THAT’S a question appropriate for Valentine’s Day. It sounds playful, but it’s not. In recalling the national hero’s affairs of the heart, his popular image as the demigod venerated from afar is rendered more approachable. That Jose Rizal, patriot and martyr, also felt Eros’s gift of ecstasy and pain, like everyone else, allows us to view his entire life as both heroic and human.

Rizal had many romantic liaisons. Among the women in his life were the flirtatious Segunda Katigbak; the devoted Leonor Rivera; Usui Seiko or O-Sei-San, a descendant of the Japanese samurai class; Gertrude Beckett, who served him hand and foot; the intelligent and rich Nelly Boustead; and Josephine Bracken, whom he considered as his wife. But who among them was his true love? Rizal scholars are divided on the issue, though the choice is narrowed down to only two contenders: Leonor Rivera and Josephine Bracken.

Leonor Rivera was a near cousin and childhood playmate. The young Rizal, however, became aware of her only on that fateful day in April 1880. On his older brother Paciano’s prodding, Rizal, now a medical student, went with him to the Rivera house in Intramuros to attend Leonor’s 13th birthday party. The pigtailed girl he once romped around with, if we go by her photograph, had now blossomed into a slender teenager, with an oval face, high forehead, black, smoldering eyes, and a thin mouth suppressing a smile. It was a magical moment. Almost in an instant, Rizal fell in love. Moreover, he saw in Leonor the inspiration for Maria Clara, the heroine of his first novel, Noli Me Tangere.

Unfortunately, beyond this point, nothing much is known about the love affair, except tidbits from letters and observations, scraps that nonetheless hinted of an abiding, if sad, love. Had it happened today, Rizal’s and Leonor’s love story could be described as an admixture of Shakespeare and telenovela—sublime but not spared the clichés of romantic fiction.

Their path crossed often enough after that party. Rizal was a boarder at the Casa Tomasina, which was managed by the Riveras, so Leonor’s presence there at certain times was perfectly valid. And Leonor and Rizal’s youngest sister Soledad were both boarding students at La Concordia College; Rizal could have frequented the place on the pretext of visiting his sister. They also wrote to each other, making theirs an epistolary romance—a long drawn one (from 1880 to 1890) and occasionally with words locked in code to bar prying eyes—the highlight of which was an exchange of troths, with Leonor regarding Rizal as her “unforgettable and dearest lover.” But—here comes the downer—none of those letters survived as the two parties, overcome by heartbreak, consigned them to the flames.

On May 3, 1882, Rizal left for Europe, not only to continue his medical studies but for something more useful—to obtain reforms for his oppressed country. He kept his departure from Leonor, who was in Pangasinan that summer. By way of goodbye, he wrote her a short poem expressing the anguish of separation and leaving her his lover’s heart. She was inconsolable and threatened to dye all her clothes in black. Although they continued corresponding, they would never see each other again—not even during Rizal’s two trips back to the Philippines.

Rizal first came home in August 1887. He was raring to visit his beloved but was held back by both his own family and the Riveras. The satirical Noli Me Tangere had reached the Philippines, electrifying Filipinos but courting the ire of Spanish authorities who branded Rizal a filibuster. He and anyone associated with him were closely watched.  He was advised by family, friends and even the governor-general to leave the country. When he insisted on staying in the Philippines and marrying Leonor, his brother Paciano stepped in, sternly reminding him of his duty to the country. He sailed back to Europe in February 1888.

Although Rizal and Leonor kept on writing each other, her mother, Tia Betang, to Rizal, had other plans. Fearful that marriage to Rizal would bring her daughter undeserved suffering, she intercepted the lovers’ letters to one another by bribing the local postal clerk. The letters stopped coming for a full year, raising suspicion in the minds of the lovers that the other had been unfaithful. Furthermore, Tia Betang ceaselessly importuned Leonor to forget Rizal and marry the Englishman Henry Kipping, a railroad engineer, who could offer her a more stable future. The dutiful daughter gave in to a loveless union on three conditions: her mother would stand beside her during the wedding ceremony (it was, after all, really Tia Betang’s wedding); she would never be asked to sing again; and the piano in their house would remain locked as long as she lived. Then she burned her dearest possession—Rizal’s letters. Tales went around that she sewed the ashes of the burned letters into the hem of her wedding dress. And that during the wedding ceremony, as Kipping was slipping the wedding ring into Leonor’s finger, he dropped it. It spun several times on the altar floor (perhaps by the hem of the bride’s dress?).

Rizal received Leonor’s devastating announcement of her forthcoming marriage in December 1890, in faraway Madrid.  Galicano Apacible, also a cousin, who was with him when he read it, said that “he wept like a child.” It took almost half a year to assuage the pain and tell his dear friend and confidant Ferdinand Blumentritt what had happened.

