The Reign of Greed
Soon there was noticed some movement in the groups, a certain air of
expectancy, while Isagani paused and turned pale. A carriage drawn by a
pair of well-known white horses had stopped at the door. It was that of
Paulita Gomez, and she had already jumped down, light as a bird,
without giving the rascals time to see her foot. With a bewitching
whirl of her body and a sweep of her hand she arranged the folds of her
skirt, shot a rapid and apparently careless glance toward Isagani,
spoke to him and smiled. Doña Victorina descended in her turn, gazed
over her spectacles, saw Juanito Pelaez, smiled, and bowed to him
affably.
Isagani, flushed with excitement, returned a timid salute, while
Juanito bowed profoundly, took off his hat, and made the same gesture
as the celebrated clown and caricaturist Panza when he received
applause.
“Heavens, what a girl!” exclaimed one of the students, starting
forward. “Tell the professor that I’m seriously ill.” So Tadeo, as this
invalid youth was known, entered the church to follow the girl.
Tadeo went to the University every day to ask if the classes would be
held and each time seemed to be more and more astonished that they
would. He had a fixed idea of a latent and eternal holiday, and
expected it to come any day. So each morning, after vainly proposing
that they play truant, he would go away alleging important business, an
appointment, or illness, just at the very moment when his companions
were going to their classes. But by some occult, thaumaturgic art Tadeo
passed the examinations, was beloved by the professors, and had before
him a promising future.
Meanwhile, the groups began to move inside, for the professor of
physics and chemistry had put in his appearance. The students appeared
to be cheated in their hopes and went toward the interior of the
building with exclamations of discontent. Placido went along with the
crowd.
“Penitente, Penitente!” called a student with a certain mysterious air.
“Sign this!”
“What is it?”
“Never mind—sign it!”
It seemed to Placido that some one was twitching his ears. He recalled
the story of a cabeza de barangay in his town who, for having signed a
document that he did not understand, was kept a prisoner for months and
months, and came near to deportation. An uncle of Placido’s, in order
to fix the lesson in his memory, had given him a severe ear-pulling, so
that always whenever he heard signatures spoken of, his ears reproduced
the sensation.
“Excuse me, but I can’t sign anything without first understanding what
it’s about.”
“What a fool you are! If two celestial carbineers have signed it, what
have you to fear?”
The name of celestial carbineers inspired confidence, being, as it was,
a sacred company created to aid God in the warfare against the evil
spirit and to prevent the smuggling of heretical contraband into the
markets of the New Zion. [27]
Placido was about to sign to make an end of it, because he was in a
hurry,—already his classmates were reciting the O Thoma,—but again his
ears twitched, so he said, “After the class! I want to read it first.”
“It’s very long, don’t you see? It concerns the presentation of a
counter-petition, or rather, a protest. Don’t you understand? Makaraig
and some others have asked that an academy of Castilian be opened,
which is a piece of genuine foolishness—”
“All right, all right, after awhile. They’re already beginning,”
answered Placido, trying to get away.
“But your professor may not call the roll—”
“Yes, yes; but he calls it sometimes. Later on, later on! Besides, I
don’t want to put myself in opposition to Makaraig.”
“But it’s not putting yourself in opposition, it’s only—”
Placido heard no more, for he was already far away, hurrying to his
class. He heard the different voices—adsum, adsum—the roll was being
called! Hastening his steps he got to the door just as the letter Q was
reached.
“Tinamáan ñg—!” [28] he muttered, biting his lips.
He hesitated about entering, for the mark was already down against him
and was not to be erased. One did not go to the class to learn but in
order not to get this absence mark, for the class was reduced to
reciting the lesson from memory, reading the book, and at the most
answering a few abstract, profound, captious, enigmatic questions.
True, the usual preachment was never lacking—the same as ever, about
humility, submission, and respect to the clerics, and he, Placido, was
humble, submissive, and respectful. So he was about to turn away when
he remembered that the examinations were approaching and his professor
had not yet asked him a question nor appeared to notice him—this would
be a good opportunity to attract his attention and become known! To be
known was to gain a year, for if it cost nothing to suspend one who was
not known, it required a hard heart not to be touched by the sight of a
youth who by his daily presence was a reproach over a year of his life
wasted.
