If it’s true that we may gauge the literary artist by the quality of his description of the Muse, it should be fun to raid our literature for what we may conveniently call a portrait of the Muse as Filipina.
Let’s look at our first literary artist, Jose Rizal:
“She was a young woman … large and black eyes and long and abundant hair. Her color was clear light brown…”
He’s not describing Maria Clara — who is tisay (not yet). Rizal is here not doing fiction; he is describing a figure from Philippine myth and legend – Mariang Makiling.
From whom, at any rate, Maria Clara is clearly descended: “Mariang Makiling was very charitable and had a good heart.”
But of course, this is already Rizal’s Muse, who appears in yet another literary work of the hero outside the Noli. In an unfinished prose piece to which he gives the title Memories, Rizal gives us a recollection of a summer encounter he had while vacationing in the provinces from his studies in Manila. He was, he writes, only 16 at the time.
“She was a young woman of 14 or 16 summers, fair, slim for her age, with her black tresses loose, almost reaching her heels. She wore a red skirt girded under her shoulders, a black tapis over it which traced the contour of her virginal form. Over her round shoulders was a white soft towel which hid them….she was chasing a butterfly.
A few steps away from her was an old woman… frothing gogo in a basin. Around her were a basket of fruits and clothes …
“Is it already 10 o’clock, grandma?”
The Muse in two of her three aspects: young maiden and crone!
“I had time to contemplate and examine her. Her face was very winsome and expressive. Her face was a perfect oval, her eyes were large and black with long lashes, her forehead was smooth and pure, her mouth was pleasing and seemed to be always exhaling an entreaty or wish.”
How the young man is able to befriend the girl through the butterflies is a most charming story that makes one suspicious — it seems just a little too well constructed. It could be fiction.
Here is the most beguiling detail in the narrative, whether it is fiction or not. After she is told by her grandmother to be careful with the captured butterflies, the girl turns to the boy.
“Is it true that these very beautiful wings can cause blindness with their dust?”
“They might well do, but nature has endowed us with eyelashes to drive away the harmful molecules. And above all when one has very long eyelashes one is protected against any injury.”
Since it was a doctor — an eye specialist — who wrote these words, Rizal not improbably may have made up an inspired retrospective embroidery. But even if this were so, who, at this point, still wants history and for that matter, science? Story is all.
He is invited to their place, a caromata ride away, where he declines a further invitation to lunch, saying his family is waiting. The boy learns that his new friends are newcomers to the place, having just arrived two days ago. He sees no else in the house but a maid and a dog, and the story closes with a flavor of mystery as he leaves the place.
“I was thinking, who could these two women be? …what were they doing there? Why were they alone?”
The work was left unfinished — but the Muse returns as Maria Clara in Rizal’s immortal novel.
