What is Triskaidekaphobia?. Do you have triskaidekaphobia? It’s a fear of the number 13: tris is three, kai is and, deka is ten, and phobia is fear (American Heritage Dictionary). The Philippine national hero Jose Rizal didn’t have it. If you examine his valedictory poem, which I have titled ‘Adios, Patria Adorada’ based on the first three words of the poem (which others have titled lamely as ‘Mi Ultimo Adios’ or ‘My Last Farewell’), you can find ‘And’ (the Spanish ‘Y’) as the very first word in each of 13 lines of the poem of 70 lines. In fact, he begins two stanzas (10^th and 11^th) with ‘And,’ meaning it was all intentional. The grammatical rule is you don’t begin a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’ or whatever. So why did he do it? A secret message: If I have to be the one to be martyred, the one to be betrayed, so be it. It’s a haunting, message-full, well-crafted, beautiful poem, and we are lucky that those 13 Ands help make it so. The Compuser's Dictionary