Oryang, Part 4 (Conclusion)

Much have been written about the loves of Rizal. There were at least 9, maybe 10 of them–an international cast stretching all the way from London to Japan: Segunda Katigbak, Leonor Valenzuela, Leonor Rivera, Consuelo Ortiga, O-Sei San, Gertrude Beckett, Nelly Boustead, Suzanne Jacoby (or Thill? or both?), and Josephine Bracken. Ambeth Ocampo adds up the body count to 13, with Rizal “serious enough to propose marriage to three of [them] in his short life: Leonor Rivera, Josephine Bracken and Nellie Boustead”, adding “[it] was the last, in my opinion, who was the prettiest of them all” (Loves of Rizal, Inq7.net). The prospect that this child-prodigy of Teodora Alonso was also (my, my!) a regular jackrabbit with a lusty lady waiting in every port of call is enough to spice up stodgy history lessons in Catholic prep schools.

Leonor Rivera, Rizal’s model for Maria Clara, may have been the closest to being the love of his life. Their 11-year romance in letters kept him from falling in love with other women he met during his travels, even if it did not preclude him from flirting with them. Their tale of unrequited love could rival that in Love in a Time of Cholera, where Fermina Daza, waking up to the frivolity of their epistolary romance, promptly rejects the passionate advances of Florentino Ariza and marries the more sensible Dr. Juvenal Urbino. “Leonor’s mother [on the other hand] disapproved of her daughter’s relationship with Rizal, who was then a known filibustero. She hid from Leonor all letters sent to her sweetheart. Leonor believing that Rizal had already forgotten her, sadly consented to marry the Englishman Henry Kipping, her mother’s choice” (from JoseRizal.Ph). Stewing up the melodrama are anecdotal accounts of Leonor Rivera burning Rizal’s letters the day before her wedding, gathering all the ashes and tenderly sewing them into the hem of her wedding gown. “Thus, as she walked down the aisle to marry a man we are told she did not love as much, she felt the pieces of a lost love crumble at her feet” (Love letters to Rizal, Inquirer.net).

Leonor Rivera (right) with mommy. Notice her dazed expression as mum clutches her cuello while holding a fan like a whip. Mata lang ang walang latay! Aray ko po!

 

Oryang, Part 3

“In brief, if the accused had to die, why were they pardoned? And if they were pardoned, why were they executed?”           –Teodoro M. Kalaw

Ay, there’s the rub. After the circus of rigging a trial that condemned the Bonifacio brothers to death, they get Aguinaldo to pardon him, and still, the brothers got executed anyway. What’s the deal here? It seems that no one is to blame, and everyone is to blame. Somehow, between Generals Pio del Pilar, Mariano Noriel, and Emilio Aguinaldo, the fates of Andres and Procopio Bonifacio were decided.

Teodoro Agoncillo in Revolt of the Masses examines the irregularities around the Bonifacio brothers’ death, and the washing of the hands of the principal players.

General Aguinaldo himself confesses that his previous order of pardon was withdrawn when Generals Noriel and Del Pilar prevailed upon him to do so in the interest of unity. This confession, then, coming as it does from the most authoritative source, definitely solves the so-called mystery of Bonifacio’s death.

….

General Pio del Pilar, originally a Bonifacio man, in a signed statement obviously designed to clarify or rather rationalize the unfortunate incident, contends that

“General Aguinaldo’s order granting pardon to the Bonifacio brothers did not at once reach General Noriel’s headquarters in Maragondon because General Aguinaldo was then in the field between Mt. Buntis and Maragondon and was gathering his men in order to reinforce the revolutionary army fighting the Spaniards who were then attacking the town of Maragondon… General Noriel also told me the same, namely, that the Supremo, Bonifacio, and his brother, Procopio, were already dead when he received the order of pardon. The reason why the order did not reach him on time was that there was a battle raging and it could not be ascertained where General Noriel and his companions were.”

They could not even get their stories straight. Aguinaldo claims del Pilar and Noriel egged him to withdraw the pardon “in the interest of unity”, while the latter two contended that they did not even receive the pardon in time. Granted that at the time things were in chaos, but it is hard to believe a lapse in memory with regards to sending a man to his death, especially one as important as Andres Bonifacio. How can they get their reports so mixed up unless there was some intent to leave this chapter of history in a cloud?

