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She hands me a story and says, You must read it, it is something about our great-grandfather.
I look at my cousin’s earnest face, the planes of her cheeks, smooth and round as my mother’s. My mother! Reigning beauty of her day, gone these many years, but when I look at my cousin I see her again. I see her tall Castilian nose, the dark fringe of lashes around her large brown eyes. “How like Teresita she is!” everyone used to say, of my cousin. I would bow my head, as if in humble obeisance to this beauty.
I open her manuscript and read the words:
Jose Rizal’s Oil Lamp
But what does this have to do with us, with our great-grandfather, I say.
Our great-grandfather, Alfredo Buencamino, was a governor of the province of Albay in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The family had wanted me to write his story for a long time. There was a college named after him in a small town there. And all of us cousins had pictures of the man, dressed in mestizo finery—the same exact picture, showing a man with a luxuriant moustache, right hand resting on his barrel chest—hanging in our homes.
I did in fact begin to write this story, but there were things I discovered about my great-grandfather that bothered me. I discovered that he had more than one wife, the youngest a girl of 14. I discovered that he was uncommonly cruel. He tried his best to hide the fact that there was a strain of indio blood in his family, and he would beat his darker colored servants mercilessly. He died mysteriously, perhaps a victim of poisoning.
You see, my cousin says, gesturing to the manuscript, we are related to the National Hero of the Philippines, Jose Rizal. The one who was shot by a firing squad at Luneta Park, in 1896.
Read it, she urges me. The story is true. And because something in her voice—something about the timbre, the slight tremor of her last words— touches me, I do look down at the pages in my hands, pages I hold lightly, uneasily, in my fingers, and read:
As Jose Rizal was lined up before the Spanish firing squad;
labeledrenegade and underground solidarity worker, George
Dewey entered Manila Bay.
George Dewey. I would always think of him in connection with the man who had invented the Dewey decimal system, but this was not that man. This Dewey was an Admiral, an adventurer with dreams of empire, who entered Manila Bay on 1898 on a great American battleship, guns pointing at the crumbling embankment of Manila’s old walled city, Intramuros.
I picture the blue water of the bay, the panic of the few Spanish soldiers watching on the gray stone battlements.
The residents of the city are sleeping peacefully, their breath rising in stagnant clouds over their heads as they lie beneath the mosquito nets draped over their mahogany four-posters. The dogs sniff in the lanes, the pigs root in the backyards. Roosters crow from various parts of the slumbering city.
Six o’clock in the morning but already the day is hot, the sun’s heat falling like shards on the still-empty streets.
While the guns fire on the crippled Spanish fleet, demolishing it and killing 200 Spanish soldiers, Dewey is having a leisurely breakfast that lasts, if his servants are to be believed, from 7:30 AM, when firing commences, to 11:15, when the white flag is hoisted over the old walls of Intramuros.
In Fort Santiago, the morning of his execution, Jose Rizal gave
his personal belongings to his mother and his sister.
Give this oil lamp to Don Alfredo Buencamino, he instructed
the women. A crumpled piece of paper lay inside. On that
paper was his last farewell to the Filipino people, "Mi Ultimo Adios."
The Spanish Guards came to Don Alfredo’s home in the morning.
They demanded the oil lamp. Lolo Bito handed it to them,
"Rizal left his oil lamp; you can have it. There is no wick, no oil in it.
It does not work. It is empty."
"Mi Ultimo Adios," the poem, Don Alfredo had already
memorized it. He memorized the poem and
destroyed the piece of paper. And as Dewey and the Americans entered
Manila, the first thing Lolo Bito did was record the poem.
And this is how Lolo preserved Jose Rizal’s last words.
But this is not true, I say. Don Alfredo never befriended Jose Rizal.
My cousin’s face assumes a petulant expression. Closed inward, the Asian cast of her eyes became more evident.
Tita Berna told me this story, she says. It’s true.
Tita Berna! The crazy old woman who fought with my mother, all those many years ago. It was a silly quarrel, as most of our family disagreements are.
I thought she lived in Seattle, I say.
She does, my cousin says. I’ve been driving up there for the last couple of months. She tells me her stories, and I tape them.
Look, I say, rising hastily and heading for my bookshelves. I have rows of books of Philippine history: Arcilla’s, which had been my first history book, bought from Alemar’s when I was still in convent school. A number of early books by William Henry Scott, when I had discovered Sagada and the beauty of its dark skies. Autobiographies by prominent Filipino public servants—de la Costa, Zulueta. Standard histories by Agoncillo, Zaide. I was always reading, and the history of the country I had left 20 years ago was never very far from my thoughts.
