TO anyone with a modicum of sensitivity, the execution of Jose Rizal must seem like an act of extreme cruelty and injustice. When I read Noli Me Tangere at the age of 21, I did not yet know that he had been shot by my countrymen, although I would have known if I had read the introduction. For me then it was just another reading, a 19th-century novel like so many others, but with the peculiarity that the story takes place in a place I knew nothing about. I was impressed by the construction of the novel, the fine irony of the narrator — imperceptible in all the English translations I have consulted — and Rizal's skill in handling Spanish. The details of Rizal's trial only became known to me much later, when I became interested in his biographical vicissitudes. His execution was one of the most infamous chapters of the Spanish presence in the archipelago.

That Rizal's cause was just, that his defense of the freedoms and autonomy of the Filipinos was legitimate, needed the passage of time to be understood in Spain. One of his bitterest enemies during his lifetime, Wenceslao E. Retana, made amends for his past mistakes with the publication in 1907 of the first complete biography of Rizal, a publishing event that was widely advertised in the Manila newspapers, as I myself have been able to verify. This biography has since been the basis for all biographies that have been published subsequently. Both Retana's portrait and the foreword by Miguel de Unamuno — the most important Spanish intellectual of the early 20th century — are full of admiration and affection.