 

Oryang, Part 2

Reading the account of the execution of Andres Bonifacio filled me with sorrow and disgust. It reads like high tragedy; once the Supremo resolved to attend the Tejeros Convention, the ineluctable wheels of fate turned towards his death. You know something really, really bad was going to happen from the onset, as when Oedipus insists in finding out who the killer of Laius was, or when King Lear divides up his kingdom between his thee daughters. You know, from a postmortem view, they were going against better judgment, which the Greeks explain away with hubris, and, like the ineffectual Chorus, all you can do is witness in horror the grizzly turn of events.

I read several versions of the story, looking for someone to blame for the egregious injustice of Bonifacio’s death. There was no single person to point a finger at, even Emilio Aguinaldo, yet all of them were culpable; it seemed like the whole of Cavite ganged up on Bonifacio. First, there was Daniel Tirona. After Bonifacio was humiliated during the elections for positions in the revolutionary government by not winning the presidency, but instead “the rather insignificant post of the Director of the Interior”, Tirona, adding insult to injury, undermined his eligibility by questioning his academic and professional qualifications, even suggesting that there was a lawyer in Cavite better suited for the job. Bonifacio threw a fit, declared the elections a fraud, and stormed out of the room. He was the Supremo after all, founder of the Katipunan, the secret society that instigated the rebellion.

Then there was Col. Yntong (Agapito Monzon), probably the most unsavory character in this story, who arrested Bonifacio for sedition in Limbon, Cavite, under orders of Gen. Mariano Noriel. His party was received by Bonifacio as friends, who shared breakfast with them, and were sent away with goodwill and cigarettes. At a safe distance, they sealed off the area, and started shooting at the camp. The first to fall was Bonifacio’s brother, Ciriaco. Bonifacio came out in the open, and hugging the men he met, shouted: “Mga kapatid akoy walang guinagauang kaualang hiaan.” They fired again, just missing his shoulders, and hit the man behind him. “Mga kapatid tingnaniño na ang pinapatay niño ay iño ring kapua tagalog.” Another shot finally wounded him, and having fallen, they stabbed him in the throat. Were the orders to arrest him, or to take him dead, rather than alive? This would have conveniently removed a “troublesome” thorn, who has outlived his use as organizer of the Katipunan, and had demonstrated his lack of military skills to prosecute the rest of the revolution.

 

Oryang, Part 1

One of the things I did while back home for Christmas was to look for Filipiñana books. I had no time to drop by Ateneo de Manila Press and get myself The Propaganda Movement, 1880-1895 (John N. Schumacher) and The Katipunan and the Revolution (Santiago V. Alvarez). Nonetheless, I did manage to bag a haul from different bookstores around the city: Decimal Places (Ricardo M. de Ungria); Edad Medya (Jose F. Lacaba); Kwadro Numero Uno (Benilda Santos); Pulotgata (Danton Remoto); The History of the Burgis (Marien N. Francisco and Fe Maria C. Arriola); Meaning and History, The Rizal Lectures and Bones of Contention, The Bonifacio Lectures (Ambeth R. Ocampo). In addition, I picked up Quiapo, Heart of Manila (Fernando N. Zialcita) at the Nakpil-Bautista House during my walking tour with Vince and Cez. Rofel Brion also gifted me a copy of his recent poetry collection, Sandali, exquisitely published by Ateneo’s ORP. Let’s just say almost half of my luggage were the weight of paper.

I read Ambeth Ocampo’s Rizal Lectures on the plane going back to the US, and his Bonifacio Lectures during my week’s stay in San Francisco. It’s not hard to believe the popular appeal of his bi-weekly column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer; he dispenses with the staid tone of scholarship, and retells history from an angular point of view. His congeniality is infectious as he confesses shedding tears while researching on the authenticity of the “found” bones of Bonifacio, or as he shares his greatest tragedy–being a historian with severe sinusitis, allergic to the very materials (dusty documents) of his own profession. One of his lectures was on what the revolutionaries had for lunch at the Malolos Banquet of 1898. (They had ice cream for desert–glaces according to the menu written in French! How the heck did they keep it from melting in the tropical heat?) When Jane in socio-anthropology, a true activist back home, tried to get me to read Renato Constantino’s histories, I abstained, and excused my lack of interest in class struggle. I read history, I told her instead, for tabloid gossip. Reading Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, I find myself going straight to the last chapter, skipping the history of early Spanish settlement, to his account of pre-Hispanic Philippines, and, as promised in the translator’s introduction, the sexual proclivities of native Filipinos before their Catholic piety.