How would you feel?
You are a good woman, not flawless. Sometimes you’re cranky, impatient, vociferous, a nagger but, overall, a good woman. You are a good wife. You bore 11 children! You must have been a good wife. You are a wonderful mother, always attending to the children, always educating the girls. The schools then did not accept girl students so you gave them home schooling, taught them yourself to read, write, count, develop strength of character.
Maybe you were a good daughter, that’s why you were an educated woman and could pass on what you learned as a child to your children. You were an impeccable sister to your favorite younger brother, Jose, who came to you one night and whispered the darkest of secrets. “Saturnina (your oldest daughter) and I have had secret meetings,” he murmured so no one would hear, “and now she is with child. Forgive us, my dear sister, and help us keep this secret.
“My wife, Teodora, your namesake, will murder me if she finds out. I suggest you take Ninay to a nunnery, now while it’s early and no one suspects yet. Then you can go and pick her up, stay long, too. When you return you can bring back the baby and claim it as yours.”
“Please, mother,” your daughter whispers through tears.
“I will pay for everything, don’t worry about expenses,” he whispers.
Dumbfounded, pained, angry, loving, torn apart inside, tears streaming down your face, you realize you cannot do anything except accept his request. If you express your anger and pain you would throw them both out of the house. Then there will be scandal. The friars might get so inflamed you might lose your rental rights to the property. What about your brother Jose’s knighthood that you fought so hard for? If there is a scandal, everyone’s life will turn to ashes. What can you do but agree and swallow the pain that cuts through you. You swallow it and carry it around, a knife blade in your gut.
It must have taken two years to get all that done. In the meantime, Jose’s wife, the other Teodora, who was a peninsular, kept traveling back and forth to Spain. It seems she hated being in Biñan, probably was unhappy being the wife of your brother. One night, the rumor goes, Jose came home and found his house empty. His wife had gone to sleep at her lover’s home. Her lover — or so they say — was the captain of the police or what they then called the guardia civil.
Jose came to you again, this time in the bright light of day. “Please, ate, talk to her again. She brings me shame. What will happen to my knighthood? That’s what’s at stake here.”
“Ninay and I will come,” you said, giving him a sharp look, forbidding him from protest. You thought: to teach all of you a lesson.
So you went and cooked merienda for Teodora Formoso Alberto, all the while thinking of what you would say. You served her in the dining room. You waited for her to invite you to sit but instead she came in carrying a small pet dog. She sat, put the dog on her lap and looked you up and down, left and right. You could feel her anger. She took the plate you gave her and lay it on the floor. Then she took her pet dog and set it down beside your plate. “Taste it, my little one,” she said, her eyes never leaving your face. The dog ate your merienda, just a little bit. Then it made a sound, like a dull yelp, then it had convulsions and it dropped dead. What a shock that must have been to you. The dog ate your food and dropped dead!
She stood up imperiously and ordered the servants to call the guardia civil. She accused you of trying to poison her. “I did not,” you say, still in shock, still horrified that her dog dropped dead after eating what you cooked. “I did not do that.” But by then her lover walked in, so quickly, like he was just waiting outside. He arrested you and made you walk from Biñan to Sta. Cruz where you were kept in jail. For how long, I wonder. There seems to be some proof found that after two years they asked you to sign a confession to the crime — that you had attempted to poison the other Teodora. But nobody knows — or I have not heard — if you signed it and how long you stayed in jail.
How would you feel if you were Teodora Alonso? A good woman, a good wife, an outstanding mother, a supportive sister. How would you feel if all these happened to you? At the very least I would feel unduly restrained, profoundly angered, extremely frustrated. I would have been ready to kill. Instead she stayed in jail and developed glaucoma so she could see less and less because if she could see everything that had happened to her and everything else that was going to happen to her clearly, she would have gone mad.
Why did we not tell these stories before? Why did we keep them secret? The friars are long gone. The world has changed. These stories don’t diminish women. It makes them heroic. And yet these stories were only whispered about through five generations even if today they read like a telenovela plot. Imagine all the emotions suppressed. Don Francisco Mercado — how did he feel about all the things happening in his family? How did he feel about his wife’s handling of all her little brother’s problems? Was he not a bit jealous? Saturnina? What made her succumb to her uncle? Was it love or was it child molestation? How did everybody feel?
How we feel about something and our willingness to discuss it shows other people what others feel. They learn from it. We can learn so much from each other’s lives. Can you imagine the pain a mother feels when she sees her son’s execution in her mind’s eye? Can you imagine the pain of mothers whose sons are salvaged? Nobody has to become a national hero to speak about such grief. You only have to find the courage to talk.
Doña Teodora Alonso was my great-great-grandmother. She was the mother of my great-grandmother Maria Mercado, Jose Rizal’s older sister. As I age I cannot help but be in awe of their lives. In the end I struggle with only one important question whose answer I will never know. That question is: How did they really feel?
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