CHAPTER VI

LEONORA RIVERA

By the title of his novel Rizal meant not that he was touching a person forbidden, but a subject. The words he had found in a Latin version of the New Testament in the passage where the risen Christ is beheld by Mary Magdalene; but he used these words in a sense wholly different from the scriptural significance. Conditions in the Philippines he had thought of as having become a social cancer that persisted first because of a notion that nobody must treat or touch it. Of all the men of his times and country, he was the only man that had the courage to break through this barrier and the skill and perfect knowledge to dissect the hideous growth behind.

With one of the first copies that came from the press he wrote to his close friend, Dr. Blumentritt, a letter in which he lays bare his own idea of his work: [77]

The novel [he says] tells of many things that until now have not been touched upon. They are so peculiar to ourselves that we have been sensitive about them. In this book I have attempted what no one else seems to have been willing to do. For one thing, I have dared to answer the calumnies that for centuries have been heaped upon us and upon our country. I have written of the social condition of the Philippines and of the life of the Filipinos. I have told the truth about our beliefs, our hopes, our longings, our complaints, and our sorrows. I have tried to show the difference between real religion and the hypocrisy that under its cloak has impoverished and brutalized us. I have brought out the real meaning of the dazzling and deceptive words of our countrymen. I have related our mistakes, our vices, and our faults. I have exposed how weakly we accept miseries as inevitable. Where there has been reason for it, I have given praise. I have not wept over our misfortunes, but rather laughed at them.

No one would want to read a book full of tears, and then, too, laughter is the best means of concealing sorrow.

The incidents that I have related are all true and have actually occurred.

But for his habitual reticence about himself he might have said much more; if he had known his own powers he might have spoken of his lifelike delineations; he might have urged a gift like prophecy. All the impression of a strong personal relation one has throughout the reading of “Noli Me Tangere” is well founded. Into it Rizal was writing himself. Ibarra was a prefiguration, in some respects marvelously accurate, of himself in the days at hand when he should return to his native country. Of the material of the book the greater part had been verified in his own experiences. The imprisonment of Ibarra’s father was the story of Rizal’s own mother. Father Damaso he had seen and watched, and Father Silva no less. In Tasio, the philosophical evolutionist, he had but drawn his own elder brother, Paciano. But above all, the story of Maria Clara was a tragedy from his own life; at that time a tragedy he might have feared but had not as yet experienced, strange as that may seem.

Maria Clara is Rizal’s cousin, Leonora Rivera, his sweetheart and first great disappointment. She was born in Camiling, province of Tarlac, on April 11, 1867, the daughter of Antonio Rivera, who was Rizal’s uncle, benefactor, and ardent partisan. [78] She was twelve years old when the family moved to Manila, where they rented lodgings to students in Santo Tomas and the Ateneo. Among these, after a time, came Cousin José Rizal, at about the third shifting of his quarters in Manila. Leonora was enrolled as an undergraduate at Concordia College for girls, where Rizal’s youngest sister, Soledad, was likewise a student. He would sometimes spend a half-holiday at Concordia to see and to amuse his sister, whereupon he and his beautiful cousin became good friends, although she was six years his junior. She was not only beautiful, but she seems to have had an unusual intellect of the kind that would be likely to attract Rizal; for she was in fact, and not by repute alone, studious, thoughtful, of the Malay seriousness, but with also the Malay delight in music. She sang well; she is said to have played the piano with a skill that distinguished her even in the corps of able pianists of which Concordia was proud. If so, the eminence was not lightly won; for the worthy Sisters that conducted that institution taught music thoroughly and well.

She must have been also of a sweet and gentle spirit; all the memories extant of her twenty years after her death included this tribute. The various commentators that have differed often about other phases of Philippine life have been of one mind in praising the typical educated Filipino woman and yet have not exaggerated her worth. In a world wearied of artificiality, her simple sincerity shines to cheer as much as to charm. Visitors that have observed her well have usually noted the excellence of her mind, the honesty of her walk, and the reserve strength of her character. Rizal’s mother was of this order, the diligent ruler of the household, the laborious instructor of her children; and, when the blows of the Spanish tyranny fell upon her head, bearing them with the proud fortitude of a Roman matron of the republic. Doubtless, the halo of Rizal and Leonora’s own romantic story have magnified her intellectual stature; yet when all allowance is made for exaggeration that may color the work of a friendly biographer, the fact is apparent that she also was of this same admirable womanhood.

The first time she seems to have suspected in herself a feeling for her handsome young cousin stronger than cousinly regard was on a day at her father’s house when the young leader of the Filipino forces at the Ateneo was brought in with a broken head and covered with dust, blood, and glory. It was not the first time he had been so ornamented, but only the first time she had seen him thus. At the sight of the youthful champion of the Filipino people disabled early in the fray, Leonora ran with speed to get warm water and bandages to dress his hurts. The rest was easy and according to the formulæ for such cases well known and accepted. She loved him for the battles he waged, and he loved her that she nursed him so tenderly.

