The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
‘anti-Spanish’ and ‘a filibuster.’ Of a schoolmaster neither
learning nor zeal is expected; only resignation, humility, and
inaction are demanded. May God pardon me if I have gone against my
conscience and my judgment, but I was born in this country, I have
to live, I have a mother; so I have abandoned myself to my fate
like a corpse tossed about by the waves.”
He has tried to abolish whipping in his school. “I endeavored to make
study a thing of love and joy, I wished to make the primer not a black
book bathed in the tears of childhood but a friend that was going to
reveal wonderful secrets; of the school-room not a place of sorrows but
a scene of intellectual refreshment. So, little by little, I abolished
corporal punishment, taking the instruments of it entirely away from
the school and replacing their stimulus with emulation and personal
pride.”
The innovation was regarded as sacrilege and heresy.
“The curate sent for me, and, fearing another scene, I greeted him
curtly in Tagalog. On this occasion he was very serious with me. He
said that I was exposing the children to destruction, that I was
wasting time, that I was not fulfilling my duties, that the father
who spared the rod was spoiling the child—according to the Holy
Ghost—that learning enters with the blood, [74] and so on. He
quoted to me sayings of barbarous times as if it were enough that a
thing had been said by the ancients to make it indisputable,
according to which we ought to believe that there really existed
those monsters which in past ages were imaged and sculptured in the
palaces and temples. Finally, he charged me to be more careful and
return to the old system, otherwise he would report me to the
alcalde of the province.”
So in despair he brought out the whips again, and sadness reigned in
the school where he had introduced happiness and work. The number of
his pupils was reduced to a fifth of the former attendance.
“So then I am now working to the end that the children become
changed into parrots and know by heart so many things of which they
do not understand a word.”
It is doubtless a perfect picture of education in the Philippines and
outlines the size of the task that Rizal had shouldered. [75]
“Let us not be so pessimistic,” said Ibarra.
He resolves to build and endow for the town a modern school-house. As
the time comes for the laying of the corner-stone, at which ceremony he
is to officiate, he receives a mysterious warning that an attempt will
be made upon his life. This he seemingly disregards; and yet, when he
must descend into the trench and stand beneath the corner-stone
suspended from the scaffold, he looks anxiously above him, watches the
apparatus, and is tense for a leap. There is a sound of cracking
timber; in an instant the great stone falls, but he has sprung aside
and saved his life.
At the dinner with which the day’s ceremonials are concluded, Padre
Damaso is a conspicuous guest. Not even yet is Ibarra, despite certain
intimations, aware that Damaso was his father’s remorseless enemy, that
the gloomy, vindictive friar had put forth the hidden powers of the
orders and dragged his father to death. But at the dinner Damaso, stung
with baffled hate because Ibarra has escaped the gin so cunningly
spread for his life, loses all self-control and utters against Ibarra’s
father an insult no son could be expected to endure. Ibarra springs at
his throat, knocks him down, and stands glowering over him. In the eyes
of the petrified spectators murder is about to be done, when Maria
Clara, Capitán Tiago’s reputed daughter, throws herself between the
infuriated youth and the prostrate friar.
Maria Clara is Ibarra’s sweetheart. She pleads with him with her eyes,
and he recovers enough self-command to take himself away.
But the assault upon the friar is his ruin. He has committed the
unpardonable sin, the blackest crime in the calendar: he has laid
“violent hand upon a friar, representative at once in his own person of
the might of the church and the majesty of the realm.” That day he is
excommunicated, a punishment that in the Philippines, nineteenth
century, retained all the poignancy it had in Darkest Europe, 1000 A.D.
He has become a moral leper.
Capitán Tiago breaks off the engagement with his daughter; in his view
the word of the friars is sacred, oracular, final. He is one of the
great portraits of the book, this Capitán Tiago; a typical Filipino of
the class that bent assiduously at the feet of power. The drawing is
like many a sketch in Rizal’s note-books, a piece of startling realism.
Tiago is a living, talking, sputtering, foolish thing of flesh and
blood that we see and hear. Even though we have never seen another
being of his kind anywhere, we see him in this picture-making. He is
vain, pretentious, fearful, abjectly superstitious, filled with strange
notions about the influences of graven images and the grandeur of
Spain; a Filipino perverted by some wealth, the allurements of a social
ambition, and an education grotesquely awry. Against the ills of the
flesh and the chances of loss in the cockpit, he has recourse to the
same arcana: so many candles burned before this shrine or that, so many
bombs to be exploded at a fiesta, or so many masses bought at current
rates. In all things, to cultivate the favor of the friars is the
boundary of his more earthly philosophy. Ibarra, rich and eminent,
newly returned from Spain with the gloss of a European education fresh
upon him, is in his eyes a delectable son-in-law. Ibarra under the ban
of the friars is an object of horror.
