The Reign of Greed
“Basilio,” he said in a low, tense voice, “listen to me carefully, for
the moments are precious. I see that you haven’t opened the pamphlets
that I sent you. You’re not interested in your country.”
The youth started to protest.
“It’s useless,” went on Simoun dryly. “Within an hour the revolution is
going to break out at a signal from me, and tomorrow there’ll be no
studies, there’ll be no University, there’ll be nothing but fighting
and butchery. I have everything ready and my success is assured. When
we triumph, all those who could have helped us and did not do so will
be treated as enemies. Basilio, I’ve come to offer you death or a
future!”
“Death or a future!” the boy echoed, as though he did not understand.
“With us or with the government,” rejoined Simoun. “With your country
or with your oppressors. Decide, for time presses! I’ve come to save
you because of the memories that unite us!”
“With my country or with the oppressors!” repeated Basilio in a low
tone. The youth was stupefied. He gazed at the jeweler with eyes in
which terror was reflected, he felt his limbs turn cold, while a
thousand confused ideas whirled about in his mind. He saw the streets
running blood, he heard the firing, he found himself among the dead and
wounded, and by the peculiar force of his inclinations fancied himself
in an operator’s blouse, cutting off legs and extracting bullets.
“The will of the government is in my hands,” said Simoun. “I’ve
diverted and wasted its feeble strength and resources on foolish
expeditions, dazzling it with the plunder it might seize. Its heads are
now in the theater, calm and unsuspecting, thinking of a night of
pleasure, but not one shall again repose upon a pillow. I have men and
regiments at my disposition: some I have led to believe that the
uprising is ordered by the General; others that the friars are bringing
it about; some I have bought with promises, with employments, with
money; many, very many, are acting from revenge, because they are
oppressed and see it as a matter of killing or being killed. Cabesang
Tales is below, he has come with me here! Again I ask you—will you come
with us or do you prefer to expose yourself to the resentment of my
followers? In critical moments, to declare oneself neutral is to be
exposed to the wrath of both the contending parties.”
Basilio rubbed his hand over his face several times, as if he were
trying to wake from a nightmare. He felt that his brow was cold.
“Decide!” repeated Simoun.
“And what—what would I have to do?” asked the youth in a weak and
broken voice.
“A very simple thing,” replied Simoun, his face lighting up with a ray
of hope. “As I have to direct the movement, I cannot get away from the
scene of action. I want you, while the attention of the whole city is
directed elsewhere, at the head of a company to force the doors of the
nunnery of St. Clara and take from there a person whom only you,
besides myself and Capitan Tiago, can recognize. You’ll run no risk at
all.”
“Maria Clara!” exclaimed Basilio.
“Yes, Maria Clara,” repeated Simoun, and for the first time his voice
became human and compassionate. “I want to save her; to save her I have
wished to live, I have returned. I am starting the revolution, because
only a revolution can open the doors of the nunneries.”
“Ay!” sighed Basilio, clasping his hands. “You’ve come late, too late!”
“Why?” inquired Simoun with a frown.
“Maria Clara is dead!”
Simoun arose with a bound and stood over the youth. “She’s dead?” he
demanded in a terrible voice.
“This afternoon, at six. By now she must be—”
“It’s a lie!” roared Simoun, pale and beside himself. “It’s false!
Maria Clara lives, Maria Clara must live! It’s a cowardly excuse! She’s
not dead, and this night I’ll free her or tomorrow you die!”
Basilio shrugged his shoulders. “Several days ago she was taken ill and
I went to the nunnery for news of her. Look, here is Padre Salvi’s
letter, brought by Padre Irene. Capitan Tiago wept all the evening,
kissing his daughter’s picture and begging her forgiveness, until at
last he smoked an enormous quantity of opium. This evening her knell
was tolled.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Simoun, pressing his hands to his head and standing
motionless. He remembered to have actually heard the knell while he was
pacing about in the vicinity of the nunnery.
“Dead!” he murmured in a voice so low that it seemed to be a ghost
whispering. “Dead! Dead without my having seen her, dead without
knowing that I lived for her—dead!”
Feeling a terrible storm, a tempest of whirlwind and thunder without a
drop of water, sobs without tears, cries without words, rage in his
breast and threaten to burst out like burning lava long repressed, he
rushed precipitately from the room. Basilio heard him descend the
stairs with unsteady tread, stepping heavily, he heard a stifled cry, a
cry that seemed to presage death, so solemn, deep, and sad that he
arose from his chair pale and trembling, but he could hear the
footsteps die away and the noisy closing of the door to the street.
“Poor fellow!” he murmured, while his eyes filled with tears. Heedless
now of his studies, he let his gaze wander into space as he pondered
over the fate of those two beings: he—young, rich, educated, master of
his fortunes, with a brilliant future before him; she—fair as a dream,
pure, full of faith and innocence, nurtured amid love and laughter,
destined to a happy existence, to be adored in the family and respected
in the world; and yet of those two beings, filled with love, with
illusions and hopes, by a fatal destiny he wandered over the world,
dragged ceaselessly through a whirl of blood and tears, sowing evil
instead of doing good, undoing virtue and encouraging vice, while she
was dying in the mysterious shadows of the cloister where she had
sought peace and perhaps found suffering, where she entered pure and
stainless and expired like a crushed flower!
