Rizal's intimations of his early death

Rizal dreamt of his death 14 years before he was executed at Bagumbayan Field on Dec. 30, 1896.

This was revealed by former Spanish Ambassador Pedro Ortiz Armengol, scholar and Rizalist. His written account, as translated from the Spanish by this columnist, follows: Rizal arrived in Madrid in mid-June of 1882. Upon enrolling on Sept. 12 of that same year in the College of Medicine, he took up residence on Amor de Dios St. It was to this address that Rizal’s friends from Calamba and Manila directed their letters; it was from this address Rizal sent them his own.

One letter from Rizal’s brother Paciano, dated Dec. 30, 1882, and written in Spanish, has its last two paragraphs written in Tagalog. In these ominous paragraphs, Paciano refers to various prophetic dreams. The paragraphs seem deliberately vague, dwelling as they do on misty remembrances and on different and obscure interpretations of these dreams. Herewith are the paragraphs: Do you still remember what you told me one morning — that you dreamt our family was about to face a grave problem, but that you could not know whether it was going to enrich or impoverish us, since it was only a dream after all?

Hours after Paciano wrote his letter in Calamba, Rizal in Madrid was writing his brother on exactly the same date, Dec. 30, 1882. Rizal also wrote long letters to his sisters Maria and Josefa, and that night, he was to have a similarly prophetic dream. Rizal’s associations with those he loved were notably profound and subconsciously clairvoyant. While sailing from Manila to Madrid, he recorded in his diary “a sad, frightful dream” which had “all the appearances of reality”.

He will again have this same dream in Singapore on May 10, a dream wherein he sees the death of Paciano. After a few days on the high seas, he has this dream once more, “a sorrowful dream” wherein appears one of his sisters. He then ponders on the meaning of these recurring dreams.

What happened to him on the night of Dec. 30, 1882, he describes two days later, Jan. 1, 1883: It is night. I am very sad. I do not know what vague melancholy, what indefinable solitude envelopes my soul, a sorrow similar to the solitude of cities after a tumultuous rejoicing or a deliriously happy celebration of a reunion.

It was two nights ago, the 30th of December, that I had a most frightful dream, a dream so oppressive that just a little while longer and I would have ceased to live. I dreamt that I was imitating an actor dying in a scene. I felt that I could hardly breathe, that my strength was quickly ebbing.

“Afterwards, my vision grew dim and darkness engulfed me, as though a nothingness — the agony of death — had overcome me.

I wanted to shout and ask for help from Antonio Paterno, feeling that I was about to die. I then woke up feeling utterly weak and drained.”

From the above, Ambassador Armengol concludes: “Once more, we see Rizal’s visionary associations borne of an extraordinary and prophetic sensibility. It is most unusual and pathetic that Rizal’s dream of death should occur on the exact day, December 30, 14 years before he would meet his martyrdom as a great patriot.

Spaniards on Rizal’s death

Contemporary Spaniards have not only recognized the enormity of the crime the colonial authorities committed against Rizal, and by extension, against the entire Filipino nation, but have also tried to make amends for it — and continue to do so, in some instances, magnanimously. In Madrid, an avenue has been named after Rizal and a statue of him, inaugurated.

Another instance of redress was undertaken by the Instituto Cervantes some years ago when it published an issue of Cuadernos entirely devoted to Rizal, this attesting to the Spaniards’ esteem and admiration for the man who, a century ago, their own forefathers had sentenced to death by musketry.

In the prologue of Cuadernos, former Ambassador Delfin Colomé wrote in part: “The execution of Rizal was not the work of Spain. It was the work of black Spain. An ill-fated, inconsiderate and deceitful Spain which tortured a large number of its own children not only in Manila but also in Madrid, in Barcelona or in Salamanca.

“But together with that black Spain existed another Spain. The Spain of Rizal’s friends, the Spain of free thinkers, liberals and revolutionaries.”