The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
doubt of the present readiness of his people for self-government. It is
certain that he declined Valenzuela’s proposal and with some heat;
[198] we may also believe that with all his might he strove to dissuade
his countrymen from violence. Yet there is testimony extant that when
he found all his pleadings were useless and the violence he feared was
but too likely he admitted that he could not in any event separate his
sympathies from his struggling countrymen.
The disputed versions of his reply are not worth the attention they
have had, because, as has been pointed out here and more than once,
Rizal’s convictions on these matters are clear. One obvious reflection
is enough to illustrate them. If he had lived through such strenuous
days as followed 1896 he would have been found in the front ranks of
those that fought for freedom and yet would never have ceased to mourn
that freedom could not be won in another way. As to this, “El
Filibusterismo,” if there were nothing else, would be testimony enough;
and if Philippine independence involved only sentimental and not
commercial interests there would be no attempt to distort or to obscure
it.
When Bonifacio received Valenzuela’s report of Rizal’s decision, he
swore, after his fashion, and determined to press on with his own plans
and forget the exile. Against the notion that the Philippines were
unready for revolution or unfitted for self-government he set himself
like a man in a battle that has thrown away fear with his scabbard. He
recalled that, weighing duly the relative strengths of the antagonists,
the American colonists were not worse prepared for the struggle that
set them free. Most revolutions, history had taught him, had been begun
by people that fought with broken weapons or bare hands; witness
Camille Desmoulins and the ragged crowd he led from the café in the
courtyard of the Palais Royal that fateful night in July. Hardly a
weapon among them all more deadly than a hammer, and yet to the echo of
their feet fell absolute government in every corner of Europe. All the
world now honors those empty hands; on the very spot where Desmoulins
addressed the crowd, behold now his statue! Are revolutions ever
wrought by well ordered ranks of daintily uniformed guards? Are they
ever launched when every condition is fitted, like joiner-work, to
their success? And, in fact, are they ever made to any man’s volition
or by anything but blind destiny that sits behind the whirlwind?
Bonifacio, at least, had no idea of waiting until the Philippines
should be populated with university graduates able to demonstrate in
scholarly phrases the philosophical sweetness of liberty. Desiring
freedom, he desired it then and there. Month by month, the Katipunan
spread and carried with it, as a flood carries a straw, the catastrophe
of this story.
At Dapitan life went on unchangingly. It is likely that Rizal had there
a happiness and a serenity he had not known since childhood. He says as
much in one of his letters:
My life now is quiet, peaceful, retired, and without glory; but I
think it is useful, too. I teach here the poor but intelligent boys
reading, Spanish, English, mathematics, and geometry. Moreover, I
teach them to behave like men. I taught the men here how to get a
better way of earning their living, and they think I am right. We
have begun, and already success has crowned our trials.
He tells how even in that out-of-the-way place there were lessons for
him to learn; how he was taught there to steer and reef, to manage a
canoe, to speak Visayan, and the better to know his own country. “God
can send you your fortune,” he adds, “even amidst the persecutions of
your friends!”
In this letter he dwells with a kind of delight on his exacting labors
in philology, of his studies in Tagalog and his Tagalog grammar, which
he had almost completed. It is plainly to be seen that his activities
kept him from nostalgia, as his captivity from the turmoil of his years
in the noisy and bitter world; and now he was happily married!
But man is not so easily separated from his Nemesis. Of a sudden all
this house of content fell in ruins about him.
All this time he was maintaining his correspondence with his friends,
the European scientists, and particularly with Dr. Blumentritt, [199]
the closest and most sympathetic of his intellectual allies. Early in
1896 a letter from Dr. Blumentritt told him of the sad condition of the
hospitals in Cuba. Yellow fever was raging in the Island, and there
were not nearly enough physicians to meet the emergency. No such report
could be made to Rizal without awakening in him his sympathy and
instinctive impulse to help whomsoever might be in distress. He wrote
to the governor-general offering to go to Cuba as a volunteer physician
in the government hospitals. There was a new governor-general now;
Despujol had ended his clouded career and gone home. Governor-General
Blanco accepted Rizal’s offer, and on August 1, 1896, the exile sailed
from Dapitan for Manila. With him went Mrs. Rizal and his little niece.
Even as a volunteer surgeon in the yellow fever hospitals he was
nominally to be a prisoner always; hence he must go to Cuba by way of
Spain and under the Spanish flag; otherwise Spanish sovereignty would
lapse and he might escape from its power. He planned to reach Manila in
time to take the next mail-boat, the Isla de Luzon, for Barcelona,
where he was to transship for Cuba. Mrs. Rizal was to reside in his
absence with his relatives at Biñan or in Manila. But the steamer that
took him from Dapitan made but a slow voyage. He had time to attend en
route a dinner in his honor at Dumaguete, and to perform an operation
on the eyes of a patient at Cebu. He reached Manila a few hours after
the Isla de Luzon had sailed. Nearly a month must elapse before another
steamer would start for Barcelona. Meantime he was detained on the
Spanish cruiser Castilla, a beautiful vessel that two years later lay
at the bottom of Manila Bay riddled with American shells. But his
confinement seems to have been easy. In a few days the officers were
his friends. The captain repeatedly invited members of his family to
dine with him on board. Mrs. Rizal came to see him, and so did former
pupils of his that had drifted from Dapitan up to Manila. He wrote
letters to his family, including one of great tenderness to his mother,
in which he included loving messages to all the household at Los Baños.
