The After-Life in Memory

An hour or so after the shooting a dead-wagon from San Juan de Di´os Hospital took Rizal’s body to Paco Cemetery. The civil governor of Manila was in charge and there also were present the members of a Church society whose duty it was to attend executions.

Rizal had been wearing a black suit which he had obtained for his European trip, and a derby hat, not only appropriate for a funeral occasion because of their somber color, but also more desirable than white both for the full day’s wear, since they had to be put on before the twenty-four hours in the chapel, and for the lying on the ground which would follow the execution of the sentence. A plain box inclosed the remains thus dressed, for even the hat was picked up and encoffined.

No visitors were admitted to the cemetery while the interment was going on, and for several weeks after guards watched over the grave, lest Filipinos might come by night to steal away the body and apportion the clothing among themselves as relics of a martyr. Even the exact spot of the interment was intended to be unknown, but friends of the family were among the attendants at the burial and dropped into the grave a marble slab which had been furnished them, bearing the initials of the full baptismal name, Jos´e Protasio Rizal, in reversed order.

The entry of the burial, like that of three of his followers of the Liga Filipina who were among the dozen executed a fortnight later, was on the back flyleaf of the cemetery register, with three or four words of explanation later erased and now unknown. On the previous page was the entry of a suicide’s death, and following it is that of the British Consul who died on the eve of Manila’s surrender and whose body, by the Archbishop’s permission, was stored in a Paco niche till it could be removed to the Protestant (foreigners’) cemetery at San Pedro Macati.

The day of Rizal’s execution, the day of his birth and the day of his first leaving his native land was a Wednesday. All that night, and the next day, the celebration continued the volunteers, who were particularly responsible, like their fellows in Cuba, for the atrocities which disgraced Spain’s rule in the Philippines, being
especially in evidence. It was their clamor that had made the bringing back of Rizal possible, their demands for his death had been most prominent in his so-called trial, and now they were praising themselves for their ”patriotism.” The landlords had objected to having their land titles questioned and their taxes raised. The other friar orders, as well as these, were opposed to a campaign which sought their transfer from profitable parishes to self-sacrificing missionary labors. But probably none of them as organizations desired Rizal’s death.

Rizal’s old teachers wished for the restoration of their former pupil to the faith of his childhood, from which they believed he had departed. Through Despujol they seem to have worked for an opportunity for influencing him, yet his death was certainly not in their plans. 

Some Filipinos, to save themselves, tried to complicate Rizal with the Katipunan uprising by palpable falsehoods. But not every man is heroic and these can hardly be blamed, for if all the alleged confessions were not secured by actual torture, they were made through fear of it, since in 1896 there was in Manila the legal practice of causing bodily suffering by mediæval methods supplemented by torments devised by modern science.