Philippine

Commentary 2013
To thine own self be true--that to no one
canst thou be false!
Monday, June 19, 2006

The Mysterious Miscarriage of Mrs.

Jose Rizal

LETTERS FROM THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY

Jos Rizal got this girl so pregnant in 1895 (when

the photograph at left is said to have been taken)
that he wanted to marry her...We know this
because History preserves many letters from the
19th Century, to and from Jos Rizl, (who was
born on this date, June 19, 1861 -- in case you
only know about December 30, 1896, when the
Catholic Taliban and the Philippine Republic
murders him annually with a gleeful "Fuego!" and
"Lupang Hinirang!").

But Rizal's vast audience of the future is lucky

because as an habitual letter-writer, diarist,
journalist, novelist, communicator, and poet, he
generated a tremendous amount of written
correspondence with family and friends, with
scientific and business associates, with
government officials and famous personalities,
and ordinary persons of his era. Moreover, Jos
Rizl meticulously recorded his every experience,
acquaintance, observation -- all of which were rich
and varied because of his travels and connections
to so many people. That material is still a primary
historical source on his life and times. And
loves...as this small collection I've chosen
perhaps gives us a glimpse of.

Here he is, after three long years of exile in dark

and dreary Dapitan, introducing his intended to
his stern and disapproving Mother...

14 March 1895
Mrs. Teodora Alonso
Manila

My Very Dear Mother,

The bearer of this letter is Miss Josephine

Leopoldine Tauffer whom I was on the point of
marrying, counting on your consent, of course.
Our relations were broken on her suggestion on
account of the numerous difficulties on the way.
She is almost alone in the world; she has only
very distant relatives.
As I am interested in her and it is very possible
that she may later decide to join me and as she
may be left all alone and abandoned, I beg you to
give her hospitality there, treating her as a
daughter, until she shall have an opportunity or
occasion to come here.

I have decided to write the General to find out

about my case.

Treat Miss Josephine as a a person whom I

esteem and value much and whom I would not
like to be unprotected and abandoned. Your most
affectionate son who loves you,

JOS RIZL
About a month or so later, he writes to his sister
about Josephine, and thanks her for some pickled
eggs...Pickled eggs!
Mrs. Narcisa Rizal
My Dear Sister,

I read your letter yesterday and Miss B.[racken]

and I thank you very much for your kindness. She
above all is grateful to you and Tonino for the
hospitality you offer her but for the present we
have decided that she should stay here. She
cannot send you anything for she has no moment
of rest now and although she likes this, she
cannot however dry fish or make pickles. The jar
of pickled fish eggs is very good and we enjoyed
eating it. Miss J.[ospehine] sends you very
affectionate regards.

With nothing more, many regards to all from your

brother who loves you dearly.

J. Rizal
Historically, the scandal has never died, of the 35-
year old Doctor Rizal taking up with "an Irish girl
of sweet eighteen, slender, a chestnut blond, with
blue eyes, dressed with elegant simplicity, with an
atmosphere of light gaiety,"

Rizal's descendant, Asuncion Lopez Rizal

Bantug, in her recent biography, Indio Bravo,
(Tahanan Books, Manila, 1997) gives some
valuable background on the intended Mrs.
Josephine Bracken Rizal ...
Josephine Bracken...arrived in Dapitan in
February 1895 with her foster father, George
Taufer, and a certain Manuela Orlac, the mistress
of a friar at the Manila Cathedral. It was Orlac's
friar connection that led some of Rizal's sisters to
sustpet that Josephine had come to spy on their
brother. Taufer and Josephine had met Rizal in
Hongkong, when Taufer sought help for his failing
eyesight. At the time of their visit to Dapitan
Josephine was 17 years old, a petite Eurasian
orphan with Irish blood, who had lived a hard life
with her foster father and his various wives. She
must have been attractive enough for Rizal to fall
instantly in love with her, and she returned his
love like many other women before her.
Despite coming in his fourth year of exile, the
months that follow are among the happiest and
most productive of Rizal's entire life. If one reads
the compendium of One Hundred Letters of Rizal
in this period of 1895, one finds him happy, busy
and ambitious. He and Josephine were living
happily as man and wife on his idyllic and isolated
Talisay property beside the sea on the Northern
Mindanao coast in what is now Dapitan,
Zamboanga del Norte. But, he also conducts a
lively correspondence and active commerce in
specimens and scientific instruments and books
with various colleagues in Europe and America.
He sees many patients, attracted by his
knowledge, skill and humanity. He has orchards
with thousands of trees, cuttings, plantings of
coffee, cashews, cocoa, macopa, siniguelas,
mangoes. He collects forest honey and scientific
specimens, even discovering unknown plant and
animal species, which today bear his name. He is
running a small school for boys and plans several
ambitious projects for Mindanao, including an
"agricultural colony" in Sindangan Bay, and a
shipbuilding facility near what is now Butuan City.
He is full of optimism and is evidently planning to
raise a family and make a life there. A great life
there!