[200]
The captain of the Castilla was one of many Spaniards that
counterpoised the grim tale of his usual treatment under their flag.
Governor-General Ramón Blanco, still remembered in the islands for his
kindly, gentle ways, was another. He furnished Rizal with letters of
recommendation to high Spanish officers in Spain and in Cuba. One of
these to General Azcárraga, Spanish minister of war, was as follows:
[201]
Manila, August 30, 1896.
Esteemed General and Distinguished Friend:
I recommend to you with genuine interest Dr. José Rizal, who is
leaving for the Peninsula to place himself at the disposal of the
government as volunteer army surgeon to Cuba. During the four years
of his exile at Dapitan he has conducted himself in the most
exemplary manner, and he is, in my opinion, the more worthy of
praise and consideration in that he is in no way connected with the
extravagant attempts we are now deploring, neither those of
conspirators nor of the secret societies that have been formed.
I have the pleasure to reassure you of my high esteem, and remain
Your affectionate friend and comrade
Ramón Blanco.
On September 3, the next mail-steamer, the Isla de Panay, departed for
Barcelona, with Rizal as a kind of self-watched prisoner, guarded by
his parole and not otherwise; for here as before it is to be remarked
as one of the curiosities of this story that however his enemies in the
Government might hate him they seemed to have full confidence in his
word of honor.
But while he was still waiting on the Castilla in the harbor disaster
had begun to ripen for him.
The whole Katipunan conspiracy was laid bare to the Government.
According to the accepted story, on the night of August 19, the mother
superior of a convent-school at Tondo burst upon the parish priest at
his house with information that she had discovered a terrible plot to
massacre all the Spaniards in the Islands. A brother of one of her
pupils was a member of the Katipunan. Assessments upon members of the
order had now become frequent, as Bonifacio’s preparations drew to a
head. It is an ancient Filipino custom for the woman in each household
to keep the purse for the men. This young man’s treasurer was his
sister. Of late he had been coming to her so often for funds that she
insisted upon knowing what he wanted the money for. Then little by
little she wormed his secret from him and fled with it to the mother
superior, who took it to the padre.
Father Gil seems to have made one leap with the news to the Civil
Guard, who arrested the girl’s brother, forced a confession from him
(probably with tortures), and, taking the priest in tow, went to the
place that the youth had said was the printing-office of the Katipunan.
There they found, or said they found, incriminating documents that
revealed the plot. [202]
Or some plot. At the best of times, as we have seen, hysteria in the
governing class of Manila slept on a hair-trigger, and, being once
awakened, offered a credulity more than childlike to the most grotesque
creations of the most unhealthy imagination. On this occasion its
manifestations were of the worst. Such wild tales as flew about the
city in those days, and had the approval of grave men that must have
known better, were fit only for a group of children telling
ghost-stories in the dark. That in the middle of the night armed bands
of ferocious, horrible natives were to steal upon the innocent repose
of every white person and slit his throat from ear to ear as he slept,
was the least terrifying of these rumors, and the earliest fruitage of
an aroused and exotic fancy. Curiously enough, it had no merit in
originality, but was wan and hoary with age; for one hundred and fifty
years, at every revolt of the overtaxed natives, it had been brought
out and paraded. It even persisted to a later day and was used to
frighten adult Americans that might have been deemed beyond such
melodrama. Certain plans required American dislike of the Filipinos,
and thus the dislike was to be engendered. In the present instance, it
can hardly be necessary to say to any Filipino reader that wholesale
murder was no part of Bonifacio’s plans, nor any other of the ogreish
and blood-curdling designs that he was then said to have formed. That
it seems needful to do him this justice before another public is only
further evidence of the gross misrepresentation that interest and
profits have made of all this chapter of history.
In the madness of panic for an hour or a day men may and doubtless will
do strange things; the abject terror that shattered the reasoning
faculties of the governing class in Manila seemed only to increase with
time. There was first fear let loose on its wild charger and then its
immediate reaction, the thirst for revenge. A Spanish mob gathered at
the gates of Malacañan clamoring for instant and sanguinary reprisals.
Rizal in his flight across the American continent had commented sadly
on the lynching-parties that disgraced the Southern States of the
American Union. If he had been in Manila in those days he would have
seen the same spirit displayed by the mob that demanded his own death.
It was 1872 come again, but infinitely worse. [203]