Getting Willie’s Rizal / Getting Rizal’s Willie

By Cezar Ruis Aquino

Love in Talisay
By Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez

That’s how I came to love you,

you are mine
though I pity the man that
cannot know his blindness
from his love. May you not blame
me, sweet Josephine, for putting you
in this terrible mess.

You call me Joe, and I for joy

tremble at your innocence
and what of it is left? You and I,
perhaps in abundance of knowing,
and also in revenge
God teased when our backs were
turned, in an absolute way

in your body I knew the guidings

of my dream.
Towards night, we would walk
streets away into the woods
for you are all my virtuous sisters
seeking me in vain.
I’m lost time and again in
illuminated roads.

The world owes you a hearing,

but my pen is late.
Josephine, we shall write no words,
but only walk in rain
so I may feel your breasts,
and kiss your feet
and in a blaze of madness wake
the buried spring.

When did Rizal say this?

 And I mean really Rizal, the self-same Rizal of history who, as it were, had written a
memoir—this.
(Just another way of saying the “I” in the poem is not necessarily fiction.)
If so, how is it the hero had written the text—a highly, or deeply, expressive one—in
English not Spanish?
Well, since he is addressing a girl with an Irish mother and British father and
American stepfather—he talks to her naturellement in English. Since I heard your lilting
laughter, it’s your Irish heart I’m after, if you ever heard Mitch Miller. Besides, admit it,
like the girl we don’t know Spanish; so it’s our fault not his—or if you do, the fault is not
his or yours all right but neither is it mine. Es la culpa de nuestra historia. Makes good
historical sense to suspect polyglot Rizal had learned all those languages with an eye on
Miss Universe, eh?
More serious, how is it possible that Rizal, over a hundred years ago, had left a text
the author of which is Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, Filipino poet in Chicago? Well, that’s
the black magic of poets obviously.
I suspect the poem to be autobiographical; Sanchez had transmuted his own story
into the seamless one of the hero such as we have it—in exactly the same manner that
John Keats, in La Belle Dame Sans Merci, had drawn a story from antique tradition and
disappeared, as it were, in the persona of the knight. The personal is transformed into
archetype or myth is another way of putting it, the process rightly compared to the
Great Work of alchemy. As Fanny Brawne, in John Keats’ life, was the belle; the belle in
John Keats’ poem is Fanny Brawne. But Keats had to work it, and when he succeeded
there was no need for the reader to know of Fanny Brawne’s existence, as well as John
Keats’.
I took this as the power of myth to validate a personal experience until the
expatriate poet, in our correspondence, called my attention to the correct order. Didn’t I
rather think, he asked, it is personal experience that validates myth?
Overlooked that.
Indeed Sanchez made it jell with a vengeance. Not only has the author’s story been
made invincibly invisible/ invisibly invincible in the poem’s story; but the episode in
the life of Rizal which is the poem’s story is turned into myth, in fact the monomyth.
And in double fact the creative lightning struck twice, the miracle is two-fold. First,
Rizal’s life validated or authenticated or gave life to or became the monomyth; then
Willie’s personal occultation gives the one story and one story only a new translucence.
Jose Rizal was born in the summer solstice, when the sun is at its brightest, and died
in the winter solstice, when the sun is its own ghost, as Thomas Mann in one of his
stories describes it. Moreover he died in pure droumenon, executed facing the guns,
though they wouldn’t let him, in full view of his people and stirring the mythopoeic
sense forever, especially as his death sparked the revolution.
So here’s to oblige our own rhetoric. When did Rizal put those words together? A
good while after he and Josephine Bracken had become lovers.

That’s how I came to love you,

You are mine
  Note the retrospective, post-coincidence, even post-honeymoon, mood of the poem—
if the word may be forgiven; that is, as if the love affair of Josephine Bracken and Jose
Rizal were not in fact a star-crossed one. Moreover honeymoon is no match for the
intoxication alone of days when, strangers to each other, Joe and Jo (coincidence or
synchronicity?) exchanged glances in the perfect if dangerous night of Taufer’s
blindness. (The variations both positional and combinative of the situation, as you can
see, are well-nigh infinite and all lead to mate. But of that, later.)
But the mood is not post-crisis either; not at all. If the surgeon general were to take
his pulse at this point in his story I would put all of Luneta on the line if it were mine
dear Joe would be advised to take a sedative. Although the two have learned to live
with it (“this terrible mess”), it continues to be a thorn on their bedside.
One of them takes to bed, yes, and though it’s Josephine who does, the ailment that
interests us in the poem is not hers, since her character is subsidiary, but Rizal’s.
However, at this point that is again to digress.
Sweet Josephine, shifted to Spanish, is Dulce Josefina—which could be what Rizal
called Josephine Bracken, not just “Josefina,” long before he came to write the Mi Ultimo
Adios. Either that or it is a beautiful inventionof Sanchez’sto intimate that Rizal already
had an intimation or premonition of the phrase, the most beautiful in his legendary
poem of farewell, not to say death: dulce estranjera, sweet stranger.
In any event it is improbable that Sanchez hadn’t heard Sweet Caroline a pop song
that was a hit around the time he wrote the poem—1969 to be exact. If I’m right about it,
the song played into his hands, insofar as the poem, I believe, makes allusion to it. To
demonstrate this, I will cite parts of the song, along with those from Pete Lacaba’s clear,
unencumbered rendition of Rizal’s exile (a dominant aspect of it).
From Lacaba’s synopsis of the screenplay Rizal sa Dapitan:

“It is 1892. The sun has not yet set on the Spanish empire, and the Philippines
is its prized colony in the Far East, the last outpost of the Spanish Inquisition. On
a rainy day in July, Dr. Jose Rizal arrives in Dapitan, a backwater town in the
province of Zamboanga, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. He is an
internal exile, deported there to isolate him from the revolutionary ferment in
Manila—a ferment stirred up in large part by his anticolonial writings.
“Though Dapitan is a paradise of bucolic charm, it is still a prison paradise.
Into this Eden of profound loneliness now comes his Eve, in the form of an 18-
year-old Eurasian orphan named Josephine Bracken. Her blind stepfather,
George Taufer, has heard of Rizal’s fame as an opthalmologist in Hongkong and
seeks treatment. The 34-year-old Rizal is smitten by her beauty.”

