Rizal’s First Love

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, it is fitting to read about love in history, and there is no
better way to see Rizal as a typical love-smitten adolescent (with pimples?) than to read his Memorias
de Un Estudiante de Manila (translated by Leon Ma. Guerrero), covering his birth and early years to
1878.

This concerns Rizal’s first crush on a 14-year old “virginal, attractive and engaging” girl named
Segunda Katigbak, whom he describes as “not the most beautiful woman I had ever seen , but I have not
met another more alluring and beguiling… from time to time she looked at me, I blushed.”

Segunda, referred to in his diary as “K”, was a boarding student at the Colegio de la Concordia
where his sisters and future fiancée Leonor Rivera also studied. Rizal used his sisters as an excuse to visit
“K”, and in one of these visits they talked about flowers and “K” asked him if he had a girlfriend.

He replied “No, I never dreamed of having one because I know pretty well that nobody would
pay attention to me, especially the pretty ones.” “K” answered, “What? You deceived yourself. Do you
want me to find you one?” Rizal said, “Thanks señorita, but I do not want to bother you.”

The visits continued until Rizal accepted the reality that “K” was already engaged.

However, he could not resist her charms. In one visits she gave him a white rose for his hatband,
saying that the flower came from Rizal’s sister. During his next visit, Rizal asked her about the rose,
saying that his sister was incapable of making such, so “K” told him the truth and he promised to keep
the rose as long as he lived, adding, “Do you know it is very painful for me to lose you after having
known you?” She tearfully answered, “But I am not getting married!” She stopped short of telling Rizal
she really loved him.
Rizal wrote:
Our visits continued. I abstained-rather, I forbade my heart to love… perhaps she really loves
me… I am not rich or handsome; I am neither sophisticated nor attractive. I adopted a course of silence,
determined that until I should see greater proofs of sympathy between us, I would not subject myself
to her yoke, or tell her that I love her.

News on the affair spread and before all their friends and relatives were talking about them. Rizal was
shattered, for all they have at this point, in the modern idiom, was simply an “understanding.” It was not
yet “serious.” Much later his letters to Leonor Rivera (Taimis) were written in codes and codenames to
avoid all the fuss.

Rizal avoided an explicit declaration of his love, “…I spent the night… without being able to fall
asleep, distracted by my thoughts my rebellious heart… refused to express itself and thus to submit,
fearful perhaps of confiding its happiness to hands so frail.”

One day, “K” received a letter from her father ordering her to return to their province. The good
news is that her family would visit a fiesta in Laguna and they could see each other there. A pattern with
Rizal makes its first appearance here, which is that when he becomes close to a woman to the point of
“intimacy,” he leaves her.

On the day of her arrival, Rizal saddled his horse and rode off to meet her. Yet when he saw her,
as he wrote:
All I did was to take off my hat. I said nothing. The same thing has happened to me at the most
trying moments of my life! My tongue so glib at other times, falls silent when my heart overflows with
feeling… critical moments of my life, I have always acted against my heart’s desire, obeying contradictory
purposes and powerful doubts.. This is how it ends.
Ah, how much truth was once instinct in these words! Ended, at an early hour, my first love! My
virgin heart will always mourn the reckless step it took… my illusions will return, yes, but indifferent,
uncertain, ready for the betrayal on the path of love… I realized that she was the woman who satisfied
completely the yearnings of my heart, and I told myself that I had lost her.

Does it sound mushy enough for a Regal film? One cannot imagine Jose Rizal going through all
this, but it’s true.