CARLOS QUIRINO, in The Great Malayan

(Philippine Commonwealth era prize winning
biography, Tahanan Books, 1997) on Rizal's
happiest Christmas:
Christmas that year was the happiest he had ever
spent in Dapitan, mainly because of Josephine's
presence. She was now big with child--his child,
and he experienced a thrill of joy at being a
prospective father. Would it be a boy or a girl?
Whom would it look like? They killed a suckling
pig, roasting it over live coals to a succulent
brown, and made chicken broth out of a fat hen.
Jose invited the neighborss to a Christmas party,
and they all danced and made merry until dawn.
On New Year's Eve, they repeated the
celebration, enjoyoing themselves thoroughly.
LEON MA. GUERRERO writes in his 1961
biography of Rizal, The First Filipino ("Awarded
First Prize in the Rizal Biography Contest held
under the auspices ofthe Jose Rizal National
Centennial Commission in 1961" Published in
Manila, 1963), "They ould not be married; as we
shall see, the Church demanded his recantation
and submission before she would consent to their
participation in the Sacrament of Matrimony. It
was not something that Josephine, a pious
believer, ould take lightly. But she had never been
demanding, and she swallowed her pride and her
scruples, although when they were more than she
could bear she always said she would go away.
"The person who lives in my house" was Rizal's
authentically Tagalog and anot ungallant
description of her to his mother in January 1896...
15 January 1896
Mrs. Teodora Alonso
My Very Dear Mother,

...She is good, obedient and submissive. We lack

nothing except that we are not married, but, as
you yourself say, better to a Love in God's grace
than be married in mortal sin. We have still to
have our first quarrel, and when I give her advice
she does not answer back. If you come and get to
know her I have every hope that you will get along
with her. Besides, she has nobody in this world
except myself. I am her whole family...J. Rizal
Then, in this letter to his mother, he gives her
some sad news, in a rather terse
and mysterious manner (to me)...
12 March 1896
Mrs. Teodora Alonso
My Very Dear Mother,

Miss B. thanks you very much for your gifts and

does not know how to reciprocate. She cannot go
there just now because there is nobody here to
look after the nephews. She bathes them, and
washes and mends their clothes, so that, poor
girl, she is never at rest, but she does it willingly
for she has a great love for the boys, and they
love her mor than they love me! ... I am afraid she
has had a miscarriage; she was very seriously ill
the day before yesterday.
Historian Gregorio F. Zaide describes this
alleged event as follows in his biography Life,
Works and Writings of a Genius (All Nation's
Publishing, 1994 ed.)
In the early part of 1896 Rizal was extremely
unhappy because Josephine was expecting a
baby. Unfortunately, he played a prank on her,
frightening her so that she prematurely gave birth
to an eight month baby boy, who lived only for
three hours . This lost son of Rizal was named
"Franisco" in honor of Don Francisco (the hero's
father) and was buried in Dapitan.
Leon Ma. Guerrero is the most sympathetic:
"Poor Josephine! Born in a barracks, farmed out
as a baby, nursing two Mrs. Taufers, tormented by
the third, running away and going back, saddled
with a sick, blind, jealous old man, falling in love
and running away (she always seemed to be
running away and going back), wanting to wait
and wanting to marry, gossiped about, slandered,
wounded int he depths of her Irish Catholic heart
by the sneers and shrugs of her lover's sisters, so
eager to please with her little gifts of music books
and muslim collars, so desperate to be accepted
with her rice cakes and noodles and dried fish!
She was not afraid to work; she had been working
all her life, a corporal's daughter brought up by
stepmothers, to whom cooking and washing and
minding the children and feeding the chickens
was the very purspose of a girl's life. She was not
bored by Dapitan, whatever Rizal might think:
here she had at last made some sort of home for
herself, outside the pale of the law, in the shadow
of the Church's reprobation, but still a home, a
family, which she had never had in crowded
exciting Hong Kong and Tokyo. I would be a real
home and "a whole family" when the baby came,
and now she had lost him.
Actually, many apocryphal and conflicting stories
and histories exist about this episode regarding
Rizal's son, Francisco, who "lived for only three
hours." Some have it that Rizal buried it
"somewhere in the gazebo" area on his Talisay
property. Then, on the day he and Josephine left
Dapitan, in July, 1896, he burned everything
down, with a Dapitan Orchestra playing Chopin's
Funeral March! Other stories even have it, that he
went and buried the child "somewhere in the
forest" above his Talisay home, and never told
anyone where.

