Rizal in Belgium
Brussels—It only dawned on me as I got off the plane from Manila that this is my third trip to Brussels and I have not visited the site on 38 rue Philippe de Champagne where our national hero lived from January to August 1890. Our embassy, led by Ambassador Jaime Victor B. Ledda, thoughtfully included a site visit during my stay to deliver two lectures at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles and the Royal Literary Society in Ghent, the nearby city where Jose Rizal published “El Filibusterismo.”
I reread Rizal’s correspondence to prepare for this visit and was disappointed that he left a few details about his stay. It seems that when Rizal was freezing in Paris in the winter of 1890, he contemplated a trip to the Netherlands in search of 17th-century materials on the Philippines in the libraries of Leiden and Utrecht. How and why he ended up in Brussels instead is something we have to extract from the stray references in his letters. Unlike other cities, like Paris, where he shared a great deal about what he saw and visited, he was sparse in Brussels probably because he was busy writing “El Filibusterismo.”
On Feb. 2, 1890, he informed Ferdinand Blumentritt that he arrived “in the beautiful city of Brussels” where he planned to stay for a few months before moving on to the Netherlands. He would probably have written more as he normally did but then he closed his letter saying: “I am shivering with cold. By the penmanship you can see that my fingers do not move as they should.” One of the considerations for choosing Brussels was cost. Writing to Mariano Ponce in Madrid he remarked:
“I am very well here in Brussels. The cost of living here is as low as in Barcelona; the city is more beautiful. I would like to see here the Filipinos who do not know what to do either with their time or money in Madrid.”
Many of his letters from Brussels are not extant, we know of these from the existing replies from his friends like Valentin Ventura who said Rizal miscalculated:
“I see by the budget that you sent me in your first letter that it is not so cheap there as you thought at the beginning, for, according to that note, your monthly necessary expenses amount to thirty-one pesos. With an equal amount, without paying for house and service, you could live in Paris, a city far more important than that and which suits you much more under any consideration.”
Why anyone would exchange Paris for Brussels is a question relevant in 1890 as it is in 2025. Rizal lived in Heidelberg to learn German, he had stayed eight months in Paris with Ventura and was already fluent in written and spoken French yet he continued studying it in Brussels:
“I am also studying French with diligence. The Brussels folk say that here I have the best professor when it comes to style. His name is Chapusset. At the beginning we could not understand each other. Now we are doing better and my compositions hardly have any mistakes. The professor says that I have much spirit and too much imagination I should get rid of, if I wish to write well. I believe he is slightly wrong, for my imagination has become very weak. I am becoming a pessimist. He says also that I think differently from the Europeans, that I have a Buddhist spirit, etc. Thus, if my hopes are realized, after three or four months, I shall be able to write good French, like a Tseng-Ki-Tong in miniature.” This was a gourmand, the author of a book on Chinese culture that Rizal read in French translation as “Le Roman de l’homme jaune” (The Story of the Yellow Man). The book is available online in English as “Chin-chin: The Chinaman at Home.”
To Antonio Luna, he sent words of advice as a “kuya” does to a wayward younger brother, warning him to avoid gambling and displeasing women and encouraging him to study:
“It is good for the youth to devote themselves to something more serious and noble than the game of cards; and as Marco Espada says very well, the handling of a weapon gives moral strength to the individual, making him prudent and moderate.”
From this letter, he describes his other pursuits:
“Here I continue working and studying. I go to the clinic, I read, I write, I got to the gymnasium and the fencing hall. As to shooting, with this I am sending you a cardboard with ten bullet holes. The board is seven and a half meters away from me. At a distance of twenty-five meters. I put 20 shots inside a board 20 centimeters high and 20 centimeters wide. I go slowly, but supplement with my will the few qualities of a shooter that nature has given me.”
Rizal was so proud of his marksmanship that he sent the target boards to his friends, Luna and Ventura, prompting the latter to remark that he would not want to be on the receiving end of a bullet from Rizal during a duel. This was a dark time for Rizal, his family was being harassed in Calamba for refusing to pay increased rent from the Dominican owners of the land they had tilled as tenants. He was disappointed with news from the Philippines and Madrid making him decide, against his better judgment, to return home: “I would rather give up my life for my people than remain here enjoying a life of leisure.”
