The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
what he still wished to believe and what his judgment told him was
inevitable, and in the conflict he grew in hardihood. From the savage
vengeance that pursued his sisters, brothers, father, and mother when
it had failed to reach him, he was beginning to learn how idle was the
hope to win reform by merely ladylike appeals. Yet the book was not of
purpose any signal to popular revolt. What he intended was solemn
warning. So far the Filipino has stood and asked for justice, still
patient, still holding out the friendly hand. Wronged hearts will not
always accept scurvy affronts; men will not always put up with kicks
when they ask fair play. This Filipino whom you despise and trample on
nineteen years in twenty and who, in the twentieth, throws you into a
panic, is not the human dish-cloth you are pleased now to imagine him.
He has in him the capacity for a great and memorable revenge, and upon
your heads he will pull down your structure if you do not hear him.
Other characters of the first book reappear in this. Father Salvi, the
lascivious friar whose machinations brought about Ibarra’s downfall;
Capitán Tiago, Doña Victorina, and Basilio, the son of Sisa. Ibarra
calls himself Mr. Simoun. His pretended business is that of a traveling
merchant of jewelry and laces; his real occupation is to spy out the
land, to lay plots against the governing class that ruined him, and, if
possible, to release Maria Clara from her convent prison. The narrative
is chiefly concerned with these plots and their failure; but behind
them always seems to show a grim figure telling Government that such
plots will not always fail.
The book starts with a gibe at the people with whose tardiness to
respond to progressive ideas Rizal was becoming impatient.
One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending
the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of
passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily
built steamer, almost round, like the taboo from which she derived
her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretentious whiteness,
majestic and grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was
held in great affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog
name, or from the fact that she bore the characteristic impress of
things in the country, representing something like a triumph over
progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism,
stolid, imperfect, yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose
as being rankly progressive, proudly contented itself with putting
on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely
Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might
have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as she had
been, under the inspection of Reverendos and Ilustrísimos.
As before, Rizal uses with photographic accuracy the materials of
Philippine life that had passed under his own observation. The
wanderings of Simoun the jeweler give him the needed occasions; he
hangs upon them startling pictures of actual conditions, the power of
the friars, the brutality and cowardice of the governing class, the
terrible wrongs of the people; even the story of Maria Clara’s
parentage he had from an incident in his own neighborhood. Poverty,
chastity, [149] and obedience were the oath of the degenerate
successors to a noble race of Christianity’s pioneers. How lightly they
regarded the second item in this creed he had shown in “Noli Me
Tangere.” As to poverty, their corporations had become the wealthiest
institutions in the Islands. He is now about to show how they had
obtained the wealth that made their power supreme and pervasive.
Tandang Selo is a native wood-cutter that by industry and self-denial
has saved a little money. He has a son, Tales, industrious and thrifty
like himself. Tales works for a rich landowner and saves enough to buy
two carabaos, to marry, and to accumulate a capital of several hundred
pesos. He has ambition; he wishes to rise in the world. There is the
jungle, unclaimed, untilled, but fertile. With his father, his wife,
and children he goes into it, clears away the forest, and makes
tillable fields.
To cut for the first time the jungle turf is supposed to release a
dangerous malaria. Of this, Tales’s wife and eldest child fall ill and
die. The others continue to plant and to cultivate.
As they begin to harvest the first crop, an agent of the friars
appears, notifies them that the land belongs to one of the orders, and
levies on the crop for the rent.
Tales has every reason to believe that the claim is fraudulent, but he
is only an Indio; the courts are organized against him and his people,
and he pays tribute rather than risk a lawsuit.
The next year the crops are good and the friars double the rent.
Nevertheless the family works hard and saves a little money. The desire
of the father’s heart is to send his eldest daughter, Juli, to school
in Manila. Next year the rent is again increased, and the hope of
education begins to fail.
When the rent has risen from thirty to two hundred pesos, Tales refuses
to pay the latest increase. Then the friars’ agent tells him to prepare
to be evicted, for another tenant will come and till the fields Tales
has won from the jungle.
Tales applies to the courts for relief and is at once despoiled of his
savings to pay the fees; likewise to satisfy the cormorants that batten
upon every court proceeding.
The farm is exposed to the raids of the tulisanes, or robbers. The
invisible government has energy enough to play eavesdropper upon its
own people, but makes scarcely an effort to restrain the banditti that
hover in all the forests and often descend upon the towns, even large
towns.
To protect his fields from these vultures, Tales patrols them with a
shot-gun and so terrifies the friars’ agents and the new tenant that
the benevolent intention of turning him into the road must be abandoned
until the lawsuit shall be decided.
