Wasted historical treasures

By Ambeth Ocampo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:08:00 11/26/2008
With the deposit and organization of the Doreen G. Fernandez papers in the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings (ALIWW), Doreen has finally come home to rest in the university and the university library she loved very much. As a historian, I am grateful that her sister Della Besa and her niece Maya Roxas took the trouble to sift through every slip of paper in Doreen’s study and realized their importance to future researchers. Old papers being, for many Filipinos, just “kalat” [clutter], just “basura” [trash] and better consigned to the fire or the “magbobote” [junk buyer]. Historians will tell you that one person’s junk can be treasure to another—the moral of the story being that we must not throw anything away. Come to ALIWW to read and research.

This reminds me of another writer whom ALIWW should contact soon: Asuncion Lopez Bantug, granddaughter of Narcisa Rizal and thus by extension grandniece of the National Hero, Jose Rizal. I have known her for a long time and interviewed her about Rizal. The late Austin Coates, Rizal’s biographer, who had known her for decades, was surprised that I was able to ask the questions that would induce a flood of memories. A few times, she would break into tears and even recite poems she was taught as a child. I would jot all these down, always knowing that nothing can be as accurate and as immediate as the entries in a diary. And she had those, too, filed neatly in a bedside shelf, but unfortunately she wouldn’t let me read these.

Bantug has maintained a diary since her youth, documentation of a life that spans over half a century, all neatly written on old school notebooks. Now that is a primary source that should have gone to ALIWW. But then, on one of her long annual trips to the United States to visit her grandchildren, one of the maids had the bright idea of giving her musty bedroom a much needed spring cleaning, and so everything was cleared out, including the notebooks. Upon her return, she had a fit but managed to ask why they had messed with her things and discarded her precious notebooks. “Walang silbi na po” [“They are useless”] was the polite reply of the maid. “Puno na po ng sulat lahat” [“The notebooks were filled up.”]

Every time I narrate this story, even non-historians groan. But this is not the worst of my horror stories from research. As you may well remember from grade school, the Rizal brood was quite large. Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonso had 11 children, two sons and nine daughters, and all but one reached adulthood. One could say that Rizal grew up in a house dominated by women, and since many of them took to their mother, this was a household with some strong-willed women. The Rizal boys, Paciano and Jose, did not marry. Jose did not have children and Paciano had a daughter. Most of the descendants of the National Hero proceed from his six sisters (Josefa and Trinidad were spinsters, Concepcion died young).

I was once called in for advice when one of Rizal’s grandnieces passed away. She had left many valuable things, including a portrait of the young Rizal painted in 1882 when he had just arrived in Europe, by his friend Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo. Of course, this painting was worth a tidy sum, but in my biased opinion it paled in comparison with a rather crude portrait in oil of Saturnina Rizal by Jose Rizal. This is much rarer than any Luna or Hidalgo in the market.

I asked if they had any Rizal manuscripts and photographs I could copy. They had those and other relics, but the item I most wanted to see was a stained embroidered piña handkerchief. Why did my heart race when I was told they had such a seemingly worthless thing? I had heard unconfirmed reports that one of Rizal’s sisters rushed to Bagumbayan that morning of Dec. 30, 1896 after his execution and his corpse was taken to the Paco cemetery for burial. This sister carried a dozen piña handkerchiefs, and when she found the place where her brother fell, she reverently used these handkerchiefs to soak up what was left of Rizal’s fresh blood on the ground. The urban legend is that each member of the family was given this rather gruesome souvenir.

I will never be sure if these handkerchiefs existed because one that matched the description was in this estate being divided among relatives. I asked for the handkerchief and heard one of the relatives ask loudly in Filipino, “Where was the soiled hanky that was lying on this table yesterday?” Nobody knew. So the question was asked again, and this time a maid rushed out carrying a neatly pressed hanky and proudly declared: “Naku! Ang tindi ng mantsa n’yan kahapon, kinuskus kong mabuti at nalinis naman po.” [“There was a stubborn stain on that yesterday but I managed to wash it off.”]

If the legend is true, if these morbid hankies did exist and this was the last of them, then the last traces of Rizal’s blood that could have undergone DNA testing went, literally, down the drain along with detergent and bleach.

During the last International Philippine Studies Conference in Manila, I sat with a group of historians over lunch and exchanged stories of the historical materials that got away. These horror stories were exchanged with a mixture of laughter and regret. There are enough to fill a small and interesting book. If I could only find the time and energy to set it to paper!

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu.