58

On December 8, 1886, Juan Luna married Paz Pardo de Tavera. They had met two years before in Paris, in November 1885, just after Luna had won the highest gold medal at the Exposición de Bellas Artes in Madrid. On February 8, 1892, M. Pilet-Desjardins, the president of the Cours d’Assises de la Seine, a Paris tribunal, interrogated Juan Luna about his wedding: D. They were Spanish mestizos? R. Yes, Monsieur le Président. D. According to the ideas of your race, are there certain divisions between you who are of the Indio race and the mestizos? R. Certainly, and that is the misfortune of our country. The Indios are seen as slaves. At first, I did not find that my brothers-in-law felt that way, but since what happened, I have understood how much this was true For those who didn’t know the couple personally, they appeared from the outside to be the most improbable match. Luna was short, dark, Indio, and of a lower social class, while Paz was tall, fair-skinned, mestiza, and from the wealthy Gorricho clan, who owned most of Escolta. Her Pardo de Tavera ancestry made her the descendant of the Grand Inquisitor of Toledo. Madame Lefebvre, a concierge who lived a few houses down from them on Rue Pergolese, remembered: “M. Luna was very softmannered and polite. Mme Luna liked to wear makeup and she wore it with elegance. She was very proud. Since she was tall, and well proportioned, it was funny when we saw her go out with her husband.” A journalist covering Luna’s trial described him in the following terms: “We saw a little man with an olive complexion, high cheekbones, and big hanging lips tumbling down the aisle of the bench of the accused, letting himself fall back behind the bar with his face inclined to the floor. And when he stood up to give his name, he presented very heavy Malay features, a sort of Japanese face mixed with African savagery, a flat nose and bushy hair, almost too well-dressed with a frock coat lined with satin. We first had the impression of a mulatto used to being hit and treated badly, incapable of manifesting any personal volition apart from getting violently angry.” This contrast must have caused them to stand out socially. Paz came across as extravagant with her fine makeup, garlanded dresses skillfully painted by Luna, fancy hairstyles, and perfect manners. Luna, on the other hand, was known to be reserved, introverted, perhaps even a bit wary, with his thick glossy mustache falling on either side of his face and his inquisitive, piercing eyes. And yet there they were, arm in arm, traversing the 19th-century social divide. The boatman of Sorprendidos, who is perhaps actually a flower vendor, faces a similar social divide. Like Luna, he is someone who works hard with his hands, steering his boat with his pole. He is the lowest figure in the frame, although the lady in red, who is perched on higher ground, stoops down almost to his height. He crouches slightly forward and whispers intimately into her ear - when they are caught as if in flagrante delicto by the older woman. A social divide is represented here by the Rio del Paradiso, the Venitian canal traversing the frame diagonally, splitting the ground between them. The lower left of the frame, where our boatman stands, is submerged in water, while the upper right, where the women stand, is elevated, firm ground. These are the steps of the Palazzo Ruzzini (today the Ruzzini Palace Hotel), a place into which a 19th-century boatman or flower vendor might not have been able to enter. The vanishing point is accentuated by the line of Piraeus lion heads who bear witness to the scene with their impassible stony gaze. They hover our eye towards a partly open door where the older woman, who resembles a furious Goyaesque witch, cries scandal and flings her hands in the air with her fingers outstretched, drawing the attention of the woman in red, who is either looking over her shoulder in her direction or tilting her ear toward her. We can’t be too sure, since her eyes are not clearly painted, but we know her attention has shifted back across the diagonal in a moment of surprise. The title Sorpendidos means “surprised” and also “caught,” as in “caught in the act,” but the painting has had various other names. In the October 6th, 1957 issue of the magazine This Week, the painting was called View of Venice. In the same year, Carlos E. da Silva of the Juan Luna Centennial Commission translated Sorprendidos as The Elopement. This title was later used in Manuel E. Arsenio’s 1969 Dictionary of Philippine Biography and in Santiago Pilar’s Juan Luna, the Filipino as painter (1980). Indeed, The Elopement has become the title most frequently used to refer to this painting. However, this title strikes me as too conclusive. The beauty of the title Sorprendidos lies in its ambiguity. Are they surprised in the act of leaving, or rather in the act of arriving? What if they are coming in from a long night, and it is now already morning? Could this be a late 19th-century representation of a walk of shame during which the couple is caught? The older woman is certainly shocked and displeased to discover the couple. It is impossible not to be reminded of Paz’s mother, Doña Juliana, who at first strongly objected to Paz and Luna’s marriage. Doña Juliana had survived the 1863 Manila earthquake that counted among its casualties both the Manila Cathedral and her young husband, Félix Pardo de Tavera. The trauma from this incident haunted her for her entire life, causing her to be afraid of the slightest noises or strong movements. Nevertheless, she braved the turbulent ocean voyage with her children in order to give them a new life in Paris and leave Manila behind. But there, in the City of Lights, an Indio from the North (as her son Trinidad once called him) asked for her daughter’s hand in marriage. Doña Juliana held anti-Indio prejudices common at that time and, being such a generally fearful person, reacted with alarm. During Luna’s trial, Trinidad said: “M. Luna was very nice to me, and we had the most cordial relations. My sister (Paz) liked him and I was very happy about this. However, this did not please my mother (Doña Juliana), who didn’t want an Indio in the family. I made her understand that that was a prejudice and she ended up giving in.” “Luna was no Indio,” Trinidad told his mother. “He is a civilized man, an artist, a great artist, a man of talent and heart; you have nothing to fear from him.” Doña Juliana, who at first forbade the marriage between Luna and her daughter, listened to her son. According to Félix Décori, the Pardo de Tavera lawyer, Doña Juliana never again showed any prejudice against Luna because of his race or social class: “She gave in so completely that during these three years of living together, the accused never had a single reproach to make. These prejudices, she had chased them all from her heart, and he never saw a trace nor heard an echo. She had always been very gentle and very kind to him.” After their wedding, Luna and Paz left for Venice in the late days of 1886 or the early days of 1887 for their honeymoon, and it is there that Luna painted Sorprendido. Unfortunately, history would reveal to us that Trinidad was wrong, and Doña Juliana was right to fear a marriage between Luna and Paz, for a few years later, on September 22, 1892, Doña Juliana died with her hands covering her ears, fearfully anticipating the noise from Luna’s gun. He was seconds away from firing a 12 mm caliber revolver that would make a fist-sized hole in her head. (© 2021 Martin Arnaldo. All rights reserved.)