SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The boy that so early and by this savage tuition came to be initiated
into his people’s sorrows was then chiefly remarkable for a gentle,
tractable disposition and a liking for books and study. He had been
born at Calamba, June 19, 1861. In his earliest childhood he seemed
undersized and undervitalized; but when he was six years old there came
to his father’s house his uncle Manuel, a figure of health and a
resolute practitioner of open-air sports, who took José in hand and
with daily exercises and rigorous living built his body to normal
strength and agility. Filipinos have a natural aptitude for athletics;
he verified now the ancestral blood in his veins. He ran and jumped; he
took long walks; he learned to fence, to ride, and to like the sun and
the wind.
By all accounts he must have been a singularly attractive child, even
in a country where handsome children are common. His color was the fine
tint of his people, a light, clean, even brown; his face a delicate
oval, but the chin firm and rather long; the forehead nobly shaped, the
nose almost classical, the lips full but nothing sensual. His eyes had
a hardly discernible slant; when he was animated they flashed out of
black depths a kind of black fire; but when he was quiescent they
seemed gravely introspective. Long afterward his neighbors and
relatives, trying to recall his boyhood, and perhaps overstraining
memory, thought he seemed always much older than his years, a notion
that may have arisen from his unusual habits. He liked to read or be
read to; he liked at times to be alone; he liked to hear his elders
argue; he liked to go to church to see the people there; and he liked
to reason.
José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda was his full name, made
up in the Spanish fashion from both sides of his house, paternal as far
as the connecting “y,” and maternal the rest of the road. Philippine
names seem to the Anglo-Saxon mind a riddle that adds unnecessarily to
the burdens of life. This boy was to be known all his life as José
Rizal; his father had been and was always thereafter known as Francisco
Mercado, his mother as Doña Teodora Alonzo. Francisco, the father, and
all Francisco’s younger brothers in a family of twelve called
themselves Rizal as much as Mercado and the rest; none of his older
brothers used Rizal; all of his children bore it as their family name.
Yet family name it was never, according to western standards; for it
was added in 1849 by virtue of a proclamation of the governor-general
and by the whim of the man then head of the house. A strange difficulty
had arisen in the Philippines. The original Tagalog (or other native)
surnames being invincible against the Spanish tongue, Spanish names
were used as substitutes, but not, one might think, with sufficient
variety. Religious fervor overworked the popularity of some of these
until there arose an inextricable confusion: seventeen Antonio de la
Cruzes in one town, all unrelated; twelve Francisco de los Santoses in
a single street. This knot the wise old Governor-General Claveria [19]
cut with ready sword. He provided a list of Spanish names, apparently
copied in alphabetical order from the Madrid directory, and required
the head of each family to take one of these, add it at the rear or
front of whatever other names he was then carrying, and hand it down to
his children. [20] The father of Francisco Mercado met the spirit of
the decree but evaded its letter. He chose for his official name of
names Rizal, which was not on the governor-general’s list, but passed
muster. It is a corruption of the Spanish word ricial, and means a
green field or pasture; being here a poetic recognition, maybe, of the
blessed state of Mercado’s own rentals.
In the long and many syllabled cognomen, sounding like a verse of the
Æneid, with which José was baptized, is to be noticed the name
Realonda. This was from his mother’s family, where it also was an
innovation of the ingenious Claveria. Her family had long been known as
Alonzo. [21]
Those that like to go over the first records of great men in search of
phenomena foreshadowing something unusual in after-life will never be
disappointed here. José mastered his alphabet when he was three years
old, and before he was five could read in a Spanish version of the
Vulgate from which his mother had taught him at her knee. [22] In other
ways his debt to her was unusual; she turned his mind in his earliest
years toward good literature, in which she had a discerning taste,
being for her times and environment of rare learning and college bred
in Manila. [23] With other accomplishments she knew and loved good
poetry, could make it herself, and early taught José to make it. He
grew up thus with the advantage of a bilingual background. About him
the common speech was Tagalog; his mother made Spanish fairly familiar
to his ear.
