The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
to punishment indiscriminately with the guilty; men that had taken part
in the uprising and men that had never heard of it. With the rest of
these victims of insensate rage, marched, on the morning of February
28, 1872, three beloved priests and servants of God, of whose
complicity in the plot was never a shred of ponderable evidence. One of
them, lifting up his voice in prayer for his assassins as he went
along, was eighty-five years old. Not his years nor his gray hairs nor
those good works that had brought him honor [1] availed to save Father
Mariano Gomez from the most ignominious of deaths. With Fathers Burgos
and Zamora, he was garroted on Bagumbayan Field, fronting the sea at
Manila; a place consecrated in the Filipino mind to memories terrible
and yet grand. Native poets and orators that have seen there every
blade of grass springing from the blood of heroes are hardly
over-imaginative. On that spot to the same cause the same dull power
sacrificed victim after victim, ending with the nation’s greatest and
best.
But now, in 1872, forgotten medieval brutalities seemed to be brought
back to darken life in a region the sunniest and of right the most
cheerful. Prisoners were tortured with instruments the world believed
to exist only in museums; tortured with thumb-screws, great pincers,
and machines of devilish ingenuity that produced and reiterated the
agonies of drowning. [2] The whip was busy in the hands of men hired
for their expert knowledge of how it could be used to yield the largest
fruition of pain; many a wretched Filipino that had in his heart no
more of disloyalty than you or I was flogged naked in the presence of
officers in whose ears his shrieks seemed to sound like music. Hysteria
and fear in the minds of the dominant class were added to the racial
hatred always festering there. Under the empire of this triad of the
beast, men that had worn the gloss of the almost classic society of
Madrid became in the Philippines no better than hooting devils.
To the typical haughty Spaniard there the Filipino was an Indio, an
inferior creature designed to render service to the white man’s needs
and to receive the white man’s blows. Each successive generation of
rulers had learned at least once, and always with astonishment and
disgust, that the lowly Indio was capable of combinations and
resistances that sometimes shook the walls of Malacañan itself and
started painful visions of massacres and wild fleeings. From the
beginning to the end of the story, it was a discovery that first exiled
reason and then multiplied work to the executioner. Yet the knowledge
gained in this way by one generation never seemed to enlighten the
next: each revolt created in its turn the same astonishment, as if for
the first time in human experience wronged men had turned against their
wrongers. Each generation, therefore, had the same obtuse notion of
violent repression as the only answer to the natives’ complaint, a
concept that each left with additions of its own to its successor.
Hence the complex savageries of 1872, which might be regarded as in a
way accretionary; not a soul in the governing class seeming to suspect,
despite all this rich experience, that the essence of the slayings was
no better than one revenge making ready for another.
In those evil days millions of Filipinos rendered to the dominant
tyranny what it compelled them to render and kept alive in their proud
hearts the longing for justice, the love of their country, and a
respect for their race. One of these, Francisco Rizal Mercado, was then
living in Calamba, a little town on the west shore of the great lake of
Laguna de Bay. Manila was twenty-five miles to the northward; the tall
mountains of Luzon, Mount Makiling and others, gloomed or shone south
and west; the plains around were fertile and well cultivated; it was a
pleasant and profitable region. Francisco Mercado was of some substance
and a character so excellent that all the country-side knew and honored
him; a sturdy, resolute, reasoning man, wide-eyed, square-headed. He
had prospered by diligence and deserving; his large two-storied
dwelling was the best in Calamba. Overawing guns and the military
checked his spirit but never daunted it. In his house the Government’s
key-hole listeners and hired porch-climbers were defied, and no one
hesitated to discuss the evils that had befallen the land.
One of the most detested instruments of the Spanish supremacy was a
body of troops called the Civil Guard, [3] a kind of military police
charged with ferreting out disloyalty and the signs of revolt. In the
strained relations between Government and governed that followed the
cruelties of 1872, it may be imagined how zestfully the Civil Guards
pursued their peculiar calling. Domiciliary visits were their
specialty, sudden and without warrant; a species of terrorism not then
practised anywhere in Europe outside of Russia and Turkey. A squad of
these visitors was in the habit of watching Calamba and the neighboring
town of Biñan, and when it was Calamba that they were favoring with
their attention, the lieutenant commanding quartered himself and his
horse upon the Mercados, where he could find the best fare and the best
fodder in town.
The crops in 1871 had not been good in that region. Mr. Mercado’s store
of fodder diminished until he had barely enough to supply his own live
stock. When next the lieutenant came the situation was explained to
him, and with every politeness he was asked to bait his horse
elsewhere.
He chose to take the request as an affront. Reciprocal hatreds were
thick and rife around him; he conceived that in some way his honor as a
Spaniard had been impaired by a “miserable Indio,” and he swore
revenge. [4]
About the same time the unfortunate Mercado managed to offend another
Spaniard still more powerful. For all such visitors to Calamba he kept
a kind of gratuitous hotel; hospitality was and is a sacred and
inviolable rite among his people. The judge of the local district,
conferring upon the Mercados thus the honor of his uninvited presence,
fancied that his reception lacked something of cordiality and ceremony.