So Placido went in, not on tiptoe as was his custom, but noisily on his
heels, and only too well did he succeed in his intent! The professor
stared at him, knitted his brows, and shook his head, as though to say,
“Ah, little impudence, you’ll pay for that!”
CHAPTER XIII
THE CLASS IN PHYSICS
The classroom 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 an elevated platform with a little stairway on each side. With
the exception of a beautiful blackboard in a narra 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.
Besides, the students were convinced that those instruments had not
been purchased for them—the friars would be fools! The laboratory was
intended to be shown to the visitors and the high officials who came
from the Peninsula, so that upon seeing it they would nod their heads
with satisfaction, while their guide would smile, as if to say, “Eh,
you thought you were going to find some backward monks! Well, we’re
right up with the times—we have a laboratory!”
The visitors and high officials, after being handsomely entertained,
would then write in their Travels or Memoirs: “The Royal and Pontifical
University of Santo Tomas of Manila, in charge of the enlightened
Dominican Order, possesses a magnificent physical laboratory for the
instruction of youth. Some two hundred and fifty students annually
study this subject, but whether from apathy, indolence, the limited
capacity of the Indian, or some other ethnological or incomprehensible
reason, up to now there has not developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi, or a
Tyndall, not even in miniature, in the Malay-Filipino race.”
Yet, to be exact, we will say that in this laboratory are held the
classes of thirty or forty advanced students, under the direction of an
instructor who performs his duties well enough, but as the greater part
of these students come from the Ateneo of the Jesuits, where science is
taught practically in the laboratory itself, its utility does not come
to be so great as it would be if it could be utilized by the two
hundred and fifty who pay their matriculation fees, buy their books,
memorize them, and waste a year to know nothing afterwards. As a
result, with the exception of some rare usher or janitor who has had
charge of the museum for years, no one has ever been known to get any
advantage from the lessons memorized with so great effort.
But let us return to the class. The professor was a young Dominican,
who had filled several chairs in San Juan de Letran with zeal and good
repute. He had the reputation of being a great logician as well as a
profound philosopher, and was one of the most promising in his clique.
His elders treated him with consideration, while the younger men envied
him, for there were also cliques among them. This was the third year of
his professorship and, although the first in which he had taught
physics and chemistry, he already passed for a sage, not only with the
complaisant students but also among the other nomadic professors. Padre
Millon did not belong to the common crowd who each year change their
subject in order to acquire scientific knowledge, students among other
students, with the difference only that they follow a single course,
that they quiz instead of being quizzed, that they have a better
knowledge of Castilian, and that they are not examined at the
completion of the course. Padre Millon went deeply into science, knew
the physics of Aristotle and Padre Amat, read carefully his “Ramos,”
and sometimes glanced at “Ganot.” With all that, he would often shake
his head with an air of doubt, as he smiled and murmured: “transeat.”
In regard to chemistry, no common knowledge was attributed to him after
he had taken as a premise the statement of St. Thomas that water is a
mixture and proved plainly that the Angelic Doctor had long forestalled
Berzelius, Gay-Lussac, Bunsen, and other more or less presumptuous
materialists. Moreover, in spite of having been an instructor in
geography, he still entertained certain doubts as to the rotundity of
the earth and smiled maliciously when its rotation and revolution
around the sun were mentioned, as he recited the verses
“El mentir de las estrellas
Es un cómodo mentir.” [29]
He also smiled maliciously in the presence of certain physical theories
and considered visionary, if not actually insane, the Jesuit Secchi, to
whom he imputed the making of triangulations on the host as a result of
his astronomical mania, for which reason it was said that he had been
forbidden to celebrate mass. Many persons also noticed in him some
aversion to the sciences that he taught, but these vagaries were
trifles, scholarly and religious prejudices that were easily explained,
not only by the fact that the physical sciences were eminently
practical, of pure observation and deduction, while his forte was
philosophy, purely speculative, of abstraction and induction, but also
because, like any good Dominican, jealous of the fame of his order, he
could hardly feel any affection for a science in which none of his
brethren had excelled—he was the first who did not accept the chemistry
of St. Thomas Aquinas—and in which so much renown had been acquired by
hostile, or rather, let us say, rival orders.
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