Almost 200 years ago

Last Monday night, I stayed up until 11:30 p.m. to watch Channel 7’s I-Witness titled “Mga Lihim ni Rizal.”

Howie Severino, an old writer friend from my Chronicle days, had interviewed me for this show and I wanted to know how it came out. Let me now say it was a beautiful documentary, very well-planned, with interviews, a bit of theater acting, a lot of on-the-spot filming. I simply don’t understand why such documentaries are shown so late at night when they should really be closer to primetime or shown on weekend afternoons so young people can watch. But that assumes that media wants to play a role in the development of our youth. Their record shows they do not.

This year, had he lived, Jose Rizal would have been 150 years old. His mother, Teodora Alonso, is also celebrating the 100th year anniversary of her death. Yet the mysteries in their lives continue to be unspoken. The question of illegitimacy is one of them.

In the family, there has been a whispered myth about the legitimacy of Teodora Alonso. They murmur that she and a sister were illegitimate but close friends of their father’s legitimate sons. This gossip, coupled with the sale of the Alberto house in Biñan, must have provoked Howie into research. He found out that the father of Teodora Alonso and Jose Alberto was Lorenzo Alberto Alonso. In his early 20s, for reasons unknown and undisclosed (after all it must have happened almost 200 years ago,) probably political or financial, Lorenzo Alberto Alonso went to Vigan to marry a young girl of 12, whose name was Paula Florentino.

“Don’t you remember?” my cousin, Mia Syquia Faustmann said. We ate at a restaurant in Vigan that said it was owned by her family. She became a poetess or something. I only vaguely remembered.

After the wedding Lorenzo Alberto Alonso came back to Biñan and probably never went back. They had no children. Ten years later in Biñan he lived with Brigida Quintos and together they had five children. The second was Teodora Alonso and the youngest was Jose Alberto. All of these five children were illegitimate. Lorenzo Alberto Alonso could not marry Brigida Quintos because he had been married before and therefore could not get permission to marry again. So they lived together and had five children who, in the eyes of the law, were all illegitimate.

But if he had no children with his legitimate wife, an old lawyer friend of mine says, then they would have been treated as legitimate children under the law in terms of property after he died.

Maybe, I said, but nevertheless their legal status was illegitimate. Was that fair?

Sometime in his life, Lorenzo Alberto Alonso got knighthood from Queen Isabela of Spain. But when it arrived in the Philippines, Lorenzo was dead. Apparently knighthood can be inherited by legitimate sons so it was presumed that the family (according to the documentary) met and agreed that Jose Alberto and his brother would become legitimate sons. That way Jose Alberto could position himself as heir to the knighthood. Perhaps this is what gave rise to the story that Teodora Alonso and Jose Alberto were half-brothers. In fact, they were full brothers, both of them illegitimate, because their father had married a much younger woman (but had not lived with her) and then later on lived with their mother. The earlier marriage would have been annullable under the old laws if it was unconsummated. But then this was an even older situation. Almost 200 years old and the friars then had full reign.

That’s the first secret. Now I ask — why did it take us so long to talk about it? There are no more friars in the Philippines. The friars, remember, were the church and the state rolled into one. If they told you that you could not marry, you could not marry. That was the final answer. You could live together — as Lorenzo Alberto Alonso and Brigida Quintos and in the next generation as Jose Rizal and Josephine Bracken did — to rebel against such unreasonable laws. Then they condemned you but what harm did that do? Nothing. They said you would go to hell but no one could certify that you did.

What is the difference between life then and life now? We do exactly the same things. The difference is then we whispered about it. These days — almost 200 years later — I am willing to talk about it because I believe in telling the truth. If the friars, who were men, then allowed it, Lorenzo and Brigida could have married and had legitimate children.

Since the friars disapproved, they had five illegitimate children. The behavior of Lorenzo and Brigida did not change. They decided to have five illegitimate children followed by much shushing through the generations. Instead of an everybody-happy situation you have everybody told to shut up. Is that reasonable behavior? What happens to our humanity? Do we simply shush it?

It has been almost 500 years since the Spanish landed. We need to tell the truth. We need to become contemporarily liberal. Spain is contemporarily liberal. They have divorce and their churches are taxed. We were just a little Spanish colony and we still haven’t changed.

That’s not the only secret of the Rizal family. There are more. Watch the documentary “Mga Lihim ni Rizal” on your computer at http.www.pinoytube.tv/action/viewvideo/21043/I_WITNESS–01_31_2011_courtesy_of_GMA7/.

It is an excellent, interesting documentary.

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