When Rizal came back to the Philippines for the second time in June 1892, there was, of course, no point in seeing Leonor. Besides, within three weeks of arrival he was arrested and banished to Dapitan. El Filibusterismo, the incendiary sequel to Noli, had already come out; it posited revolution as an alternative to reform efforts that led nowhere. A year later, sometime in August 1893, his mother, along with his sisters Narcisa, Trinidad and Maria, visited him. They brought him sad news: Leonor had died (of a broken heart, Rizal’s biographer, the Englishman Austin Coates, implied). As a last request she asked that she be buried in the saya she had worn when she and Rizal came to an “understanding,” and that the silver box in which she had kept the ashes of Rizal’s burned letters be interred with her.

Rizal retreated to his room and stayed there for hours, fingering a lock of Leonor’s hair.

Coates characterized Josephine Bracken as “the leaf in the wind.” She blew into Dapitan, in February 1895, in the company of her adoptive father George Taufer, whom she brought to that Mindanao island to seek a cure for his blindness from the renowned ophthalmologist. Instead, it was the 18-year-old, an orphan of dubious parentage and checkered upbringing, who found new light in the eye surgeon. Here was her white knight, her salvation.

Rizal, on the other hand, probably fell for Josephine’s “buxom good looks that had always attracted [him] in Europe.” Or so Leon Ma. Guerrero suggested in his Rizal biography, The First Filipino, adding that the hero must have also been captivated by the young woman’s provocative prettiness—“with eyes a little bold, sensuous lips, and a mass of curly brown hair. Within hours, within minutes, perhaps…[he] was in love, passionately….”  It also happened at the right time, commented Coates, when Rizal’s “defenses were down,” when the loneliness of exile, the pointlessness of living a life with no future in sight were beginning to wear him down.

The two needed each other; each found in the other, in Coates’s words, a “point d’appui,” a fulcrum.

There were, however, many obstacles to their romance. From the very start, Rizal’s family found it difficult to accept their Jose’s golondrina. She had little education and, therefore, clearly out of his intellectual depth; she kept questionable company: one of her close friends had a friar for a lover and, therefore, she (Josephine) could be spying for the Church; she lacked the finesse demanded by society’s elite where the Rizals belonged. Taufler, the possessive old man, was loathed to lose Josephine upon whom he had cultivated an unhealthy dependence. Worse, the lovers could not legitimatize their relationship. There was no civil marriage in the Philippines at the time, and the friars refused to marry them unless Rizal retracted his stance on the Catholic Church. Seeing that he had no alternative and, as Coates reasoned, “there being no impediment in the sight of God, [Rizal] took Josephine as his wife.”

Sadly, the relationship was short-lived—less than a year—and made forlorn by a still-born child. Soon after Rizal’s death in December 1896, Josephine passed out of the family’s life. She eventually went back to Hong Kong, married a Filipino, bore a daughter and died of tuberculosis in 1902 at 25.

The question still begs to be answered. Who was Rizal’s true love? How much did the hero love Leonor? Guerrero chided Rizal for playing the field the moment he left for Europe, likening his behavior to “the lordly Victorian male” who expected Leonor, his intended, “to wait patiently and faithfully at home” while he wrote his novels and diddled with the Consuelos, O-Sei-Sans, Suzannes  and Nellies of the world. What did he do right after Leonor broke up with him? He cried buckets, then proposed marriage to Nellie Boustead!

That Rizal loved Josephine could be gleaned from his tender regard of her—his “dear unhappy wife,” his “dulce extranjera…amiga…alegría.” But how much did he love her? Or perhaps the question should be did he truly love her? Or was the union with Josephine, as Coates inferred, merely “a companionship of desolation,” having found in her—and she in him—a buffer against outrageous fortune.

Or perhaps the issue is rendered moot by the popular allegation that Rizal’s true love was his country: that he couldn’t belong to anyone—not to woman, not to family—because he was meant for nobler things. Blumentritt believed so. In his letter consoling Rizal after he lost Leonor, the Austrian said: “I know your heart is aching; but you are one of those heroes who overcome the pain of wounds caused by woman because they pursue higher ends. You have a stout heart and a nobler woman looks upon you with love: your native country. The Philippines is like one of those enchanted princesses in the German fairy tales who is kept in captivity by a foul dragon until she is rescued by a valiant knight.”

Perhaps at the back of his mind, Rizal knew that he would never marry. Clearly there were two episodes in life—with Leonor and Nelly—when he could have tied the knot had he seriously so desired. And he told Blumentritt as much in a letter dated October 1891, nearly a year after he and Leonor parted ways. There is this notion that men and women with a mission should never marry because their cause, whatever it is, is a demanding and jealous lover. Perhaps it was just as well that Rizal took the solitary, if lonely, road. His legacy to the nation attests to the wisdom of this decision.