The affection between Ibarra and Maria Clara has the welcome fragrance
of purity and exaltation in the midst of these miasmas. They had been
playmates in childhood, they had grown up together, they had really
plighted their troth when Ibarra went to Europe. He had been
chivalrously true to her in all his seven years of travel. He has come
back to her sure of her love and looking forward to an early marriage.
Upon all such dreams Tiago sets his foot; he not only forbids any
further communication with Ibarra, but he favors another lover, one
Linares, a feeble-willed young Spaniard brought forward with suspicious
haste by Father Damaso. With this candidate, against the vehement
protests of Maria Clara, an engagement is quickly made.
Meantime, the governor-general comes to the town and hears about the
troubles of Ibarra, whose father he had known and admired. The
governor-general is a type of many that Spain sent to the Philippines,
excellent in purpose, well aware of the malignant fever of friarism,
resolved to withstand it, and invariably finding his good resolutions
crumbling under him. Yet, in this instance, he will save if he can the
son of his old friend from the clutches of the modern Inquisition.
Between the friars and the archbishops of Manila is a smoldering feud,
for the archbishop is usually chosen outside of the four orders. The
governor-general nudges the archbishop; the archbishop cancels the
excommunication; and Ibarra, escaped from this damnation, is doomed by
the friars to another still worse.
With Tiago the lifting of the ban upon Ibarra makes no difference; he
is still anathema to the all-powerful orders. The campaign for Linares
and against Ibarra is waged vigorously with the aid of many candles on
many shrines and the promises of many bombs. At fiestas, it should be
explained, the custom was to burn great quantities of fireworks by day
and night; and the piety of the devout, as expressed in squibs,
crackers, rockets, pin-wheels, and bombs, was supposed to insure their
salvation. In this form of divine worship, the friars had a commercial
interest; it may be believed that if a doubt of its perfect efficacy
occurred to them they managed to master it.
Under the Spanish social system, Philippine maidens of all complexions
married whomsoever their parents told them to marry and silenced their
objections, if they had any; hence, in the Tiago household the
preparations for the marriage of Maria Clara and the half-witted
Linares are urged with a sweet confidence. Maria Clara herself
contributes the only flaw in these proceedings. She falls desperately
ill.
News of her condition is brought to Ibarra by the person in the book
called “the Pilot Elias,” who is one of the pivots on which the
narrative turns. It was Elias that warned Ibarra of the plot to crush
out his life with the corner-stone. In a picnic fishing expedition
Ibarra had saved Elias from the jaws of a cayman (crocodile) and Elias
had sworn his gratitude. He is evidently much above his caste, which is
that of a boatman; he has had an education. In and out of the story he
flits mysteriously until his true vocation is revealed; he is a man
with a history, a victim of the prevailing despotism, forced by his
sufferings to ponder the ills of his people and become at last a
secret, restless, wary, and intelligent agitator against the System of
his day.
It is through him that Rizal voices his protests. As the plot unfolds,
Ibarra wins Elias’ story. We shall repeat it here, but with a preface
of warning. In these times, the average reader, the more if he is an
American, will look upon the tale as a wild extravagance, so easily are
the conditions of one generation obliterated in the next, and so
difficult is it to believe the life of one country is not like the life
of all countries. Yet what Elias is fabled here to have told Ibarra
might have been taken with changes of names from veritable records.
Exactly these things happened in the Philippine Islands in the
nineteenth century, even in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
They happened in many regions and to many persons. Still worse things
happened, if worse can be conceived; for lust and greed and reversion
ran savage riot under two conditions that have always been hothouses
for such growths: autocracy, and distance from the world’s observation.
ELIAS’ STORY
“Some sixty years ago my grandfather dwelt in Manila, being
employed as a bookkeeper in a Spanish commercial house. He was then
very young, was married, and had a son. One night, from some
unknown cause, the warehouse burned down. The fire was communicated
to the dwelling of his employer and from there to many other
buildings. The losses were great, a scapegoat was sought, and the
merchant accused my grandfather. In vain he protested his
innocence, but he was poor and unable to pay the great lawyers; so
he was condemned to be flogged publicly and paraded through the
streets of Manila. Not so very long since they still used the
infamous method of punishment which the people call ‘caballo y
vaca,’ and which is a thousand times more dreadful than death
itself. Abandoned by all except his young wife, my grandfather saw
himself tied to a horse, followed by an unfeeling crowd, and
whipped on every street-corner in the sight of men, his brothers,
and in the neighborhood of numerous temples of a God of peace. When
the wretch, now for ever disgraced, had satisfied the vengeance of
man with his blood, his tortures, and his cries, he had to be taken
off the horse, for he had become unconscious. Would to God that he
had died! But by one of those refinements of cruelty he was given
his liberty. His wife, pregnant at the time, vainly begged from
door to door for work or alms in order to care for her sick husband
and their poor son, but who would trust the wife of an incendiary
and a disgraced man? The wife, then, had to become a prostitute!”
Ibarra rose in his seat.