A Life in Full

José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was born on 19 June 1861 in Calamba, Laguna, and baptised three days later. He was the seventh child and second son of Francisco Mercado Rizal, a tenant farmer of the Dominican estate, and Teodora Alonso Realonda, an unusually well-educated woman who taught him to read and to write verse. The family was comfortable, devout, and bookish — the household kept one of the largest private libraries in the province.

The surname tells its own story of the colony. The family used Mercado, but José adopted Rizal — from the Spanish ricial, a green field — a name his father had taken after a 19th-century decree obliged Filipino families to assume Spanish surnames. His ancestry was Filipino, Chinese, and Spanish; his outlook, in time, would be simply Filipino.

A shadow fell early. In 1872 his mother was arrested on a fabricated charge and marched to the provincial capital; the same year, three Filipino priests — Mariano Gómez, José Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora — were garroted at Bagumbayan after the Cavite mutiny. Rizal later dedicated El Filibusterismo to their memory. He was eleven.

After early tutoring at home and in Biñan, Rizal entered the Ateneo Municipal de Manila, graduating in 1877 with the highest honours the Jesuit school could confer. He wrote prize-winning poetry, sculpted, and fenced. He then studied philosophy and letters at the Universidad de Santo Tomás, and medicine besides — driven, he said, by his mother's worsening eyesight. Frustrated by what he considered the discrimination shown to Filipino students, he left in 1882 for Spain, telling almost no one in his family.

In Madrid he completed a licentiate in medicine (1884) and another in philosophy and letters (1885) at the Universidad Central. He continued to Paris, working under the ophthalmologist Louis de Wecker, and then to Heidelberg, where he studied under Otto Becker and gained the surgical skill to operate for cataract. He read voraciously, travelled widely, and learned language after language — Spanish, French, German, English, Latin, and more among the score he could use.

Europe also politicised him. Among the Filipino students and expatriates of the Propaganda Movement — Marcelo H. del Pilar, Graciano López Jaena, Mariano Ponce and others — Rizal argued for representation of the Philippines in the Spanish Cortes, freedom of the press, equality before the law, and the secularisation of the parishes. He wrote for La Solidaridad. He never, in these years, called for separation from Spain; he asked for the rights of a Spanish province.

In Berlin, in 1887, he published Noli Me Tángere at his own straitened expense. Four years later, in Ghent, came El Filibusterismo. Between them, in the British Museum, he copied out and annotated Antonio de Morga's Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas to demonstrate that the islands had possessed a developed civilisation before 1565.

Rizal returned briefly in 1887 and found his novel banned and his family harried; the agrarian dispute at Calamba eventually cost the Mercados their land and drove relatives into exile. He came home again in June 1892 and founded La Liga Filipina, a civic association devoted to mutual aid, education, and lawful reform. Within days the governor-general ordered his arrest, and on 15 July 1892 he was deported to Dapitan on the northern coast of Mindanao.

The four years of exile were not idle. He built a school for boys, ran a clinic, treated patients from as far as Hong Kong, laid a waterworks for the town, drained marshes, farmed abaca, collected specimens for European museums (three species bear his name), sculpted, and wrote. There he met Josephine Bracken, the young Irishwoman who came with her adoptive father for an eye operation and remained as his companion.

His correspondence records a long line of affections — Segunda Katigbak, Leonor Valenzuela, Leonor Rivera (widely thought the model for María Clara), Consuelo Ortiga, the Japanese Seiko Usui, Gertrude Beckett of London, Nelly Boustead of Biarritz, and finally Josephine Bracken. He wrote to his family constantly and to the Austrian scholar Ferdinand Blumentritt for a decade; that friendship, conducted almost entirely by post, produced one of the great correspondences of the period.