As to this, he may have been right; in the hearts of most intelligent
Filipinos of those days the feelings toward official Spaniards were not
likely to be exuberantly warm. The judge, like the lieutenant before
him, deemed his Spanish honor to have suffered and went away with a
similar appetite for vengeance, a lust to which the example of their
Government richly incited them.
For judge and lieutenant the opportunity came more quickly than they
could have hoped. At this neighboring town of Biñan lived José Alberto
Realonda (formerly Alonzo), a half-brother of Mrs. Mercado. He was
deservedly of mark in his province; his father had been an engineer
whose abilities were recognized by Spain in an order of knighthood that
the son inherited, an order equivalent to a baronetcy in England; José
Alberto himself had been at school in Calcutta, spoke English well, and
had traveled widely. It was at his home in Biñan that Sir John Bowring,
[5] the English linguist and traveler, had been entertained; and
Bowring had put into his book on the Philippines a graceful paragraph
about his host and entertainment, the good taste with which the
Realonda house was furnished, the excellent cooking set before its
guests.
Don José Alberto had married young, and, as the event showed, not
wisely. His wife was his cousin. They quarreled and separated, and the
wife seems to have set afoot wild and fantastic stories, injurious to
her husband. Divorces were difficult in the Philippines.
From material no better than these the lieutenant now manufactured
against Mrs. Mercado and her brother a charge of conspiracy to murder
Mrs. Realonda. It was a preposterous tale, but to such tales the
institutions that, in those parts, by a figure of speech, were called
courts of justice were in the habit of lending a ready ear if thereby
they served any end of the dominant power or gratified a powerful
Spaniard. In probably no other corner of the world with a pretense to
Christian civilization was the judicial system so farcical; the next
developments were typical of the conditions under which seven million
people dwelt at the mercy of perjurers, adventurers, and thieves. With
joy the incensed judge received the accusation and ordered Mrs. Mercado
to be arrested and imprisoned in the provincial jail.
This, although but left-handed and imperfect revenge, accorded with the
ideas and practices of the governing class. The grievances of the judge
and the lieutenant, if they had any, were against Mr. Mercado; they
evened the score by striking not at him but at his wife.
Incomprehensible or almost insane as this will seem to a healthier
sense of honor, it was a custom of which we shall find other and more
painful instances. Suppose the governing class, or a member of it, to
believe the much cherished supremacy of the white race to demand that
an example be made of an offending native. No nice discrimination was
deemed necessary. If the offender was not available, retribution could
still be inflicted upon the offender’s wife, or upon his children or
even upon his brother-in-law or his great aunt, if he had no children,
or if his wife was not within striking distance. In fairness to the
Spaniards we are to note that this singular reversion was not a product
of nationality but of geography; many a man defended vicarious
vengeance in the Philippines that would have scorned it in Spain, so
wonderful are the moral idiocies into which imperialism drives us.
Mrs. Mercado was ordered from her home to the prison at Santa Cruz, the
provincial capital, at the other side of the lake. Ordinarily, traffic
with Calamba was by steamer; but a road, rough and ill made, led along
the shore. The more to taste the pleasures of his revenge, the judge
ordered Mrs. Mercado to be conducted by this road and on foot; that is
to say, about twenty miles and in the sun.
It will later appear in this narrative that she was no ordinary woman;
she came from a household that believed in liberty; she seems to have
had a lofty spirit and a certain dignified self-mastery not rare among
Filipino women. All about that part of the province she was known for
her charities and good neighborliness. Her compatriots liked her. When,
therefore, trudging along the shore road under the custody of a guard,
she came at the evening of the first day to a village, she was received
by its inhabitants with outpourings of sympathy and an invitation to
lodge at the best house in the place instead of the village lockup as
the judge had thoughtfully intended. She accepted the invitation; but
with insatiable malice he had followed to see how his orders were
obeyed. When he found the prisoner well bestowed instead of undergoing
the miseries of the filthy prison, a madness of rage came upon him. He
broke down the door of the house where his victim was sheltered, and,
judge as he was, hesitated not to assault with his cane both the
unlucky guard that had shown her lenity and the owner of the house that
had received her. [6]
He was as merciful as the judicial system he adorned; as intelligent
and as well ordered. One of the least of its offenses was that this
same hedge-row magistrate, at whose order she had been arrested to
gratify his spite, was also to be the prosecuting attorney, when she
should be brought to trial, and the judge before whom her fate should
be decided. Mr. Mercado, meanwhile, had been putting forth every
peaceful means to rescue his wife from this disaster. He had secured an
attorney, who now presented a petition that her case should not be
allowed to come before a judge so manifestly prejudiced against her.