Rizal Secrets. Of the National Hero you didn't know
MANILA - Can you keep a secret? I have more than 100 of Jose Rizal secrets. My hero! By secrets , I don't mean like Rizal's abrupt departure to Spain he and his brother Paciano kept secret even to the rest of the family and Leonor Rivera , his fiancée, or that he was buried in a secret grave at the Paco Cemetery, or that he had a secret in the lamp he handed to his sister before they executed him in a very public place. Almost everyone knows those. The Rizal secrets I am about to tell you are more my discoveries than anything else. Like award-winning Filipino painter Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo 's portrait of Rizal as a young man (he is 22 years old here), this essay is my portrait of Rizal as his own man as revealed in some aspects of his life, works and writings that have been either rejected, ignored, unnoticed, not considered, or not known by most people, including historians and Rizalists. You know, I'm sure, that Jose Rizal was executed by a firing squad at