A year later with the full approbation of their parents they were betrothed. Mr. Rivera was fond of his nephew; to the aunt, José was at least not objectionable, though she seems to have been a lady of a captious and changeable temperament. It was the uncle that first suggested Rizal’s withdrawal from the Philippines when it became evident that the governing class had marked him as a young man to be suppressed. Mr. Rivera knew well enough what that would mean in Santo Tomas and elsewhere: every avenue closed, every possible obstacle thrown in his way. The malice he had aroused he could hope to defeat in some measure if he could win in Europe a training and a distinction that would on his return provide him with a practice in spite of Spanish opposition. Mr. Rivera assisted his flight, sent him money while he was pursuing his studies in Madrid, and showed at all times a sincere interest in his welfare. The lovers had a tender parting just before Rizal went aboard his ship that night; as a sign or image of his presence when he should be far away he left with her a poem that began:

The summons sounds, predestinate and grim, The iron clanging of the tongue of fate, That drives me on a pathway strange and dim And strikes my flowers of hope all desolate.

Thou know’st,—thou other, dearer soul of mine— How hard it is to say farewell, and part; Through clouds that darken, suns that shine, I venture—but I leave with thee my heart.

At Madrid he wrote her regularly and with deep affection and received replies that, his diary says, gave him unbounded joy, as these entries indicate:

1884. January 10. Received two letters, one from Uncle Antonio [Leonora’s father] and the other from L. Nov. 30. The letter from Leonora was lovely with a sweet ending.

January 25. To-night I had a sad dream. I returned to the Philippines, but oh, what a sad reception! Leonora had been unfaithful; an inexcusable unfaithfulness without any remedy.

April 13. To-day I received letters from Leonora, Uncle Antonio, and Changoy. I am well satisfied with what Leonora writes but not with her state of health. [79]

No trait is more to be emphasized in observing the Filipino people than their respect for womanhood. It is hardly less than phenomenal. In Burma the women may have as much power; in Filipinas they have power and respect as well as affection. Rizal was all of this order; the most sacred object in the world was his mother; the next most sacred the woman that should be his wife; after her came his sisters. He had developed in advance of his times a certain philosophy of feminism that has since become much more general. In his letters he dwelt upon it. He thought the Filipino woman might be one of the great instruments for the deliverance of the country, exercising her power and influence conscientiously for education and liberty. Therefore, every Filipino woman ought to prepare herself for this service by utilizing every road to knowledge and enlarging her understanding of the nation and its possibilities. He believed that a general effort on these lines by the educated women would make a profound impression upon the young and be invaluable in the next generation.

There seems to have been no flaw in his attachment to Leonora; his career abroad has been searched in vain for a reminiscence of an escapade. He lived a life of purity and that self-control that he held to be the first demand of the moral code he professed. Seldom has the biographer a career like this to write in which appears not enough of human frailty to spice the narrative. He had made for himself certain rules of conduct—abstemiousness, temperance, chastity, no wasting of time, no wasting of health—and to these he adhered with the stern inflexibility of an ascetic. The artist is usually saved, says Edmund Clarence Stedman, by his devotion to beauty. Rizal was an artist, and never has knelt before the ideal of beauty a worshiper more devout. The beauty of righteousness seemed to rule out of him all promptings to the coltish excesses of youth; that, and the dignity of his love, and his conception of the gravity of his mission. He that is called to bring light to his people must not linger at the wayside inn nor ruin their hopes by capitulation to man’s grosser senses.

Meantime, the Riveras had moved from Manila to Dagupan, in the province then called Laguna. The reputation that Rizal had left behind him was not bettered by the handling it had from the governing class after his flight. Evil propaganda has always been easy to great power in any form. In his absence the spies and agents provocateurs of the Government made it but the day’s work to smear with lies the name of Rizal. “Some of it will stick,” is the philosophy of the professional slanderer. In this case the word proved true enough. Mrs. Rivera seems to have been much affected by the sad decline and fall of her prospective son-in-law. She was an excellent lady but one that set exaggerated store by the verdict of society and what Shelley called the great god “They Say.” Among all colonists everywhere this is a deity of might. With the slender group of Filipinos that strove to grasp the skirts of a society drawn disdainfully away from them, the cult amounted sometimes to a frenzy.

The reports that came from Madrid about Leonora’s lover, or were affirmed to come thence, were no salve to the mother’s wounded sensibilities. He was said to associate with sad young dogs, revolutionists and outcasts and all that, with Filipinos that had been exiled after the governmental sand-dance of 1872 and with other agencies of treason. The thought of the career that such a man would probably have in the Philippines seems to have struck Mrs. Rivera with inexpressible terror. What her friends and social co-mates would say when her daughter should be married to one sure to be a pariah if not a victim of the garrote was beyond her strength to endure.