From the essay When Joe Met Miss J. by the same author:

“When Rizal met Josephine Bracken during his exile in Dapitan, he was 34
and she wasn’t quite 18.”
 From Neil Diamond’s song Sweet Caroline:

Where it began
I can’t begin to knowin’
I only know it’s growin’ strong
T’was in the spring
And spring became the summer
Who’d have believed you’d come along

Note how the two parallel continua coincide.

Lacaba, the same sources:

 “Josephine suffered a miscarriage while she was living in with Rizal. The
child was premature and did not survive.”
“In an unfortunate confrontation, Josephine suffers a miscarriage, and a
grieving Rizal buries his stillborn son.”

The song:

And when I hurt

Hurtin’ runs off my shoulder
How can I hurt when holdin’ you

The match or correspondence is still exact.

Lacaba once more:

“Nevertheless, the nearly two years spent with Josephine are largely happy
times.”

The song:

And now I look at the night

And it don’t seem too lonely
We filled it up with only two

Oh yes that’s him, mutant king (after Alexander, Jesus,Von Kleist, Van Gogh, James
Dean, et al) after Josephine’s miscarriage.
Looking at the night is the lingering last thing I see Willie’s Rizal doing, in deep
thought. Here is the son we sent to study in Europe, our one and only Renaissance man,
Filipino heir to Goethe and Da Vinci, to all intents and purposes a scion of the
civilization of the west—at the premature twilight of his life, repudiating that
civilization somewhat when he confesses:

I’m lost time and again in

 illuminated roads.

The lamps in Dapitan he himself has installed in the goodness of his European
engineer’s heart; but on a deeper level a metaphorical reference to the civilization and
culture of Europe that he ultimately finds inadequate, unavailing.
The shadow of modernism is upon him.
The 1890s are only just discovering the unconscious, although the acknowledged
discoverer of the concept, Sigmund Freud, acknowledges the poets to have known it
long before he came. And perhaps it’s really Henry James’ big brother William who had
come right before. En español, el cerebro de un centenar de años antes de Robert
Ornstein. Meantime JR’s faith in reason, which may be what drove him away from the
church into the lure of secret knowledge of the mysterious Freemasons, has come to
nothing.
This is what ails Rizal.
But “ailing” may be too strong a word.
Even “out of sorts” would exceed.
Listless is a little more like it.
What vice or, graver, what inner weakness could he possibly have felt himself sunk
in, that his nine sisters, nine-fold virtue itself, were all of them alien to his innermost
core, as the Irish lass was, virtue being, in the latter’s case, vestigial innocence that could
yet stir and arouse and make a man to tremble, for all that her lavisher, the unfortunate
Taufer, had lavished on her stepdaughter by way of not so much upkeep as education,
i.e. savvy in the ways of the world?
The world turns and because it does we have light and darkness and their eternal
alternation; knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and innocence, being and nothingness
—their alternation and their variance—a variance so irresoluble ancient Persia invented
the end of the world by fire, the Big Bang except they were looking in the opposite
direction.
But where in the poem is this coming from?

You and I,
perhaps in abundance of knowing,
and also in revenge
God teased when our backs were
turned, in an absolute way

My italics.

Our ambidextrous universe, at least the human or anthropocentric one. is also

unfortunately one-faced; i.e. we can only see what’s in front of us, the other - the one
behind—is the realm of the unseen and unknown, the dark, a condition the ancient
Greeks, fools for light forever, apparently found so unacceptable they could not be
content with spin or twist or turn and they invented Janus.
The idea (of two faces looking in opposite directions and therefore covering both)
sounds like overreach, overkill, overdose. In other words, fucking fantastic and futile.
It’s in the nature of everything that we cannot see it. On the opposite side, there is
not a moment when God does not see everything that we do.
Therefore, enabled by love to become children again, Joe and Jo avenge themselves,
teasing hapless sightless Taufer whose back is always turned as it were. Literally the
English “act of darkness.”
But the syntax of the poem twists or spins when, instead of the normal and
expected “You and I teased God” the clause is “You and I God teased.”
That we cannot see God is God teasing us absolutely. Our backs, as it were, are
always turned and thus we know nothing in an absolute way. Vengeance is mine, said the
Lord.Every man is Taufer.
Happily, in Rizal’s case, in Josephine he discovers the primacy—which had been in
truth lifelong—of intuition.

In your body I knew the guidings

Of my dream

At the final split moment Rizal makes a heroic effort to twist, spin, turn around and
see the sun, the firing squad, the guns, maybe even the bullets coming, the lone shooter
whose gun had no bullet, the moth, you and me, the child grown instantly into a
handsome son of a bitch, everything.

However, brilliant and sublime our intelligence may be, it is scarcely more
than a small spark which shines and in an instant is extinguished, and it alone
can give us no idea of that blaze, that conflagration, that ocean of light. (Rizal in a
letter to Father Pastells.)

And in a blaze of madness wake.