The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
with to-day, perhaps five.”
“Jesso, jesso, monseer,” [40] replied the professor, examining the
youth over his gold eye-glasses. “You confess that you have missed
five times, and God knows if you have missed oftener. Atqui, as I
rarely call the roll, every time I catch any one I put five marks
against him; ergo, how many are five times five? Have you forgotten
the multiplication-table? Five times five?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Correct, correct! Thus you have still got away with ten, because I
have caught you only three times. Huh, if I had caught you every
time—Now how many are three times five?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen, right you are!” concluded the professor, closing the
register. “If you miss once more—out of doors with you, get out!
Ha, now a mark for the failure in the daily lesson.”
He again opened the register, sought out the name, and entered the
mark. “Come, only one mark,” he said, “since you hadn’t any
before.”
“But, Padre,” exclaimed Placido, restraining himself, “if your
Reverence puts a mark against me for failing in the lesson, your
Reverence owes it to me to erase the one for absence that you have
put against me for to-day.”
His Reverence made no answer. First, he slowly entered the mark,
then contemplated it with his head on one side—the mark must be
artistic—closed the register, and asked with great sarcasm, “Abá,
and why so, sir?”
“Because I can’t conceive, Padre, how one can be absent from the
class and at the same time recite the lesson in it. Your Reverence
is saying that to be is not to be.”
“Nakú, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can’t
conceive of it, eh? Sed patet experientia and contra experientiam
negantem, fusilibus est arguendum, do you understand? And can’t you
conceive with your philosophical head that one can be absent from
the class and not know the lesson at the same time? Is it a fact
that absence necessarily implies knowledge? What do you say to
that, philosophaster?”
This last epithet was the drop of water that made the full cup
overflow. Placido enjoyed among his friends the reputation of being
a philosopher, so he lost his patience, threw down his book, arose,
and faced the professor.
“Enough, Padre, enough! Your Reverence can put all the marks
against me that you wish, but you haven’t the right to insult me.
Your Reverence may stay with the class; I can’t stand any more.”
Without further farewell, he stalked away.
The class was astounded; such an assumption of dignity had scarcely
ever been seen, and who would have thought it of Placido Penitente?
The surprised professor bit his lips and shook his head
threateningly as he watched him depart. Then in a trembling voice
he began his preachment on the same old theme, delivered, however,
with more energy and more eloquence. It dealt with the growing
arrogance, the innate ingratitude, the presumption, the lack of
respect for superiors, the pride that the spirit of darkness
infused in the young, the lack of manners, the absence of courtesy,
and so on. From this he passed to coarse jest and sarcasm....
So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class
was over. The 234 students, after reciting their prayers, went out
as ignorant as when they went in, but breathing more freely, as if
a great weight had been lifted from them. Each youth had lost
another hour of his life and with it a portion of his dignity and
self-respect, and in exchange there was an increase of discontent,
of aversion to study, of resentment in their heart. After all this
ask for knowledge, dignity, gratitude!
Just as the 234 spent their class hours, so the thousands of
students that preceded them have spent theirs, and, if matters do
not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs, and be
brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful enthusiasm will be
converted into hatred and sloth. [41]
Rizal liked the Ateneo and the Ateneo liked him, students as well as
fathers. His fellows seem to have had for him more of awe than
affection as they contemplated his always growing list of victories. We
may believe now that the distance that separated them from him was not
so great as they thought, the wizardry of his prize-winning being, next
to his hard work, the advantages of his definite aim. Most men that
acquire this and follow it with any steadiness, whether it be for
wealth, position, or reputation, seem to their contemporaries a kind of
demon, but if they live, indent the chronicles of their times. The idea
that seized upon Rizal and was always growing in his thoughts was that
he ought to do something to help his people out of the prison-house of
ignorance and tyranny in which they sat the bound captives of a
preposterous social organization. This was enough to mark him apart
from students that went to the Ateneo only because their parents told
them to go. Good things for him were things that helped him to his
purpose and bad things were things that got across his way.
Long after he had left those sequestered halls, he put together notes
on his recollections of his life at the Ateneo, that, curt as they are,
light up his views of himself, his peculiar self-abnegation and his
idea of his destiny. He says:
After the vacation, in that memorable year of my mother’s release,
I again had my lodgings in the Walled City.... My mother had not
wanted me to return to Manila, saying that I already had a
sufficient education. Did she have a presentiment of what was going
to happen to me? Can it be that a mother’s heart gives her double
vision?
My future profession was still unsettled. My father wanted me to
study metaphysics, so I enrolled in that course. But my interest
was so slight that I did not even buy a copy of the text-book. A
former schoolmate, who had finished his course three months before,
was my only intimate friend. He lived in the same street that I
lived in.