She had also the strange notion that steals into the minds of some subjugated people that intermarriage with the dominant color promises relief from the sting of inferiority. About this time the railroad was being extended to Dagupan, and a young English engineer, Henry C. Kipping, came to take charge of the building of the last section of the new line from Bayambang. His work took him often to Dagupan, where he met and fell in love with Leonora. He seems to have urged his suit with ardor and persistence and to have had from the beginning an adroit

## partisan in Leonora’s mother. Here had come, as if by the order of

Providence, a means to save her daughter from an unhappy marriage. How much better to wed an English engineer than a Filipino agitator! With joy she seized every opportunity to praise the ingenious Kipping, gave thanks (for she was of a resolute devotion) to the wisdom that had arranged all this, and even prepared to give it help of her own devising. [80]

Cold fell her eulogies on Leonora’s ears. When Kipping talked love to her she told him frankly that she was engaged to marry Rizal, whom she loved and would always love, and that another suitor was for her impossible.

Nothing in Kipping’s reports of these chilly receptions daunted Mrs. Rivera, her heart being set on this match. She knew well the weight of parental authority among her people. Also, she had faith in the effects of absence, if judiciously interpreted and assisted. She can hardly have read the novels of Charles Reade, but that eminent author would have found in her a character all made to his mind. She now had resort to an expedient that was one of favorite practice among his own villains. Many a reader of his it has left cold, deeming it impossible or extravagant. Behold, then, vindication for the novelist, and straight from history. Mrs. Rivera augmented the glacial effects of separation by stopping all letters between the young lovers. To this end she bribed two postal clerks. [81] For a monthly stipend they agreed to bring to her all the letters that Leonora wrote to José and all the letters that José wrote to Leonora.

Months went by and not a word came from Madrid. Leonora began to droop under the suspense. Skilfully and industriously her mother plied her with insinuations and the wise shaking of the head so eloquent to the anxious. We could and if we would, and that line of ambiguous givings out. At last, she openly declared that Rizal had found another sweetheart. Leonora hysterically affirmed her faith in her lover. But the physical fact persisted that mail after mail arrived from Spain and not a line from Rizal. “He is sick,” said Leonora, “and I am here, I cannot take care of him.” The next time the expected letter failed she said deliberately, “I know José. He has given his word. He will die before he breaks it.”

The mother seems to have known how to beat down this spirit. At last she brought to an issue the slow, sure undermining in which she had been employing her wits. “If you truly love me, you ought to remember that, after God, you owe to me all you are, and after God, then, you owe me your duty. I urge this marriage, not because it means anything to me, but because I am your mother. I seek your true happiness. All the hope of my life is centered upon it. Do you wish to kill your mother?”

At this, Leonora capitulated. So great is the maternal influence in the Filipino household it is likely that most other Filipino girls in the same conditions would have yielded. According to Miss Sevilla, Leonora’s sympathetic biographer, the daughter now fell into the mother’s arms and said:

“I owe you my life; I will sacrifice it for you, and make this marriage as you wish, but you will find that I shall not live long after it. In return, I ask you three things, that I shall not again be asked to play or to sing, that my piano shall be kept locked, and that you shall be at my side when I am married.” [82]

The next day she burned the letters she had received from Rizal before her mother had interfered with her happiness. Following a Filipino custom, she put the ashes into a little box which she covered with a piece of the dress she had worn when she was betrothed and a piece of the dress she had worn when she yielded to her mother about Kipping. The box is still in existence. It bears on its covers the letters “J” and “L” worked in gold. [83]

The wedding was fixed for June 17, at Dagupan. A few days before this date, Mrs. Rivera was called to Manila by some business transaction in which she must take a part. She seems to have forgotten the postal clerks, or they to have forgotten their employment; for while she was gone a letter arrived from Rizal to Leonora, and it fell into her hands. She opened it with wonder and trembling, and lo! it was filled with tender reproaches for her long silence. He had written to her regularly by every mail, but all these months had come not a word in answer. Had she forgotten him?

The next scene may be deemed to justify the writers both of fiction and of melodrama. Leonora waited in silence until her mother returned from Manila, for her quick intelligence showed her unerringly who had been the author of this wreck of her happiness. The moment her mother opened the door the storm broke. Leonora, for once, defied the restraint the Filipino girl must traditionally feel in the presence of her parents and spared nobody in her passionate denunciation of the treachery of which she had been the victim. Mrs. Rivera seems to have admitted everything and borne with composure the whirlwind of her daughter’s wrath. She knew that the discovery had come too late to disturb her own success. The wedding was close at hand, the banns had been cried, the guests invited, the peculiar Filipino pride was involved and her daughter would hold to her word.

Kipping was baptized and became a Catholic. The wedding took place at the appointed hour. Afterward some of her relatives recalled that it was a ceremony without joy or good omens. They said that from it the bride returned in a state of chill lassitude. Contrary to her mother’s hopes, the marriage proved unhappy, and Leonora survived it only two years.

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