Under the code his case is unassailable. Even by their own charter the
friars cannot own land. The judges know that this is so, but one of
their number loses his place for giving a decision in favor of a
native; the rest have no desire to share his fate and so to go back to
Spain humiliated as well as impoverished. They advise Tales to
surrender and pay what is demanded of him. The fighting blood of the
Malay is up within him: he stands in his place and demands that the
friars produce some evidence of ownership—title-deeds, documents,
papers, anything. None of these have the friars to show; their claim
here, as so often in such cases, rests upon the tradition of a
concession. Nowhere else would such a plea, unsupported and
unwitnessed, be seriously considered in a court of justice. In the
Philippines it outweighs everything else, and the judges decide in
favor of the friars.
Tales with his gun continues to patrol his land. The friars obtain a
decree from the governor-general ordering all arms to be surrendered,
and so they take away the shot-gun. Tales patrols his fields with a
bolo.
The bolo is taken from him on the pretext that it is too long and
therefore comes within the prohibition of the decree about arms. Tales
patrols his fields with an ax.
Then the tulisanes come and capture him and hold him for five hundred
pesos ransom.
To get the money, Juli sells herself into slavery in the neighboring
town. It is not called by that name, her servitude; but that is what it
amounts to.
She is engaged to a young man whom she dearly loves. The sale of
herself is likely to end her chance of marriage.
With the money so raised, her father is ransomed. He comes home to find
the friars’ agent and the new tenant walking over the fields that with
so much labor the Tales family has cleared.
Tales steals a revolver and joins the tulisanes. That night the friars’
agent and the new tenant and the new tenant’s wife are murdered. [150]
The substance of this story, as you perceive, is taken from the
experiences of the tenants of Calamba, among them Rizal’s own folk.
There is terrible irony in a description of how the governor-general
governs; how he transacts business and promotes the welfare of the
Islands. He has been on a hunting expedition in which he has shot
nothing and returns ill tempered to Los Baños, where he has his bath,
drinks his cocoanut milk, and sits down to a game of cards with three
friars. From this reasonable occupation his chief secretary tries to
divert his attention to matters of public business. This annoys the
governor-general.
“The petition about sporting arms,” suggests the secretary.
“Forbidden!” says the governor-general and goes on playing. The
secretary tries to intimate that this is not wise. He only arouses the
wrath of the executive.
The schoolmaster at Tiani has petitioned for a better location for his
school. The old store-room he is using has no roof: he has bought with
his own funds books and pictures, and he wishes them not to be ruined.
“I’ve heard several complaints against this schoolmaster,” says his
Excellency. “I think the best thing would be to suspend him.”
“Suspended!” [151] says the secretary.
“In the future,” says the governor-general, “all that complain will be
suspended.”
The well known fact is developed that there are not nearly enough
school-houses. Somebody suggests that the cockpits might be used for
schools when not needed for the more exalted purpose to which they are
dedicated. Horror meets the proposal to interfere, for the sake of mere
education, with reasonable sport and with the Government’s revenue.
It is probably the worst Government in the world.
At the end of the card game the secretary whispers to his Excellency
that that woman is around again, the daughter of Cabesang Tales, with
her petition. When Tales fled to the tulisanes the authorities, true to
form, arrested his aged father in his stead and now hold him in prison.
His Excellency looked at him with an expression of impatience and
rubbed his hand across his broad forehead. “Carambas! Can’t one be
left to eat one’s breakfast in peace?”
“This is the third day she has come. She’s a poor girl——”
The governor-general scratched the back of his ear and said, “Oh,
go along! Have the secretary make out an order to the lieutenant of
the Civil Guard for the old man’s release. They sha’n’t say that
we’re not clement and merciful.”
He looked at Ben-Zayb. The journalist winked. [152]
You can see that it is cartoon-making with a vengeance. The mirth is
savage. It gives one the shivers. This man taught the methods of peace
and rejected every suggestion that reform could be won by physical
violence. Yet the way he was walking is clear. In ten years if he had
kept on he would himself have been leading an insurrection. It has
always been so; in the cloister the sweet gentle spirit dreaming of
oppression overcome by reason, and in the streets rude weapons beating
off the shackles.
As Simoun the jeweler, Ibarra brings dramatic vengeance upon the head
of Father Salvi. In Manila is an American prestidigitator who is
exhibiting the trick known as the talking head. In this instance the
head is supposed to be that of an ancient Egyptian. In the midst of
gruesome settings to enhance the effect, it tells to an audience in
which Salvi is seated the story of Maria Clara, disguised as an event
of four thousand years ago. Salvi, conscience-stricken, falls in a fit.
[153]
Simoun’s purpose from the beginning has been to excite the people to an
uprising by which he hopes to win his revenge on friars and Government
alike and to free Maria Clara from the nunnery where she has been