The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
the misfortunes of his own people and sharply reminded him of his
mother and the two terrible years she had spent in Santa Cruz jail. In
Calamba and all about him festered a social system infinitely worse
than any Dumas had imagined.
About this time he began to lay out his days into a schedule of hours
to which he aimed rigidly to adhere; so many hours for study, so many
for reading; from four to five, exercise; five to six, something else.
This was a plan he followed, or tried to follow, all the rest of his
life, and accounts in part for that list of achievements that still
staggers the investigators. It was strict economy of time and likewise
an exercise in self-mastery, a virtue on which he set great store and
in the practice of which few men outside of monastery walls have
equaled him. He came to look upon his body as a kind of mechanism with
which, as its master, he could do as he pleased; feed it, starve it, or
run races with it. At the Ateneo he held it in subjection while he
accumulated medals, fought when necessary, and composed treatises in
chemistry, which, next to poetry and sculpture, had become his
pleasure.
CHAPTER III
FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY
For the times and the place the Ateneo was a good school, by general
consent the best in the Islands, in some respects matching well with an
inferior preparatory school in America. When the Jesuits were allowed
to return to the country from which they had been banished, they
brought with them new ideas of education into a region where for two
hundred years such imports had been rare. For all that, education at
the Ateneo was not to be had except at the price of a struggle. There
was no suggestion there, at least, of Tennyson’s idea of a row of empty
pates and kindly Instruction tumbling in the sciences. A student like
Rizal, reputed in his second year to be the hardest working in the
institution, seemed like a soldier fighting in doubtful trenches;
education to be won, as it were, by hand-to-hand conflict. Years
afterward Rizal wrote in his own vivid style a description of the
manner in which wisdom was imparted in even the highest Philippine seat
of learning, from which wonder grows to amazement that there were in
those days any educated Filipinos. It reveals them again as of iron
will and unmatchable persistence. No such dogged resolution in chase of
knowledge is now required of any people; the pursuit of learning under
difficulties, it may well be called. A Filipino reading it now may be
excused if he is moved somewhat to hold up his head among the nations.
Every fact that one of his countrymen added to his store he must wrest
from the hard hands of prejudice and desperate chance.
As to this, the Ateneo was not so bad as the rest, but bad enough.
Within even its halls was as yet no emancipation from the notion that
the student is the scum of the earth and the professor sent to scourge
and chasten him. At Santo Tomas, whither Rizal was later transferred,
this variant of purgatory was at its worst; tuition dwelt in the Lower
Silurian. Rizal’s description is of the session of a class in physics.
The discerning reader will conclude that it is the transcript of a
personal experience:
The class-room was a spacious rectangular hall with large grated
windows that admitted an abundance of light and air. Along the two
sides extended three wide tiers of stone covered with wood, filled
with students arranged in alphabetical order. At the end opposite
the entrance, under a print of St. Thomas Aquinas, rose the
professor’s chair on a level platform with a little stairway on
each side. With the exception of a beautiful blackboard in a narra
[wood] frame, scarcely ever used, since there was still written on
it the viva that had appeared on the opening day, no furniture,
either useful or useless, was to be seen. The walls, painted white
and covered with glazed tiles, to prevent scratches, were entirely
bare, having neither a drawing nor a picture, nor even an outline
of any physical apparatus. The students had no need of any; no one
missed the practical instruction in an extremely experimental
science; for years and years it has been so taught, and the country
has not been upset but continues just as ever. Now and then some
little instrument descended from heaven and was exhibited to the
class from a distance, like the monstrance to the prostrate
worshipers—look, but touch not! From time to time when some
complacent professor appeared, one day in the year was set aside
for visiting the mysterious laboratory and gazing from without at
the puzzling apparatus arranged in glass cases. No one could
complain, for on that day there were to be seen quantities of brass
and glassware, tubes, disks, wheels, bells, and the like—the
exhibition did not get beyond that, and the country was not
upset....
This was the professor who that morning called the roll and
directed many of the students to recite the lesson from memory,
word for word. The phonographs got into operation, some well, some
ill, some stammering, and received their grades. He who recited
without an error earned a good mark, and he who made more than
three mistakes a bad mark.
A fat boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the
bristles of a brush yawned until he seemed about to dislocate his
jaws, and stretched himself with his arms extended as if he were in
his bed. The professor saw this and wished to startle him.
“Eh, there, sleepy-head! What’s this? Lazy, too; so it’s sure you
don’t know the lesson, ha?”