Sleep in peace, ill-starred daughter of my hapless fatherland! Bury in
the grave the enchantments of youth, faded in their prime! When a
people cannot offer its daughters a tranquil home under the protection
of sacred liberty, when a man can only leave to his widow blushes,
tears to his mother, and slavery to his children, you do well to
condemn yourself to perpetual chastity, stifling within you the germ of
a future generation accursed! Well for you that you have not to shudder
in your grave, hearing the cries of those who groan in darkness, of
those who feel that they have wings and yet are fettered, of those who
are stifled from lack of liberty! Go, go with your poet’s dreams into
the regions of the infinite, spirit of woman dim-shadowed in the
moonlight’s beam, whispered in the bending arches of the bamboo-brakes!
Happy she who dies lamented, she who leaves in the heart that loves her
a pure picture, a sacred remembrance, unspotted by the base passions
engendered by the years! Go, we shall remember you! In the clear air of
our native land, under its azure sky, above the billows of the lake set
amid sapphire hills and emerald shores, in the crystal streams shaded
by the bamboos, bordered by flowers, enlivened by the beetles and
butterflies with their uncertain and wavering flight as though playing
with the air, in the silence of our forests, in the singing of our
rivers, in the diamond showers of our waterfalls, in the resplendent
light of our moon, in the sighs of the night breeze, in all that may
call up the vision of the beloved, we must eternally see you as we
dreamed of you, fair, beautiful, radiant with hope, pure as the light,
yet still sad and melancholy in the contemplation of our woes!
CHAPTER XXIV
DREAMS
Amor, qué astro eres?
On the following day, Thursday, at the hour of sunset, Isagani was
walking along the beautiful promenade of Maria Cristina in the
direction of the Malecon to keep an appointment which Paulita had that
morning given him. The young man had no doubt that they were to talk
about what had happened on the previous night, and as he was determined
to ask for an explanation, and knew how proud and haughty she was, he
foresaw an estrangement. In view of this eventuality he had brought
with him the only two letters he had ever received from Paulita, two
scraps of paper, whereon were merely a few hurriedly written lines with
various blots, but in an even handwriting, things that did not prevent
the enamored youth from preserving them with more solicitude than if
they had been the autographs of Sappho and the Muse Polyhymnia.
This decision to sacrifice his love on the altar of dignity, the
consciousness of suffering in the discharge of duty, did not prevent a
profound melancholy from taking possession of Isagani and brought back
into his mind the beautiful days, and nights more beautiful still, when
they had whispered sweet nothings through the flowered gratings of the
entresol, nothings that to the youth took on such a character of
seriousness and importance that they seemed to him the only matters
worthy of meriting the attention of the most exalted human
understanding. He recalled the walks on moonlit nights, the fair, the
dark December mornings after the mass of Nativity, the holy water that
he used to offer her, when she would thank him with a look charged with
a whole epic of love, both of them trembling as their fingers touched.
Heavy sighs, like small rockets, issued from his breast and brought
back to him all the verses, all the sayings of poets and writers about
the inconstancy of woman. Inwardly he cursed the creation of theaters,
the French operetta, and vowed to get revenge on Pelaez at the first
opportunity. Everything about him appeared under the saddest and
somberest colors: the bay, deserted and solitary, seemed more solitary
still on account of the few steamers that were anchored in it; the sun
was dying behind Mariveles without poetry or enchantment, without the
capricious and richly tinted clouds of happier evenings; the Anda
monument, in bad taste, mean and squat, without style, without
grandeur, looked like a lump of ice-cream or at best a chunk of cake;
the people who were promenading along the Malecon, in spite of their
complacent and contented air, appeared distant, haughty, and vain;
mischievous and bad-mannered, the boys that played on the beach,
skipping flat stones over the surface of the water or searching in the
sand for mollusks and crustaceans which they caught for the mere fun of
catching and killed without benefit to themselves; in short, even the
eternal port works to which he had dedicated more than three odes,
looked to him absurd, ridiculous child’s play.
The port, ah, the port of Manila, a bastard that since its conception
had brought tears of humiliation and shame to all! If only after so
many tears there were not being brought forth a useless abortion!
Abstractedly he saluted two Jesuits, former teachers of his, and
scarcely noticed a tandem in which an American rode and excited the
envy of the gallants who were in calesas only. Near the Anda monument
he heard Ben-Zayb talking with another person about Simoun, learning
that the latter had on the previous night been taken suddenly ill, that
he refused to see any one, even the very aides of the General. “Yes!”
exclaimed Isagani with a bitter smile, “for him attentions because he
is rich. The soldiers return from their expeditions sick and wounded,
but no one visits them.”
Musing over these expeditions, over the fate of the poor soldiers, over
the resistance offered by the islanders to the foreign yoke, he thought
that, death for death, if that of the soldiers was glorious because
they were obeying orders, that of the islanders was sublime because