Let’s end this literary gossip

By Noel Galon de Leon

Every town has its favorite rumor, and every generation seems determined to preserve the stories that refuse to die no matter how often history contradicts them. Some rumors are harmless enough to become part of a community’s folklore, repeated with amusement rather than certainty. Others survive because they satisfy our desire to imagine that the great men and women of history experienced the same emotions, longings, and youthful fantasies that ordinary people do. Today, let us finally put to rest one of the most persistent literary rumors in Western Visayas, the enduring claim that Magdalena Jalandoni had a romantic crush on our national hero, José Rizal.

I have encountered this story countless times over the years. Teachers mention it during literature classes with an amused smile. Literary historians repeat it during lectures as though they are revealing a delightful secret. Writers and readers of Hiligaynon literature continue passing it from one conversation to another because it makes for an irresistible anecdote. The rumor humanizes two literary giants. It invites us to imagine that before they became monuments in textbooks and names engraved on schools, streets, and libraries, they were simply two people connected by admiration and perhaps even affection. It is a charming story, but charm alone has never been enough to make something true.

History, when examined carefully, quietly dismantles the entire narrative. Magdalena Jalandoni was born in 1891. José Rizal was executed in Bagumbayan on December 30, 1896. At the time of his death, Magdalena was only five years old. They never met. They never exchanged letters. They never shared a conversation, collaborated on a literary project, or crossed paths in any documented setting. No diary, memoir, newspaper account, or surviving correspondence suggests that a romantic attachment ever existed between them. The timeline itself makes the rumor impossible. Whatever fascination later generations have attached to their names belongs more to imagination than to documented history.

Yet I have never completely dismissed this story, not because I believe there is hidden evidence waiting to be discovered, but because I think the rumor accidentally reveals something far more interesting than romance. It exposes the way we understand influence, admiration, and the mysterious relationship between writers who belong to different generations. Perhaps somewhere along the way we confused intellectual devotion with romantic affection. Perhaps we reached for the language of love because it was easier to understand than the quieter and deeper language of literary inheritance.

Every serious reader eventually discovers that it is possible to become deeply attached to a writer one has never met. We encounter a novel, an essay, or a poem that permanently rearranges our understanding of the world. Certain sentences linger in our memory long after we close the book. Certain ideas refuse to leave us and gradually become part of our own thinking. We begin borrowing not merely a writer’s words but also their courage, their curiosity, and their moral imagination. They become invisible companions whose influence quietly shapes our own voice. If such attachment resembles love, it is a love rooted not in romance but in gratitude.

Perhaps that was Magdalena Jalandoni’s true relationship with José Rizal. She inherited neither his friendship nor his physical presence. What she inherited was something far more enduring, his example. Rizal had already demonstrated that literature could awaken a nation, challenge injustice, confront colonial power, and reshape the Filipino imagination. He proved that novels could become instruments of national consciousness and that a writer’s pen could influence history as profoundly as any political speech or military campaign. By the time Magdalena came of age as a writer, Rizal had already become the standard against which every Filipino intellectual measured the purpose of literature.

Magdalena answered that challenge in her own remarkable way. While Rizal wrote primarily in Spanish because it was the language of educated Filipinos during his time, Magdalena devoted herself to Hiligaynon and transformed it into a respected literary language through her novels, poems, plays, essays, and short stories. She never attempted to imitate Rizal’s style, nor did she seek to become another Rizal. Instead, she embraced the same conviction that Filipino stories deserved dignity, seriousness, and permanence regardless of the language in which they were written. Her work became living proof that literary greatness did not belong exclusively to Manila, to Spanish, or even to Tagalog. It could emerge from Iloilo with equal brilliance and lasting significance.

As someone who continues to write from Western Visayas, I often think about Magdalena Jalandoni with profound gratitude. Writers inherit much more than the places where they are born. We inherit sentences from those who came before us. We inherit courage from authors who chose conviction over convenience. We inherit confidence from generations that insisted our regional languages possess the same beauty, complexity, and expressive power as any language in the world. Every page written by Magdalena became another quiet declaration that Hiligaynon literature deserved not merely preservation but celebration.

Whenever I walk through Iloilo’s old districts and stand before ancestral houses that continue their silent conversation with history, I sometimes imagine Magdalena writing late into the evening while the world beyond her windows changed with astonishing speed. Electricity gradually replaced lamplight. Colonial rule gave way to revolution, then to American occupation, then to an entirely different political landscape. Through all these transformations, she remained faithful to her language and to her calling as a writer. Every manuscript she completed became another argument that so-called regional literature was never regional in imagination. It was simply literature of the highest order, created from a place with its own distinct voice and cultural memory.

Perhaps this explains why the old rumor continues to survive despite the complete absence of historical evidence. Human beings often translate intellectual admiration into romance because romance is easier to narrate. It is far simpler to claim that Magdalena had a crush on Rizal than to explain the invisible conversation that occurs between writers separated by time. We instinctively understand romance because it belongs to ordinary life. Literary influence is far more mysterious. It crosses generations, ignores chronology, and allows people who never occupied the same century to shape one another’s ideas.

Literature has never respected the boundaries imposed by time. A reader today can spend the morning debating Shakespeare, laugh with Mark Twain in the afternoon, reflect with Virginia Woolf before dinner, and conclude the evening learning from Doreen G. Fernandez. Books erase centuries as effortlessly as turning a page. The dead continue speaking because language refuses to recognize mortality. Writers who never exchanged a single word in life become lifelong companions within the imagination of every thoughtful reader.

Magdalena Jalandoni never needed to meet José Rizal for his influence to transform her understanding of literature. She only needed to encounter his ideas, his courage, and his unwavering belief that writing carries moral responsibility. Likewise, Rizal never needed to know Magdalena personally because every generation eventually produces writers who answer questions left unfinished by those who came before. Great literature is not a solitary achievement. It is an ongoing conversation that stretches across centuries, languages, and places.

So whenever someone asks me whether Magdalena Jalandoni had a crush on José Rizal, I no longer think the correct response is a simple yes or no. The more meaningful question asks which writers have influenced us so deeply that they quietly redirected the course of our own lives. Every writer has such figures. Some have one. Others have several. They become our invisible teachers, our silent editors, and our impossible standards. We imitate them before discovering our own voices, disagree with them as we mature, and eventually return to them with greater wisdom and appreciation.

If there is any truth hidden inside this old and stubborn rumor, it is not a story of romance. It is a story of influence, admiration, and literary inheritance. History records with certainty that José Rizal and Magdalena Jalandoni never met. Literature, however, suggests something equally beautiful. Across generations, across languages, and across the pages of their works, they never stopped talking.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.