Once she read to him a moral tale, “The Moth and the Candle,”
translating as she went along, and emphasizing the lesson. The moth had
been told by its mother to keep away from the flame, and now see what
happened. A cocoanut-oil lamp was burning on the table as she read;
winged insects were flying about and losing their lives in the blaze.
José became much more interested in them than in the salutary warnings
of his mother. He said afterward that he was not so much sorry for the
insects that lost their lives as fascinated by their fate.
The advice and warnings sounded feebly in my ears [he wrote]. What
I thought of most was the death of the heedless moth. But in the
depths of my heart I did not blame it. My mother’s care had not
quite the result she intended.
Years have passed since then. The child has become a man. He has
crossed the most famous rivers of other countries. He has studied
beside their broad streams. Steamships have carried him across seas
and oceans. He has climbed mountains much higher than the Makiling
of his native province, up to perpetual snow. He has received from
experience bitter lessons, much more bitter than that sweet
teaching which his mother gave him. Yet, in spite of all, the man
still keeps the heart of a child. He still thinks that light is the
most beautiful thing in creation, and that it is worth a man’s
sacrificing his life for. [24]
He had the soul of an artist, you may perceive, and the artist’s
irresistible yearning for expression. Before he was five years old, and
without tutelage or suggestion, he began to draw with pencil and to
model in clay and wax. It was form that most took his attention; to
model images of birds, butterflies, dogs, and men, to draw faces and to
outline designs. [25] For such studies his surroundings could hardly
have been better; as soon as his bent was shown father, mother, and
uncles gave him every encouragement; this is a race that upon any
manifestation of artistic promise looks with a kind of solemn joy.
Uncle José Alberto, his mother’s half-brother, had been a
school-teacher as well as a student abroad; Uncle Gregorio was a great
reader; the atmosphere of the house was friendly to study. After the
Philippine manner it was grave, decorous, reserved; for there is not on
earth, one may believe, a people by nature more serious-minded. The
family was happy to have the benignant friendship of Father Lopez, the
parish priest, a fair antithesis of the typical friar of those days and
a noble inheritor of the purest spirit of the first missions. Father
Lopez was beloved of all the children of the parish. They had sound
reason for their affection; there was no kinder or more useful man. The
friendship he maintained with José seemed more like a page out of
Charles Dickens than the barren realities of ordinary child life in the
Philippines, and the priest to have stepped from some new and Spanish
version of “Christmas Stories.” The boy was to learn by painful
experience how different from certain others of the cloth was the
gentle old curate of Calamba.
Years afterward, when he was entering upon man’s estate, he was induced
to write what he called the story of his boyhood. It proved to be a
juiceless sketch of a few pages covering many years. He was not enough
egotist to make a good autobiographer. He begins by saying he was born
a few days before the full of the moon. Then he adds:
I had some slight notions of the morning sun and of my parents.
That is as much as I can recall of my baby days.
The training I received from my earliest infancy is perhaps what
formed my habits, just as a cask keeps the odor of its first
contents. I recall clearly my first gloomy nights, passed on the
azotea [26] of our house. They seem as yesterday! They were nights
filled with the poetry of sadness and seem near now because at
present my days are so sad.
On moonlight nights, I took my supper on the azotea. My nurse, who
was very fond of me, used to threaten to leave me to a terrible but
imaginary being like the bogy of the Europeans if I did not eat.
He had nine sisters and one brother. Of his father he says that he was
a model parent. [27] “He gave us the education that was suitable to a
family neither rich nor poor. Through careful economy, he had been able
to build a stone house.”
At nightfall, my mother had us all say our prayers together. Then
we would go to the azotea, or to a window from which we could see
the moon. There my nurse would tell us stories. Sometimes sad and
sometimes gay, they were always oriental in their imagination. Dead
people, gold and plants on which diamonds grew were all mixed
together.
When I was four years of age, I lost my little sister, Concha, and
for the first time my tears fell because of love and sorrow. Till
then I had shed them only for my own faults. These my loving,
prudent mother well knew how to correct.
