Travels with Jose (Part 1)

It was the spring of 1998 and the 100th year when the Philippines declared its independence. I was traveling to Europe and thought of including visits to places where our national hero Jose Rizal and his fellow radicals lived, worked and got together.   It was to be a solitary and reflective excursion requiring nothing more than a camera, a decent map and my trusty diary.  I didn’t expect though to have a companion–someone intimately know-ledgeable with the project I was to undertake.  His name?  Jose.  Jose Rizal, that is.

Let me explain.  I reached Paris to be warmly greeted by my hosts, Marietta and Henri de La Haye Jousselin.  I had e-mailed Marietta before coming that aside from museums to visit, I wanted to retrace Rizalian sites.

Marietta handed me a list and asked me a favor.  Could I take back to the Philippines a little iron bust of Rizal for Ambeth Ocampo?   No problem, I said.  I was still to go to Barcelona and Madrid before returning to the Philippines but the bust was not heavy; it was the little I could do for Marietta’s hospitality.

The very morning I arrived in Paris I was with Marietta headed for the Louvre Museum.   I had been to the Louvre once, as a student, long ago.  Now, as a museologist I came to see it in a very different light.  The receiving entrances below the I.M. Pei glass triangle, the many boutiques and shops connected to the museum, the directional signs and floor guide, the refurbished bedroom and ante-rooms of Louis XVI as additional pavilions and the new domed skylights covering the courtyards were equally interesting to me as were the works of art.  

Being one of the first repositories in the world to establish and define what a museum is and welcoming today five million visitors a year, I had good reason to make this my first stop.  Rizal did the same.  In a letter to his parents after having just arrived in Paris, he scribbles his greetings and apologizes for the letter’s brevity.  He was in a rush for he was off to go to "the Museum."

* * *

Oh my God, it’s three in the morning and I can’t sleep.  This jet lag is a killer.  Maybe if I read a little I’ll get sleepy.  Oh, Jose, how’d you get on the night table?  Oh yes, I put you there, I think.

I can’t sleep.  You had it much better coming to Europe.  Thirty plus days of leisurely cruising and stopping at interesting ports like Saigon and Cairo.  Sunsets on board, fine dining at night.  You got to bone up on your French, and Latin and Dutch.  It took me just under 13 hours to get to Paris after a stop in Hong Kong.  Could hardly see a thing below from my window. Saw two movies both I didn’t like.  The airplane meal was inedible.  And now, three days later, I still can’t sleep.  You think we have it better, Jose?  Faster maybe.  But definitely not better.

* * *

In previous trips I never thought of going up the Eiffel Tower.  I rather enjoyed seeing it from a distance, like from the Trocadero or on the top floor of the Pompidou Center.  Seeing the Eiffel meant being in Paris.

Jose Rizal on his 1889 trip to Europe left the stuffy rarefied atmosphere of the British Library where he was doing research to join his Filipino companions for the opening of the Paris Exposition which inaugurated the Eiffel Tower.

So, I did what millions of others have done;  I waited my turn in line to board a lift to take me to the second floor of the tower.  Looking at this massive skeletal structure above, I recall Jose writing to friends about how Paris,  with its sophistication, wide boulevards and technological progress made him feel so provincial.  I felt the same way too, traveling up the lift,  knowing how, over a hundred years ago, this structural landmark, the highest in all of Paris, would bedazzle citizens and visitors alike.  I walked all four sides of the second floor tower with every view of the city equally enchanting.   But my favorite view was the one where I could see the  Seine and Musee de L’Homme where I researched many years ago and the colorful and anomalous Pompidou Center and the long sprawling Louvre.  I pulled Jose out from my bag and directed his eyes to his favorite Louvre.

"Who’s your friend?" I looked beside me to see this tall black woman with a big smile clutching the railing and looking at Jose.

"Oh, just an old friend."

"Well, your friend’s gonna like this view."

"Yeah, he liked it a lot.  A long time ago."

"Ain’t this a beautiful day? You know Ella’s song, I Love Paris keeps playing and playing and going on rewind in my mind."

"What a coincidence," I said. "I was humming that same song when I was coming up."

"I love Paris in the springtime..."  She dives into the song, arms outstretched, forcefully like a nightclub singer.

"I love Paris in the fall..."  I join her, a little meekly in the beginning.

"I love Paris in the summer when it sizzles..." A rotund couple in sunglasses nearby join in too with their Australian accent.

"I love Paris in the winter when it drizzles..." We are now a piano bar crowd singing lustily away.  Our faces are up to the sky soaking in this delicious day.  I raise Jose’s face upward, to the sun, as the second floor of the Eiffel Tower sings lustily away.

The cab driver stopped at the appointed address.  No.  65 Boulevard Arago.  I stood in the middle of an empty boulevard on a quiet Sunday afternoon to get a full look at this series of long connected ateliers in Norman architecture partially covered by trees.   At the courtyard entrance there is a plaque placed by the Philippine National Historical Institute commemorating the studio of Juan Luna as a meeting place for the artists and intellectuals who bandied themselves as "Los Indios Bravos."  Aside from Juan Luna, Felix Resureccion Hidalgo also had an atelier here.   The prestige of two Filipinos having ateliers is made even more significant knowing that Rodin, Gauguin, Modigliani had, at other times, had studios there too.

I was slightly nervous walking through the lush garden, passing worn wicker chairs and peering in through studios.  Here amidst blooming azaleas and cascading roses and chirping birds and wandering bees I wondered, perchance, coming upon Jose Rizal seated on one of the chairs busily writing away.  You see, Rizal was here for four months camping at Juan Luna’s studio to finish his first subversive novel, the Noli Me Tangere.

