Nine women, one Rizal, too many frames

Nine women, one Rizal, too many frames | Daily Tribune

“Hoy! Say nila, si JR, a girl in every port? Palikero daw! Totoo? Macho fantasies na B.I. Playboy. Parang Hollywood script yata?”

“Think of Kuya Pepe as ma kapwa Pinoy, raised with nine sisters and a feisty nanay. Forget that colonial framing. Kilalanin muli si Bayani JR sa pagkataong Pilipino niya.”

That was Kidlat Tahimik, firing off a Rizal Day note last 30 December and, as usual, tipping over with enviable gusto a comfortable stack of assumptions. The message is clear. The palikero Rizal is a Western fantasy imposed on a Filipino hero.

Fair enough. Rizal himself was once dismissed as an American-sponsored hero, safe, cerebral, bookish, preferred over the bolo-wielding Andres Bonifacio during the US campaign of pacifism after Spain’s exit. Yes?

But contrarians are not paid to clap on cue, nor are they obliged to disagree for sport. The job, such as it is, is to resist easy binaries.

And there is a risk here. That in pushing back against colonial caricature, we may end up sanding Rizal down into something just as convenient. An endlessly misunderstood, harmlessly warm kuya whose love life was merely a series of cultural misunderstandings.

The truth, inconveniently, may sit somewhere in between.

The trouble begins with Leonor Rivera, Rizal’s cousin and his first and longest attachment, dating back to around 1878. Rizal was boarding at her father’s house while studying medicine at the University of Santo Tomas.

From then until 1891, Rivera remained present in his life through letters, silences, and deliberate family interference, mostly from her side. Everything else overlapped with that fact.

From 1879 to 1880, while very much tied to Rivera, there was the other Leonor, Valenzuela, in Intramuros. Orang was youthful, flirtatious, and remembered mainly for invisible ink letters.

By 1882, in Madrid, there was Consuelo Ortiga y Rey. Rizal admired her, then withdrew, not because of a great passion thwarted, but because he was already entangled, emotionally and morally, with Rivera.

Fast forward to 1888. In Tokyo, Rizal met O Sei San, or Seiko Usui. He was attentive and impressed, but left without hesitation within weeks. That Japan episode overlapped squarely with Rivera, then still our hero’s long-distance anchor.

Later that year, in London from 1888 to 1889, Gertrude Beckett entered the picture. Again, companionship more than commitment, and again, no rupture when Rizal moved on.

The real stress test arrived in Paris in 1890 with Nelly Boustead, the first woman who plausibly offered a future. Here, the overlap with Leonor Rivera was no longer theoretical but an emotional competition. Boustead was a devout Catholic.

Rizal, by then a Freemason, was not an atheist. Far from it. But he was profoundly anti-clerical, hardened by what friar power had done to his family and country. When the question of a Church marriage arose, it was not faith he rejected but submission. He would not trade conscience for domestic peace.

By 1891, Leonor Rivera married another man and died two years later. Only after that did Suzanne Jacoby appear in Brussels and Ghent, a calmer, domestic relationship overlapping not with a rival woman, but with grief and closure.

Finally, in Dapitan, there was Josephine Bracken. No overlap. No “it’s complicated” status. Whatever judgment one makes of this union, it stands alone.

So yes, Kidlat may be right to reject the “girl in every port” trope. That script does not survive contact with dates, places, and Rizal’s habit of walking away.

Still, portraying Rizal as a man with faults is not necessarily doing colonialism’s work. Humanizing him does not automatically sexualize him. The danger lies in replacing one flattening with another.

Rizal was neither the B.I. Playboy of macho fantasy, nor the culturally misread saint of gentle warmth. He was a man who held on too long to one relationship, allowed minor affections at the margins of exile, faced one genuine alternative and declined it on principle, and only at the end entered a relationship without emotional overlap.

Nine is a tidy number. It fits exams and trivia nights. History, unfortunately, is not tidy. Rizal was not a saint. He was not a playboy. He was complicated in ways that resisted both colonial fantasy and post-colonial comfort.