The environment would seem nevertheless to be more propitious for the
breeding of an agitator than of either a moralist or an artist. “Almost
every day in our town,” he says, “we saw the Guardia Civil lieutenant
caning or injuring some unarmed and inoffensive villager. The only
fault would be that while at a distance he had not taken off his hat
and made his bow. The alcalde did the same thing whenever he visited
us.”
We saw no restraint put upon brutality. Those whose duty it was to
look out for the public peace committed acts of violence and other
excesses. They were the real outlaws, and against such lawbreakers
our authorities were powerless.
His father looked carefully to the beginnings of José’s education.
There was daily drilling in all the elementary studies; an old man came
and lived in the house to teach the boy Latin.
When he was nine years old he was sent to the boys’ school at Biñan,
where his uncle José Alberto lived, and where he acquired knowledge in
the traditional manner and under a liberal application of the rod. Dr.
Justiniano Cruz, his teacher, seems to have had no modern illusions
about the sparing of this implement; to have it hang by the side of the
Bible and be more frequently used was his notion of thorough
instruction.
José wrote of his experiences there:
My brother left me after he had presented me to the schoolmaster,
who, it seemed, had been his own teacher. He was a tall, thin man,
with a long neck and a sharp nose. His body leaned slightly
forward. His shirt was of sinamay, [28] woven by the deft fingers
of Batangas women. He knew Latin and Spanish grammar by heart. And
his severity, I believe now, was too great. This is all I can
remember of him. His class-room was in his own house and only some
thirty meters away from my aunt’s house [where José was lodged].
When I entered the class-room for the first time, he said to me:
“You, do you speak Spanish?”
“A little, sir,” I answered.
“Do you know Latin?”
“A little, sir,” I again answered.
Because of these answers, the teacher’s son, who was the worst boy
in the class, began to make fun of me. He was some years my elder
and had an advantage in height, yet we had a tussle. Somehow or
other, I don’t know how, I got the better of him. I bent him down
over the class benches. Then I let him loose, having hurt only his
pride.
From this feat, the other boys thought he was a clever wrestler. One of
them challenged him. His pride had an early fall. The challenger threw
him and came near to break his head on the sidewalk.
I do not wish to take up the time with telling of the beatings I
got, nor shall I attempt to say how it hurt when I received the
first ruler-blow on my hand. I used to win in the competitions, for
no one happened to be better than I. Of these successes I made the
most. In spite of the reputation I had of being a good boy, rare
were the days in which my teacher did not call me up to receive
five or six blows on the hand.
There was near-by an aged painter. José used to haunt his studio and
learned much there about the secrets of pictorial art. He continues:
My manner of life was simple. I heard mass at four if there was a
service so early, or studied my lesson at that hour and went to
mass afterward. Then I went into the yard and looked for mabolos.
[29] Then came breakfast, which generally consisted of a plate of
rice and two dried sardines. There was class-work till ten o’clock,
and after luncheon a study period. In the afternoon there was
school from two o’clock until five. Next, there would be play with
my cousins for a while. Study and perhaps painting took up the
remainder of the afternoon. By and by came supper, one or two
plates of rice with a fish called ayungin. In the evening we had
prayers and then, if there was moonlight, a cousin and I would play
in the street with the others. Fortunately, I was never ill while
away from home. From time to time, I went to my own village. How
long the trip seemed going and how short coming back!
The tenderer plants of knowledge would hardly be expected to flower in
this harsh air, but the boy acquitted himself well. In two years he had
gathered into his little head all the wisdom Dr. Cruz could supply,
even with the conscientious use of the birch, and his parents had
decided to send him to Manila and the famous Ateneo Municipal of the
Jesuits. [30]
In Manila, though not at the Ateneo, he had been preceded by his elder
brother Paciano, long a student at the College of San José, where that
Father Burgos, whose death at the hands of the terrified governing
class in 1872 we have recounted, was an instructor. Paciano lived at
Father Burgos’s house and was his intimate friend. What ideas and
ideals dominated the Mercado household at Calamba we may surmise from
incidents of Paciano’s own school life. He was pilloried at San José as
a notorious patriot; because he spoke with some freedom against the
tyranny that blasted his country the authorities refused to allow him
to pass his examinations. [31] It appears that Father Burgos, although
unjustly accused of complicity in the Cavite affair, was likewise a
sturdy Filipino and convinced that the iniquities of the existing
System could not long be maintained. In all probability he was
sentenced for holding these views. No one will ever know this, because
the trial was in secret, no testimony (if any was taken) was afterward
to be found, and he that was called the witness for the Government was
garroted by that same Government before the public could learn the
nature of his inventions. [32] A belief that Father Burgos was a
general-principles victim is justified by the habitual proceedings of
the Government. He was not the only man that perished in those days for
what he thought and not for what he did.
