Rizal as Sportsman
Sesquicentennial grabs you as a sexy word, albeit a lot out there may still be groping for its instant meaning, until told it’s 150th! That’s the number of years it’s been since Jose P. Rizal was born — exactly a century and a half (sesqui) ago.
The Latin sesqui means “one and a half.” “Sesquipedalian,” it is said of a very long word, like itself, since it looks to be a foot and a half long. “Sesquipedality,” Wiki also tells us, is the “quality of a style which uses very long words.”
Getting back to Lolo Pepe, on Sunday we commemorate and celebrate the milestone that is his birth, his sesquicentennial.
It remains unfortunate that an anthology of essays we have collected, on the multifarious facets of our National Hero, together with visual offerings as well as odds and ends such as astrological charts, music sheets, and a map of the Rizal route in Madrid, among others, is still awaiting publication.
Titled Rizal Plus, it includes over 40 essays by such stalwart bylines as those of the late Vicente Albano Pacis, Leon Ma. Guerrero, Adrian Cristobal, Nick Joaquin, together with those of living legends among our contemporary writers and poets, including Alfredo Roces, Greg Brillantes, Cirilo F. Bautista, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Erwin E. Castillo, Pete Lacaba, Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, Victor Peñaranda, Carlos Cortes, Eric Gamalinda, Howie Severino, Lourd de Veyra, and many others.
The goddess Gilda Cordero Fernando joins the visual artists in rendering engaging set pieces for the coffee-table book, such as BenCab, Jaime de Guzman, Pandy Aviado, Edd Aragon, Dengcoy Miel, et al.
Here we share excerpts from the impending volume, which will surely come out sometime this year, even if it’s past the subject’s exact sesquicentennial date. We have chosen these excerpts from a couple of engaging pieces that mark out Rizal as a sportsman — with his interest in guns and chess as the peg.
Erwin Castillo On Rizal, The Pistolero
We start off with Erwin E. Castillo’s essay, “Pinoy Pistolero: Rizal’s ‘Magnificent Smith & Wessons.’” Besides being a poet and novelist, the writer is a pioneer member of the Philippine Practical Shooting Association (PPSA) and is among its oldest active, regular competitors.
Our President should find Castillo’s piece very interesting. He and the rest of you may read it in full in the Philippines Free Press’ upcoming June 18 issue, where it will first see full print.
“Rizal was an ardent pistol shooter, a passion he shared with the German frat men. In fact Rizal’s friend and companion Jose Alejandrino called it an ‘addiction.’ This aspect does not sit well with the politically correct who argue that only those authorized should be allowed to own guns, a situation dramatized in El Filibusterismo. This is often followed by a misquote from Freud, who wrote the exact opposite, that darkly hints there is something unhinged in the pistol shooter. To be sure this attitude of political correctness is a fairly recent phenomenon, imported from liberal American bias. A pair of single shots identified as Rizal’s target guns is still commonly published. Rizal’s comic-book biographies distributed to elementary schoolchildren as late as the 1950s illustrated him blithely firing away at some wall, writing his name or drawing pictures with bullet holes.
“During Rizal’s time, the Indian rural officialdom, the tribute collectors and the principalia might be ceremonially armed, usually with long-obsolete smoothbore muskets with shortened barrels. These were the same arms issued to the militia, the cuadrilleros in the police stations. The veterans of the Guardia Civil were better served by the famous American-designed Remington Rolling Block breech-loading rifles, built in Spain and designated the official arm of the Spanish Army until 1896. This was the rifle that killed Rizal.
“These important Indians, again from the evidence of the Fili, were also sometimes allowed by leniency to possess small, inexpensive revolvers of 6mm or about .25 caliber, generally made by the gunmakers of Obrea Hermanos in Eibar, in the Basque region, the family seat of the novels’ tragic Ibarras. Farther north, similar cheap revolvers were also being mass-produced in Belgium. The Basque and the Belgian productions combined to be popularly known in Europe as Velo Dog revolvers, implying they were marketed for riders of the newfangled bicycle, velocipede or velo, to be carried as defense against chasing dogs.
“It was in Spain of the first sojourn that Rizal began to practice seriously with the pistol. The young Filipino propagandists engaged opposing writers in journalistic jousts that became heated enough to demand satisfaction in the field of honor. In those days of the code duello this meant seeking out opponents and challenging them to duels.
“In the beginning it was Antonio Luna, Kafre, who was the Filipinos’ designated champion. But Luna proved himself too intemperate and reckless — not finding the selected enemy, the inebriated Kafre would turn on his own companions. In response Rizal encouraged everyone to the gymnasium for fencing lessons, to the firing range of Carbonell y Sanz in Madrid for pistol practice.
“By the time of his second European trip Rizal — now sunk in the despair of failed romance, and guilt-ridden by the sufferings of his family embroiled in agrarian troubles in Calamba — had become the Indios Bravos’ most eager, and perhaps most skilled, pistolero.
“In Brussels with Edilberto Evangelista and Jose Alejandrino, the impoverished Rizal practiced daily in a seeming manic trance. Alejandrino — later general of the Revolution, senator of the Commonwealth, and indefatigable champion of the agrarian masses — testified that Rizal apportioned his hoard of practice ammunition thriftily as his small supply of biscuits, a main source of his nourishment in those cold, sorry days.
“Here, Rizal made this assessment of his skill: Shooting slow fire at 25 meters, cocking for each shot and firing one-handed in the traditional duelist’s stance, he reported he could place 20 consecutive shots into 20 cm, roughly 8 inches square. This is very good shooting, especially since we do not know the gun Rizal used, the caliber nor make. As reference, the black 10-point bull’s-eye of the official American slow fire pistol target, shot at 25 yards, is 5 _ inches. At the highest skill levels this target is shot with customized pistols with adjustable sights. On the other hand, the 5-point A-Zone of A3/B target of the International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC) is 15 x 28 cm, or 6 x 11 inches. The IPSC target is commonly engaged rapid-fire, but with two hands....