I often wondered in what setting Rizal laced and strung the words that became the monumental novel that changed Philippine history.  In this scented garden, below a rapturous sky and the expansive air of freedom, a young man over a hundred years ago penned lines about his country.  Perhaps it was here, in this same garden, where he wrote the preface to the Noli Me Tangere.  Addressing his country like a mother he vowed  "to describe your condition faithfully, not trying to please; raising the mask that conceals your sores, sacrificing everything to truth, even including self-esteem, since, being your son, I too share in your blemishes and frailties."

I came across a vacant studio, the front door opened, and I entered it.  In the middle of the room was a skylight so high allowing the sun in, bathing the room with the "painter’s light."  It dawned on me that this would be a similar setting for many old indoor photographs ascribed as having been taken in Luna’s studio.  Amidst long damask curtains, a tall stovepipe to the side and oversized paintings, Rizal, Luna,  Hidalgo,  Pardo de Tavera and other "Indios" posed proudly in gentleman’s attire or clowned around a table cluttered with wine bottles in drunken ribaldry.

I was awestruck being in a place where our Indio spirits once wrote, painted and partied.  I slowly retraced my steps back to the gated entrance, looking back every so often to gaze once more at the pink peonies and the purple irises, hoping just perhaps to spot a mustached brown man furiously scribbling at a distant garden table.  I walked the full length of tree-lined Boulevard Arago wondering at times if the same pavement spot my foot rested upon was the same spot that Jose’s foot rested.  I walked, dazed and unmindful, until I reached a Metro station to devour me back to this fin-de-siecle moment.

Aside from being in Paris in the most beautiful of May springs, I arrived in the midst of a national recollection for an event that unsettled all of French society. Thirty years ago, that May, a massive and widespread student revolt occurred with workers joining, later paralyzing the whole country and would, a year later, force the resignation of General Charles de Gaulle.  In bars and cafés where I ate, a TV set recounted those days with images of bonfires on the boulevards and students clashing with the police.  This uprising was one of many seething uprisings throughout the world protesting the war in Vietnam,  protesting against the mediocrity of university teachings and against rigid conventions.  I was then in high school filled with similar nascent sympathies, thinking school was one huge bore and raging a cruel proxy war being waged in Southeast Asia.  We were the young enlightened and impassioned generation of the sixties seeking world peace, nirvana, self-worth and sexual freedoms.

As I wandered in bookstores looking at the array of books and magazines recalling the student revolt I thought of Rizal and surmised that if he were in Paris during that period, he would have given his allegiance to the students. Rizal was but a 22-year-old student when he came to Paris in 1883.   Skimping on meals, he preferred to buy books including the works of radical intellectuals and free thinkers like Voltaire  and Eugene Sue.  He had been sympathetic to the valiant and fatal stand of the Paris Communards. It would be in Paris too where Rizal formed Los Indios Bravos.  Seemingly a group of cocky Filipinos who wanted to change a slur to a badge, these "Indios" also secretly plotted the liberation of all Malayan peoples from colonial subjugation.   As I savored an outdoor bar in the gay Marais District one afternoon and seeing on TV black and white film footage of students battling the police, I raised a toast to all of them, to all with youthful ideals. In a chair beside me, the ghost of Jose raised his glass, too.

Barcelona, the first city in Spain on my visit, would also be Rizal’s first introduction to Spanish life when he arrived in 1882 . This is the city that would first confer his role as a leader for it is here that the La Solidaridad organization and newspaper were formed with Rizal elected as honorary president.  I carried Jose with me as I combed Barcelona looking for where the La Solidaridad staff worked, the places they lived and the cafés around the Plaza de Catalunya where they rendezvoused.

I took Jose to the fort at Montjuic on a tall bluff overlooking the harbor.  In October 1896, on his way to Cuba to be a medical doctor, Rizal arrived in Barcelona, was arrested and while waiting for another ship to bring him back to Manila for trial, was imprisoned in this fort.  From atop, gazing at the vast and blue Mediterranean Sea, at an assortment of ships docked at the port and the vibrant pastel city below me, I wondered if this was the same view Rizal had from his window cell.   It was difficult for me to relish this breathtaking view knowing the anguished feelings Rizal may have felt seeing this city, once full of youthful memories, now barred from him.

As an artist, Rizal must have felt an affinity for Barcelona whose government once bought Juan Luna’s prize winning Spoliarium.    This sophisticated city where art galleries big and small appear everywhere you look, gave birth to and educated artistic geniuses like Miro,  Picasso and the architect Gaudi.  Like Rizal,  on his walks down the enchanting boulevard La Rambla, I was so taken by the spontaneity of its citizens as couples, young and old, danced away on the boulevard with nary a care except loving, life, music and companionship.

I fell in love with Barcelona, the city that harbored our intrepid Indios and published their withering diatribes and pungent satires to the discomfit of authorities and smug friars in the colony. This port city’s physical enchantment and its historical role as haven brought back memories of San Francisco. In America, during those dark years against Ferdinand Marcos, we yelled in front of the Philippine Consulate till we were hoarse, we wrote and printed broadsides after broadsides till we nearly ran out of invectives and rhetoric.  In the midst of plenty and individual expression, we were still rootless and nostalgic.  Like this band of Indios who churned out their fearless newspaper in this tolerant paradise, to wander happily exhausted to an outdoor café and trudge home to a cheap boardinghouse, we anti-Marcos activists shared, a century hence, those same sequences of moments, the same pervasive ennui, imbibing a freedom stolen and lost from a country we loved and left. (To be continued)