Yet...Jose Rizal was a man who knew where

every postage stamp he bought was, where every
button, cuff and collar that was lovingly sent to
him was, a man who dutifully and accurately
recorded the minutest details of his entire life
experience...but in the case of his son, --his son!--
he leaves no record of where he buriedit?? Just
like that, with less thought than he accorded his
laundry, he disposes of his "stillborn" eight-month
old baby boy?? I don't believe it for one second
and have other theories about what really
happened...It is simply out of character for Rizal
to have done so. Perhaps there never was a
miscarriage and it was all to save a boy from a life
as the Son of Jose Rizal--the bastard son of Jose
Rizal, heretic, apostate, excommunicant, exile!

Later, much later, Josephine would write to Jose

Rizal...(her 'typos' and grammar are preserved...)
17 August 1896, Manila
Dr. J. Rizal
My Darling Love

I received your most kind and welcomed letter

dated the 10th Wednesday. I am very much
surprised not hearing anything about if you have
received the three Tyrines of Foie gras: well!
perhaps you have not received any other letters
that I have written to you. I went to the Governor
General today but unfortunately he is laid up with
a severe cold, but his adecam told me to go back
in three days to receive an answer from him.

Dear I would like very much to go with your dear

famaily, but; you know what I have written to you, I
would like to go alone, so I can speak to you
better for in your famaily's presence we can [not]
be very free to each other.

I know my dear it breakes my heart to go and bid

you good bye! but! dear what can I do; than to
suffer until the Good God brings you back to me
again. Your sister Choling came to visit me
yesterday and she wants to give me her daughter
Maria Luisa to me she says she had great
confidence in me, well I told her for my part I am
quite willing and satisfied but I have to comunicate
with your first if you are willing, I have so many
pupils about fifteen three dollars each and I am
also studying Piano 4 $ a month in Dna. Maria's
house one of my pupil, Dear I have to do
something like that because I am always sorry
thinking of your. Oh! dear how I miss you. I will
always be good and faithful to you, and also do
good to my companions so that the good God will
bring youback to me. I will try all my best to be
good to your family especially to your dear old
Parents "the hands that we cannot cut lift it up and
kiss it or adore the hand that gives the blow." How
it made the tears flew in my eyes when I read
those few lines of you. Say darling say it makes
me think of our dear old hut in Dapitan and the
many sweet [h]ours we have passed there.

Love I will love you ever, love I will leave thee

never, ever to me precious to thee never to part
heart bound to heart or never to say good bye.

So my darling receive many warm Affection and

love.

From You ever faithfull and true till death,

JOSEPHINE BRACKEN

P.S. The boys are very well I am giving my home

pupils their lesson every night from 7 until 9
o'clock.
Jose Rizal's final farewell to her--did it come
before or after the above?
Adis, dulce extranjera, mi amiga, mi alegra,
Adis, queridos seres, morir es descansar.
I think it must be taken as something of great
significance that Jose Rizal's last written words on
earth are to this "sweet stranger, his friend, his
joy." Just as the first words that Christ utters to
Mary Magdalene after Resurrection was: "Noli
Me Tangere!"

Then there's this... El Filibusterismo: Sic Itur Ad

Astra (MP3)

MANUEL L. QUEZON III writes about a different

purported son of Rizal: ADOLF RIZAL!

Adrian Cristobal of the Manila Bulletin tackles

the same topic today, but MLQ3 produces the
more interesting read.