[16] Fernández, “A Brief History of the Philippines,” p. 136. [↑]
[17] The Philippine Independence Mission of 1922 estimated the number at one hundred, great and small. [↑]
[18] Barrio: hamlet. Most Philippine farmers live gregariously. [↑]
CHAPTER II
SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The boy that so early and by this savage tuition came to be initiated into his people’s sorrows was then chiefly remarkable for a gentle, tractable disposition and a liking for books and study. He had been born at Calamba, June 19, 1861. In his earliest childhood he seemed undersized and undervitalized; but when he was six years old there came to his father’s house his uncle Manuel, a figure of health and a resolute practitioner of open-air sports, who took José in hand and with daily exercises and rigorous living built his body to normal strength and agility. Filipinos have a natural aptitude for athletics; he verified now the ancestral blood in his veins. He ran and jumped; he took long walks; he learned to fence, to ride, and to like the sun and the wind.
By all accounts he must have been a singularly attractive child, even in a country where handsome children are common. His color was the fine tint of his people, a light, clean, even brown; his face a delicate oval, but the chin firm and rather long; the forehead nobly shaped, the nose almost classical, the lips full but nothing sensual. His eyes had a hardly discernible slant; when he was animated they flashed out of black depths a kind of black fire; but when he was quiescent they seemed gravely introspective. Long [[29]]afterward his neighbors and relatives, trying to recall his boyhood, and perhaps overstraining memory, thought he seemed always much older than his years, a notion that may have arisen from his unusual habits. He liked to read or be read to; he liked at times to be alone; he liked to hear his elders argue; he liked to go to church to see the people there; and he liked to reason.
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda was his full name, made up in the Spanish fashion from both sides of his house, paternal as far as the connecting “y,” and maternal the rest of the road. Philippine names seem to the Anglo-Saxon mind a riddle that adds unnecessarily to the burdens of life. This boy was to be known all his life as José Rizal; his father had been and was always thereafter known as Francisco Mercado, his mother as Doña Teodora Alonzo. Francisco, the father, and all Francisco’s younger brothers in a family of twelve called themselves Rizal as much as Mercado and the rest; none of his older brothers used Rizal; all of his children bore it as their family name. Yet family name it was never, according to western standards; for it was added in 1849 by virtue of a proclamation of the governor-general and by the whim of the man then head of the house. A strange difficulty had arisen in the Philippines. The original Tagalog (or other native) surnames being invincible against the Spanish tongue, Spanish names were used as substitutes, but not, one might think, with sufficient variety. Religious fervor overworked the popularity of some of these until there arose an inextricable confusion: seventeen [[30]]Antonio de la Cruzes in one town, all unrelated; twelve Francisco de los Santoses in a single street. This knot the wise old Governor-General Claveria[1] cut with ready sword. He provided a list of Spanish names, apparently copied in alphabetical order from the Madrid directory, and required the head of each family to take one of these, add it at the rear or front of whatever other names he was then carrying, and hand it down to his children.[2] The father of Francisco Mercado met the spirit of the decree but evaded its letter. He chose for his official name of names Rizal, which was not on the governor-general’s list, but passed muster. It is a corruption of the Spanish word ricial, and means a green field or pasture; being here a poetic recognition, maybe, of the blessed state of Mercado’s own rentals.
In the long and many syllabled cognomen, sounding like a verse of the Æneid, with which José was baptized, is to be noticed the name Realonda. This was from his mother’s family, where it also was an innovation of the ingenious Claveria. Her family had long been known as Alonzo.[3]