“We are not sure what gun or guns Rizal used to shoot these targets. There is that brace of single-shot target revolvers previously referred to, photographed lying on a bed of satin, but we do not know these pistols’ provenance. What we know for certain is the weapon Rizal wanted to own and use. This was the Smith & Wesson New Model No. 3 large-framed, single-action revolver, break-top, with automatic ejectors, in .44 Russian caliber. This model had been special-ordered for the Tsarist officer corps and became the rage of the European handgunning community while Rizal was in Belgium.
“We know Rizal wanted this pistol because in El Filibusterismo the secret agitator Simoun, who was wealthy enough to buy any gun in the market, carries a brace of them in his traveling bag.
“Rizal called the guns the ‘magnificent Smith & Wessons.’
“We know Rizal badgered friends for original American Smith & Wesson catalogs. But significantly Rizal also asked his friends for gun catalogs from Franchotte of Liege, who made cheap imitations of the Smith & Wesson, as did Obrea Hermanos in Spain. It is unlikely that Rizal ever handled an original Smith & Wesson No. 3, but there is the possibility that the pistol he used in Brussels was a Belgian or Basque copy. From then time and chance turned for Rizal, and he was in faraway Dapitan, wishing he had one of those newfangled bicycles, and that Dr. Basa could send him the Velo Dog revolver he left with the doctor in Hong Kong.
“In the Fili Simoun shows the Smith & Wessons to Cabezang Tales. Tales, a woodsman and hunter, expresses doubts about how the revolver would fare against the Remingtons in the arsenal of the bandits. Whereupon Simoun fires one of the magnificent revolvers at a bunga palm 200 meters away, blowing off a rain of fruit! The .44 Russian cartridge is one of the direct ballistic ancestors of the legendary .44 Magnum.
“There is a well-worn specimen of the Smith & Wesson No. 3 revolver, the Magnificent, at the Armed Forces Museum at Camp Aguinaldo.”
Carlos Cortes On Rizal, The Chess Master
The outstanding fiction writer (also a novelist) Carlos Cortes contributes “A Great Brilliancy Prize Chess Game by the Master” — wherein Rizal is shown to have keenly played ahedres.
“When early in 2009 I came upon a game by Rizal, I expected a 19th-century sort of game: very romantic, a King’s Gambit perhaps, or a Giuoco Piano, with swashbuckling attacks, unsound sacrifices, maybe a horrid blunder or two. I’d always known — from a footnote here, from a gratuitous aside there — that Rizal played chess. In 1877, soon after first meeting Segunda Katigbak, he played parlor or azotea chess somewhere in Trozo. His play was bad — he had just learned the guy with Segunda was her fiancé; he had been asked to do a sketch of her because his talent for drawing was well known, but the sketch he came up with was wretched; every time she glanced at him he would blush — and he lost the game. The moves of that game don’t seem to have been recorded.
“In 1882, on his first trip out of the country, he played chess with his fellow passengers on the good ship Salvadora. He had his own chess set. Every square had a hole in the center. Every piece had a peg at the bottom. One played by sticking a piece into a hole.
“The Salvadora took him to Singapore, where he transferred to the good ship Djemnah. He must have played chess aboard the Djemnah as it sailed the Indian Ocean to Punta de Gales (the old Portuguese fort of Galle in Ceylon), then to Colombo, then to Aden, then through the Suez Canal to Port Said, and into the Mediterranean to Naples, and finally Marseilles. (From there he took a train to Barcelona.) In 1888, he played chess with fellow passengers on the train from San Francisco to New York. None of the moves of any of those shipboard or trainboard games seems to have been recorded.
“Chess was at the periphery of Rizal’s sensibilities as a novelist. In the Noli Me Tangere, there’s a game between Crisostomo Ibarra and Capitan Basilio.
“But that was all — a few games, none of them recorded, an offhand mention of a game in his first novel. There were no in-depth accounts of Rizal’s playing style. That frustrated me no end. I wanted to play over an actual game of his.
“The oldest extant book on chess had been written by a Spaniard, Luis Ramirez de Lucena, in 1497. I felt sure Rizal knew how to record games in Spanish notation. But if he never bothered to record his games, perhaps it was because he was a chess dilettante, maybe a bit stronger than a patzer, but not someone who really excelled in chess. He could lose a game because of Segunda Katigbak’s glances. He was no Emanuel Lasker, who never took his eyes off the board when his opponent’s accomplices got a naked woman to parade around the room. Rizal was good at fencing and great with women, but sharp chess players always get a reputation, and Rizal didn’t have one....
“The game is a metaphor for how we think of Rizal. We hold Rizal to an ideal. The Rizal we know earns grades of sobresaliente at the Ateneo. The Rizal we know is into fencing and jujitsu. He answers an insult with a challenge to a duel. Goes through rigorous years of medical school in a foreign country so he can heal his mother’s eyes. Writes inflammatory novels. Soars to poetic heights in Mi Ultimo Adios. Pivots to lie fallen facing the sky after he has been shot in the back by a firing squad. The Rizal we know would play elegant chess at the master level. How can we begrudge him Queen and Rook sacrifices on empty squares?”
The reader might feel shortchanged that we chose to jump to the end of Cortes’ piece the way we did. But suffice it to say that these excerpts should tantalize any Rizal buff into wishing just as hard as we do — that Rizal Plus gets off the press sometime soon.
