accept it, she was welcome to stay in his home; if not, he would rent a house in town for her. In this letter he complained that he was being treated like a child rather than an adult.

In the compilation of Rizal’s correspondence published by the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission in 1961, the 954 letters exchanged between Rizal and others were sorted and chronologically arranged into four volumes: Correspondence with Family Members (Vol. 1), Correspondence with Colleagues in the Propaganda Movement (Vol. 2), Correspondence with Ferdinand Blumentritt (Vol. 3), and Miscellaneous Correspondence (Vol. 4). Everyone who could not be classified in the first three volumes are lumped into “Miscellaneous,” and all the women romantically associated with Rizal are in this volume.

The letters between Rizal and Josephine, and the letters to his family with references to Josephine, give us an idea of their domestic life: She kept him company, darned his socks, and tended to his nephews and the chickens. Rizal added:

“She cooks, washes, sews, and takes care of the chickens and the house. In the absence of miki for making pancit, she made a kind of long macaroni noodles out of flour and eggs that served the purpose. If you could send me a little ankak, I would be grateful to you, for she makes bagoong; she also makes chile[?] miso, but it seems to me that what we have will last us for ten years!”

In a letter to his mother, dated Jan. 15, 1896, and sent with a package of dried fish, Rizal tried to explain his relationship:

“You will receive a small quantity of salted fish that was prepared by the person who lives in my house. She is good, obedient, and submissive. We lack nothing, except that we are not married, but as you yourself say: It is better to live in the grace of God than being married in mortal sin. Until now we have not quarreled and when I advise her, she does not answer back. If you come and accept her I expect that she will get along with you. Besides, she has nobody in the world except me. I am all her kinsfolk.”

To his sister Trinidad he wrote:

“Miss J. is better than her reputation, and since she has been staying with me her little defects are being corrected. She is meek and obedient, and not hard-headed, besides she has a good heart. What we only need is to pay a curate, that is to say it is not necessary to us. Until now we have not quarreled; we are always gay, jesting. The public can say it is a scandal; without doubt it is very scandalous to live better than many married people. We work and are contented. She will do everything to be your friend, but what will people say?”

Rizal’s correspondence reveals that their relationship was not all roses and chocolates. The real challenge was staying together in a difficult situation.

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