This question, instead of offending the class, amused them and many
laughed; it was a daily occurrence. But the sleeper did not laugh;
he arose and, with a bound, rubbed his eyes, and, as if a
steam-engine were turning the phonograph, began to recite:
“The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces intended to
produce by the reflection of light the images of the objects placed
before said surfaces. From the substance that forms these surfaces
they are divided into metallic mirrors and glass mirrors——”
“Stop, stop, stop!” interrupted the professor. “Heavens, what a
rattle! We were at the point where the mirrors are divided into
metallic and glass, eh? Now if I should present to you a block of
wood, a piece of kamagon for instance, well polished and varnished,
or a slab of black marble well burnished, or a square of jet, which
would reflect the images of objects placed before them, how would
you classify those mirrors?”
Whether he did not know what to answer or did not understand the
question, the student tried to get out of the difficulty by
demonstrating that he knew the lesson; so he rushed on like a
torrent:
“The first are composed of brass or an alloy of different metals,
and the second of a sheet of glass, with its two sides well
polished, one of which has an amalgam of tin adhering to it.”
“Tut, tut, tut! That’s not it! I say to you, ‘Dominus vobiscum,’
and you answer me with, ‘Requiescat in pace!’”
The worthy professor then repeated the question in the vernacular
of the markets, interspersed with cosas and abás at every moment.
The poor youth did not know how to get out of the quandary; he
doubted whether to include kamagon with the metals, or the marble
with the glasses, and leave the jet as a neutral substance, until
Juanito Pelaez maliciously prompted him:
“The mirror of kamagon among the wooden mirrors.”
The incautious youth repeated this aloud, and half the class was
convulsed with laughter.
“A good sample of wood you are yourself!” exclaimed the professor,
laughing in spite of himself. “Let’s see from what you would define
a mirror—from a substance per se, in quantum est superficies, or
from the substance upon which the surface rests, the raw material,
modified by the attribute ‘surface,’ since it is clear that,
surface being an accidental property of bodies, it cannot exist
without substance—what do you say?”
“I? Nothing!” the wretched boy was about to reply, for he did not
understand what it was all about, confused as he was by so many
surfaces and so many accidents that smote cruelly on his ears, but
a sense of shame restrained him. Filled with anguish and breaking
into a cold perspiration, he began to repeat between his teeth:
“The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces——”
“Ergo, per te, the mirror is the surface,” angled the professor.
“Well, then, clear up this difficulty. If the surface is the
mirror, it must be of no consequence to the ‘essence’ of the mirror
what may be found behind this surface, since what is behind it does
not affect the ‘essence’ that is before it, id est, the surface,
quae super faciem est, quia vocatur superficies, facies ea quae
supra videtur. Do you admit that or do you not admit it?”
The poor youth’s hair stood up straighter than ever, as though
acted upon by some magnetic force.
“Do you admit it or do you not admit it?”
“Anything! Whatever you wish, Padre,” was his thought, but he did
not dare to express it from fear of ridicule. That was a dilemma
indeed and he had never been in a worse one. He had a vague idea
that the most innocent thing could not be admitted to the friars
but that they, or rather their estates and curacies, would get out
of it all the results and advantages imaginable. So his good angel
prompted him to deny everything with all the energy of his soul and
refractoriness of his hair, and he was about to shout a proud nego,
for the reason that he who denies everything does not compromise
himself in anything, as a certain lawyer had once told him; but the
evil habits of disregarding the dictates of one’s own conscience,
of having little faith in legal folk, and of seeking aid from
others where one is sufficient unto himself were his undoing. His
companions, especially Juanito Pelaez, were making signs to him to
admit it, so he let himself be carried away by his evil destiny and
exclaimed, “Concedo, Padre,” in a voice as faltering as if he were
saying, “In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.”
“Concedo antecedentem,” echoed the professor, smiling maliciously.
“Ergo, I can scratch the mercury off a looking-glass, put in its
place a piece of bibinka, and we shall still have a mirror, eh? Now
what shall we have?”...
Another pupil is questioned.
“What’s your name?” the professor asked him.
“Placido,” was the curt reply.
“Aha! Placido Penitente, although you look more like Placido the
Prompter—or the Prompted. But, Penitent, I’m going to impose some
penance on you for your promptings.”
Pleased with his play on words, he ordered the youth to recite the
lesson; and the latter, in the state of mind to which he was
reduced, made more than three mistakes. Shaking his head up and
down, the professor slowly opened the register and slowly scanned
it while he called off the names in a low voice.
“Palencia—Paloma—Panganiban—Pedraza—Pelado—Pelaez—Penitente, aha!
Placido Penitente, fifteen unexcused absences——”
Placido started up. “Fifteen absences, Padre?”
“Fifteen unexcused absences,” continued the professor, “so that you
only lack one to be dropped from the roll.”
“Fifteen absences, fifteen absences,” repeated Placido in
amazement. “I have never been absent more than four times, and,