Rizal and Ateneo

By Ambeth Ocampo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:36:00 08/25/2010

WATCHING THE live television footage of the hostage drama near the Quirino Grandstand, which ended badly, kept me awake the whole night. What made things worse for me was the fact that the poor tourists who were killed in the bus were hijacked from Fort Santiago, where they had probably visited the Rizal Shrine. How and why a heavily armed man got inside Fort Santiago, and into the tourist bus is a question that will be answered after the investigation.

Over the weekend I was reading student papers on Intramuros, and it made me remember Jose Rizal’s “Memorias de un estudiante de Manila” (Memories of a Manila Student) whose title page identifies the author as a certain “P. Jacinto.” Rizal wrote under an assumed name, thinking that his diary could or would be read by someone else. Yet, he got carried away writing all his memories and impressions that he forgot about the title page and signed his name on the last page!

In the fourth chapter of this work, which covers the years 1872 to 1875, Rizal recalled his days at the Ateneo Municipal where he was not accepted: “I was introduced at the Ateneo Municipal to the Rev. Fr. Magin Ferrando. At first he did not want to admit me whether because I had come after the period of admission was over or because of my rather weak constitution and short stature: I was then 11 years old.” Then as now Rizal’s parents pulled strings and “at the request of Mr. Manuel Jerez, nephew of the ill-fated Fr. Burgos and now Licentiate in Medicine, the difficulties were removed and I was admitted.”

This forgotten line from his diary counters all textbook history that says Rizal didn’t want to be associated with Burgos. He was admitted into the Ateneo upon the intercession of the nephew of Burgos.

They had a uniform in the Ateneo and Rizal said, “I dressed like the rest, that is, I put on a coat with a ready-made necktie.”

His eye for detail, evident so early in life, is manifest in his diary:

“With what fervor I entered the chapel of the Jesuit fathers to hear Mass. After Mass I went to class where I saw a great number of children—Spaniards, mestizos and Filipinos—and a Jesuit who was the professor. He was called Fr. Jose Bech. He was a tall man, thin, with a body slightly bent forward, with hasty pace, an ascetic, severe, and inspired physiognomy, sunken, small eyes, sharp Grecian nose, fine lips forming an arch whose ends turned towards his beard. The father was somewhat lunatic so that one should not be surprised to find him sometimes disgusted and with a slightly intolerant humor while sometimes he amused himself, playing like a child.”

So detailed was Rizal’s diary that he described everything he saw and experienced in describing his classmates and other children, like those in his boarding house, including “some young Spanish mestizos, the fruits of friar love affairs.”

In 1875 Rizal became a boarder at the Ateneo and while we only have the picture of the outside of the dormitory Rizal provided us with a description of his room:

It was located “in the corner of the dormitory looking out into the sea and the embankment. It consisted of a space about two square varas [a vara being about 32 feet), an iron bedstand on which they placed my beddings, a small table with a basin which a servant filled with water, a chair, and a clothes rack. I forgot to say that in the little table I had a drawer with soap, comb, brushes for the hair and for the teeth, powder, etc. My little money, amounting to some eight pesos, I kept under my pillow.”

We know the names of his memorable Jesuit professors, both the ones he liked and disliked. His favorite was Fr. Francisco de Paula Sanchez who was sent to be with him at the beginning of his exile in Dapitan. Another professor he liked was Fr. Vilaclara who, he remembered, “liked me very much and to whom I was somewhat ungrateful. Although I was studying philosophy, physics, chemistry and natural history, and in spite of the fact that Fr. Vilaclara had told me to give up the society of the Muses and give them a last goodbye (which made me cry), in my leisure hours I continued speaking and cultivating the beautiful language of Olympus under the direction of Fr. Sanchez.”

Rizal was terrified of the world outside school. I always remind my own students of this and of the fact that university often teaches about a word that doesn’t exist, and that one must make adjustments from textbooks to the real world. Rizal himself said:

“I had entered college still a boy, possessing only a limited knowledge of the Spanish language, my intelligence only moderately developed, and my emotions scarcely cultivated. By dint of study, of self-analysis, of aspiring to ever greater heights, and of countless corrections, I began to be transformed little by little, thanks to the beneficent influence of a zealous professor.”

What is now generally known is that Rizal continued his association with the Jesuits and the Ateneo even if he was already enrolled, first for a degree in philosophy and later medicine, in the University of Santo Tomas. Before he departed for Europe in 1882, he went to the Ateneo. He wrote: “In the afternoon I said goodbye to the Jesuit fathers, who gave me strong letters of recommendation to the fathers in Barcelona. I owe a great deal to this order—almost, almost everything that I am.”

I guess the saying is true: you can take a boy out of the Ateneo, but you cannot take the Ateneo out of the boy.