On Sundays and other holidays, this friend used to call for me and
we would spend the day at my great-aunt’s house in Trozo. My aunt
knew his father. When my youngest sister entered La Concordia
College, I used to visit her, too, on the holidays. Another friend
had a sister in the same school, so we could go together. I made a
pencil sketch of his sister from a photograph she lent me. On
December 8, the festival of La Concordia, some other students and I
went to the college. It was a fine day, and the building was gay
with decorations of banners, lanterns, and flowers.
Shortly after that I went home for the Christmas holidays. On the
same steamer was a Calamba girl that had been a pupil in Santa
Catalina College for nearly five years. Her father was with her. We
were well acquainted, but her schooling had made her bashful. She
kept her back to me while we talked. To help her pass the time, I
asked about her school and studies, but I got hardly more than
“yes” and “no” answers. She seemed to have almost, if not entirely,
forgotten her Tagalog. When I walked into our house in Calamba, my
mother at first did not recognize me. The sad cause was that she
had almost lost her sight. My sisters greeted me joyfully, and I
could read their welcome in their smiling faces. But my father, who
seemed to be the most pleased of all, said least....
There I tied the horse by the roadside and for a time watched the
water flowing through the irrigation ditch. Its swiftness reminded
me how rapidly my days were going by. I am now twenty years old and
have the satisfaction of remembering that in the crises of my life
I have not followed my own pleasure. I have always tried to live by
my principles and to do the heavy duties I have undertaken. [42]
The instructor at the Ateneo that Rizal chiefly liked was Father
Guerrico, a kindly, gentle, devout old man, full of learning and given
to good works. Long after swift and stirring events in the great world
had dimmed the memory of other faces at the Ateneo, the visage of
Father Guerrico, furrowed with thought, yet beaming with good will to
all mankind, was clear before Rizal, and with that marvelous gift of
his for sculpture he made, out of his lingering recollections, a bust
of the father, achieving a likeness of extraordinary quality, so subtly
charged it is with the feeling of truth that confers life upon
portraiture. But there is, indeed, no room to doubt his high artistic
calling; if to painting or to sculpture he had cared to devote himself,
he would have been one of the world figures of his day. When one so
gifted and having also the artist’s craving for expression and
achievement makes of these a sacrifice for the general welfare, it may
be doubted if rack or prison mean much more.
Sculpture came as easily to him as laughter to a child. From his
babyhood, or thereabouts, he had been modeling these figures in clay, a
spontaneous and irrepressible outgiving of the spirit in him; figures
strangely vital, and wittily touched, so that to-day the observer
coming upon them for the first time beholds them with a sense of
something weird, as if in some way he had come also upon the sculptor
behind his work. Often with no tool but a pocket-knife he worked in
wood to the same results. There are extant faces and busts he carved
thus in wood that have an almost inexplicable potency to suggest
character, thought, or life.
He had as great a command over his brush and pencil; his sketch-book
has a certain charm, distinctive and rare; he had the French artist’s
uncanny power to suggest with a single line an inevitable trait or an
overmastering feature of a landscape. He could paint before he had
taken a lesson. When he was a mere boy, still at Calamba, before he had
entered the Ateneo, a banner was spoiled that was to have been used in
one of the local festivals that were then so important; José painted in
its place a banner that all men declared to be better than the
original. [43] At the Ateneo he carved an image of the Virgin Mother
that won the unstinted praise of men not novices in art, and a statue
of Christ that for twenty years was one of the admired exhibits of the
school hall.
By all accounts, this multiplex being could write as easily; he was
poet and dramatist as well as sculptor and painter. At school he
continued to practise the art his mother had taught him, showing
himself a skilled practitioner in verse and a devout worshiper of
poetry, Spanish and Tagalog. For, despite the common European belief to
the contrary, Tagalog is not the dialect of a tribe of savages but a
highly developed language having an ancient and honorable literature.
There were poems in Tagalog as early as in English, and many a
beautiful Tagalog poem has been sung and resung and passed into the
heritage of the people where no European speech had ever been heard.
At the age when children usually begin to learn their alphabet this boy
was making verses. A little later he could see subjects not only for
poems but for plays. Before he was eight years old he had written a
drama that was performed at a local festival and brought him two pesos.
At the Ateneo, poetry and dramatic composition were his relaxation, his
pastime, his joy and rapture, when he turned from the ponderous routine
of the curriculum.
In December, 1875, he being then fifteen, he wrote “The Embarkation, a
Hymn in Honor of Magellan’s Fleet,” a poem in seven stanzas of eight