Rizal women: Then & now

She was 27 years old when they got married. He was tall, a mestizo, handsome, according to my cousin, Toto Cruz. He was 19 years old. Today, we would have called her a puma — below 40 hanging out with younger men? But she wasn’t hanging out with him. She was marrying him. At the altar, they say, when he was putting the wedding ring on her finger, he accidentally dropped it, and the ring rolled away. Their guests must have gasped. Malas! (Bad luck!) And in a way, that’s what happened.

She was Maria Mercado, the sixth daughter of Francisco Mercado and Teodora Alonso, the sister immediately preceding their son, Jose Mercado, later Jose Rizal. He was Daniel Cruz from Biñan. They had five children but only two of them lived. Stories I heard from the family said she was terribly jealous — as who would not be if she had married a younger, handsome man — so she went and followed him around, carrying her umbrella with her, perhaps to hit him on the head, if she caught him. I wonder — did she catch him? I don’t remember hearing any such stories.

The two children who lived were Mauricio and Encarnacion Mercado Cruz. Mauricio Cruz was my grandfather, my mother’s father and her idol. She claimed to be his favorite daughter. She remembers her mother asking her to call him at the Club — wherever that was — to ask him to come home early. He would ask my mother what sandwich he might bring her if he came home late.

The story I remember hearing from my grandmother is how Lola Angge, that’s how she called Maria, initially wanted to share the marital bed with her and Morris, my lolo’s nickname. I found that funny when I heard it the first time. I was a little girl around five years old. I thought then that married people never slept with their parents. It wasn’t the custom. Now, at my age, I find it hilarious. Why did she want to sleep with them? What did she not want them to do?

The years passed. Mauricio, his son Ismael, and his son-in-law Vladimir Gonzalez, my father, were all killed by the Japanese at the end of World War II. Much later, my grandmother died. Her grandchildren were led by three girls. The oldest was Gemma Cruz, then I, then Noelle Syquia. We all married terribly young. Eventually we separated. Noelle parted from her husband first but she was sent to Germany. Gemma separated last then went to Mexico. I separated and stayed. My family stopped talking to me. I thought it was because I had broken a family tradition. I thought everyone in my family before the three of us cousins had stayed married.

But over time they got over it and we were once again friends, when there were no more men in my life.

Then one Sunday in 1988, we had a family lunch at my cousin Mia Syquia Faustmann’s house. After lunch I was drinking coffee when one of my aunts mentioned that Lola Angge was separated from her husband Lolo Daniel. “What?” I gasped. “All this time I thought you stopped talking to me because I had broken a family tradition. Apparently, I was following one.”

One Sunday in the early 1900s, I suppose, Lolo Daniel asked Lola Angge if she had any money. He was going to the cockfights and he had no cash. Lola said, “Here is my last peseta (50 centavos then, quite enough money). I am putting it on the table. If you take it, I promise you your children and I will not be here when you return. And we are never coming back.” She put the peseta on the table. He took it. He came back to an empty house.

My great-grandmother went home to her father’s house.

She and her children lived there for a while. Then later on she settled in San Pablo, where she is buried today, close to her daughter Encarnacion and Encarnacion’s children, Pacita and Marita. I know that she had a house in San Pablo. At some time she had a boxing ring, where she and my Lolo Morris would hold fights and charge admission. She became a highly successful entrepreneur, acquired much property, became independently wealthy. She was one of the early single mothers.

Why did they not tell us? No one told me until 1988 when I was 44 years old that I had not broken a family tradition. Our family tradition was single parenthood and I had kept it. In fact most of us – my cousins and I – had kept this single parenthood tradition. It began four generations before us. It began with Lola Maria, whom my grandmother called Lola Angge, but whom her family called Lola Biang.

Maybe because she was a single mother, there are many claimants to her throne. The Philippine Historical Commission, I am told, has received many requests for aid from people who claim to be descendants of Maria. They ask the family to verify. We do verify. One of them was apparently run over by a vehicle and wanted to ask for support but when we computed her age versus Lola Biang’s, it said she must have given birth at 60, so that was not possible.

When I lived in San Francisco, I met a woman who, as I was taking her on a tour of a friend’s house told me, “Do you know I am a Rizal descendant?”

“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” I said, thinking she was descended from his other sisters, so I asked, “Which sister?”

“Maria,” she said haughtily.

“I am a descendant of Maria,” I said, “and I know all of my cousins.”

I gave her a quizzical look but she changed the subject. She was related to Daniel Cruz not to his wife Maria. She could not lay claim to one drop of Mercado/Rizal blood.

Why do I write all this now? It is Jose Rizal’s 150th birthday. We have to bring him to life for the youth. We have to turn him into a real person. He was like one of us. Nothing supremely extraordinary about him except he had courage and values. His family was not perfect. It was imperfect. He himself was not perfect. He was short. He had a complex. He liked being heroic. He wrote Noli Me Tangere, which turned into the novel that made the Filipinos aware of the rut they were in and got that circulated, an amazing feat, considering there were no paper copiers then. How could his book cause such a furor?

I am a descendant by sheer accident of my birth. I had nothing to do with it but I was given a small amount of his blood and maybe a little bit of his genes. So I write these stories to tell the world. He came from a regular family. His sister left her husband and struck off on her own and became a successful entrepreneur. Quite a few of us inherited her blood and her spirit.

One of my uncles used to say. There are three things you cannot do in this life. One, you cannot paint the sky blue. Two, you cannot pour the ocean into a hole. Three, you cannot win an argument with a Rizal woman.

The third one is so true.

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