DON ALFREDO AND JOSE RIZAL
She hands me a story and says, You must read it, it is something about our great-grandfather.
I look at my cousin’s earnest face, the planes of her cheeks, smooth and round as my mother’s. My mother! Reigning beauty of her day, gone these many years, but when I look at my
cousin I see her again. I see her tall Castilian nose, the dark fringe of lashes around her large brown eyes. “How like Teresita she is!” everyone used to say, of my cousin. I would bow
my head, as if in humble obeisance to this beauty.
I open her manuscript and read the words:
Jose Rizal’s Oil Lamp
But what does this have to do with us, with our great-grandfather, I say.
Our great-grandfather, Alfredo Buencamino, was a governor of the province of Albay in the last decade of the nineteen
