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Wednesday, July 4, 2001
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How a small-town schoolteacher met the Philippines' national hero By Alan Levy  When Carmelita Rodriguez was growing up on the island of Cebu, it seemed oxymoronic that Philippine Independence Day used to be observed on the Fourth of July: American Independence Day. For the Philippines had actually declared its independence from Spain on June 12, 1898, and established a republic under the first democratic constitution ever known in Asia. But when the United States won the Spanish-American War later that year, Spain ceded the islands to the United States for $20 million and the nation was put under the control of an American military governor.
Only after enduring brutal punishment in battle and Japanese occupation during World War II did the Philippines win independence from the United States on July 4, 1946. Whereupon July 4 became Independence Day -- celebrating independence from America. But ever since a nationalistic resurgence in the 1960s, Philippine Independence Day has been celebrated on June 12. (July 4 is now Philippine-American Friendship Day.) Carmelita Rodriguez Salas, widow of a UN undersecretary-general, has been, since 1997, the first Philippine ambassador resident in Prague. This year, on the Sunday nearest to June 12, she took a busload of 45 Prague-based Filipinos 65 kilometers (40 miles) north of the capital to celebrate Philippine Independence Day in Litomerice, a fortified north Bohemian town just across the Labe (Elbe) river from the Holocaust tourist destination of Terezin (Theresienstadt). Why Litomerice? Because from Friday the 13th of May, 1887, to May 16, the Philippine national hero, Jose Rizal (1861-1896) spent a long weekend in Litomerice, then Leitmeritz in the Habsburgs' Austro-Hungarian Empire. Rizal, who had been studying and writing in Europe for five years, was on his way home and came on a train from Dresden to visit his pen pal, local high-school teacher Ferdinand Blumentritt (1853-1913), for the first and last time. But so strong was the friendship the two men already had forged that Rizal once wrote: "I believe I shall live my days in Austria. I want to retire there, if not in the Philippines, because it is an Austrian who loved and served my fatherland so much." Instead, on the next-to-last day of 1896, Rizal would die at 35, facing Manila Bay, the island of Corregidor and the blue mountains of Bataan with his back to a firing squad, for that is how traitors to Spain were executed: shot in the back. Three busts in one block What Litomerice celebrates in a ceremony every June is not the late Jose Rizal's early martryrdom -- which incited a full-scale rebellion against Spanish rule -- but four of the best days of his life. Three busts of him stand within a square-block's radius of the town's spiffed-up, arcaded central square. (See box.) Born in the Philippine town of Calamba (since 1974, officially "twinned" with Litomerice as "sister towns"), Rizal had been in Europe since May 1882, studying medicine and philosophy in Madrid and ophthalmology in Paris and Heidelberg. (He was a licensed eye doctor.) In Germany, he had finished writing and just published -- in Spanish -- his first novel, Noli Me Tangere (Don't Touch Me). Now he and Maximo Viola -- a Filipino physician who'd funded publication of Rizal's novel -- embarked on a farewell trip across central Europe together before Rizal would sail east from Marseilles that summer. Blumentritt, a Prague-born and -educated German-speaker not quite eight years Rizal's senior, had settled in Leitmeritz upon graduation from Charles University, where he'd studied Spanish colonialism, to take up an appointment to teach history and geography in the town's Technical Secondary School (of which he later became director). He married a local girl, Rosa Muller, and they had two sons and a daughter to whom they gave a Spanish name, Dolores; at home, she was called Loleng, the Tagalog, or Philippine language, version. Math in Tagalog Rizal, who'd been campaigning to introduce Philippine studies into European universities, had heard that Blumentritt was learning Tagalog. While still in Heidelberg, Rizal sent Blumentritt an arithmetic book written in Tagalog and Spanish by a Filipino scholar. Blumentritt responded enthusiastically, and thus began what Rizal's biographer, Austin Coates, has called "the most remarkable -- and the most voluminous -- correspondence in Philippine letters, which went on almost uninterruptedly until terminated by death." In an 1886 exchange of letters, Rizal rebuked the staunchly Catholic Blumentritt for his research reliance on Spanish authors and monks. (The latter are the villains of Noli Me Tangere.) Blumentritt sent Rizal some etchings of his family. Rizal, who also was an artist, sent back a self-portrait. Blumentritt wrote to Rizal: "I look forward with even greater impatience than before to the moment when I should come to know you personally."
That occasion came May 13, 1887, when Rizal and Viola stepped off a train in Leitmeritz. The whole Blumentritt family was there to welcome them and escort them to their billets at the Hotel Rak on the main square. Beer and a butterfly It wasn't a historic weekend -- or even a newsworthy one: just one friend sharing his life with another. After a visit to the Blumentritt home, they strolled the slopes of the hilly town, inhaling the scent of its May flowers and blossoming fruit trees, while conversing mostly in German. They visited the bishop's residence, where Rizal particularly admired a Czech Bible from the 15th century, and the mayor's office, where Rizal and Viola signed the city chronicle's guest book. They drank in a town pub, where Viola pronounced its beer the best in Bohemia, and ate Austro-Czech food, for Rizal had mentioned in a letter that he didn't like north German cuisine. Blumentritt also took his guests to a meeting of the Tourists' Club. Their farewell dinner was in an inn beneath tall trees that Rizal admired on the Shooter's Isle (now Strelecky ostrov) in the Elbe. As the train to Prague pulled out on May 16, Blumentritt stood silent, his eyes blurred with tears, while his daughter Dolores ran along the platform "like a butterfly," Rizal recalled. On May 19 from Brno, Rizal wrote a prescient thank-you to Blumentritt: "Shall this magnificent farewell to Europe be perhaps the omen of a terrible reception in the Philippines?" But, Rizal concluded, he would always remember that "you are not alone, Rizal. There is a little corner of Bohemia [where] there are good, noble souls and friends who appreciate you. Think of them." And he told Blumentritt: "I am in my heart a Leitmeritzan just as you consider yourself a Filipino in sentiment." When Rizal reached Manila in August 1887, his novel had preceded him and he was indeed notorious. After he published a fiery sequel, El filibusterismo (The Subversive, 1891), he was arrested as a revolutionary agitator and banished to Dapitan on Mindanao island. In November 1896, he was put on trial and condemned to death for instigating an insurrection and founding revolutionary societies. On Dec. 29, 1896, from his cell in Fort Santiago, Rizal penned his last letter to Blumentritt: "My dear brother: When you receive this letter, I am already dead. Tomorrow at 7 o'clock I shall be shot. I am, however, innocent of the crime of rebellion. Farewell, my best, my dearest friend, and never think ill of me." Alan Levy's e-mail address is alevy@praguepost.cz More in Tempo Shooting stars
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The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.
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