The slayings of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora took place a few
months before José Rizal went to Manila. Almost before Paciano’s face
his friend and teacher had been dragged to death. What communication
about these things Paciano made to his brother, or how Paciano was
moved by the tragedy, we can gather only from what happened afterward;
but what it meant to José we know well, for as to that he has left
eloquent testimony. Sixteen years afterward he compressed into
twenty-two lines of bitter irony the scorn he had of Spain for that
day’s work. The tragedy on Bagumbayan Field came at the time when his
mother’s persecution was beginning; his departure from home had been
delayed by her arrest. He was already burning under the sense of an
intolerable wrong; this sharp and gratuitous access of injustice must
have pierced him with another wound to brood over. [33] All the rest of
his life he seemed a lonely and rather melancholy figure. It was here
at the Ateneo that his aloofness began. A feeling grew upon him that he
was alone in the midst of crowds. It was the counterpart of a sense
equally developing in him that the misfortunes of his people were to be
the business of his life.
He found much at the Ateneo that sharpened his observations of the
source of the national disease. All things considered, the school
professed unusual virtues; its wise conductors made something of a
vaunt of equal treatment for all their pupils. Yet even so it was
impossible to shut out or to mitigate the contempt and hatred the
Spaniards had for the Filipinos. Before the faculty, Spanish boys and
Filipino boys might have an equal chance to pass their examinations;
outside of the class-rooms, the Spanish boys sedulously imitated the
arrogance and brutalities of their elders. One of the first remarks
made by José Rizal in his new academe was that the Spanish boys always
bore themselves with aggressive insolence toward their schoolmates of
darker skin; the “miserable Indio” attitude over again. The next was
that while the Filipino boys seemed as a rule to accept a situation
they were powerless to end, they were one and all insubmissive in their
hearts. Next he made note that the Filipino boys were so little
impressed with Spanish superiority that in secret they laughed at their
white tyrants, mocking them and well aware of their faults and
weaknesses. Finally, he satisfied himself many times in many ways, that
the Filipino mind was not in any respect inferior to the Spanish; for
the pretense of Spanish superiority there was no other basis but the
accident of the overawing military.
In cannon and not in mind, spirit, or genius lay all of Spain’s
prestige.
Before this discovery all the theory upon which Europe dominated any
part of the Orient crumbled and vanished. There was no such thing, it
did not exist, it was only fabrication and device. The brown man was
not inferior; he was not deliberately shaped by the Creator to be the
white man’s patient drudge. Put down side by side with an equal course
before them, footing the same starting-line, the brown boy in school
won to the goal as quickly and surely as the white. And only as quickly
and surely? It seemed to Rizal, after a time, taking careful note, that
the brown boy was in every trial heat the nimbler and wiser. [34] As,
for example, here was all the instruction in this school given in
Spanish, the white boy’s native tongue, but all alien to the brown boy.
So, then, the brown boy must needs compass the language in which the
instruction was conveyed as well as the instruction given therein. Yet,
even so, handicapped by this and no less by universal contempt and
disparagement, behold him winning at least as many prizes as the
Spaniard, at least as proficient, diligent, capable.
Here was a revelation to shake the towers of accepted doctrine. In the
light of it how great (and how hideous!) was the wrong done to the
people of the Philippines! The pretense upon which Spain ruled in this
iron fashion, with so much cruelty and dishonesty, was (in effect) that
in the cells of the brains and in the corpuscles of the blood of these
people some undefined and mysterious essence was lacking, and for want
of this they were incapable of ruling themselves or even of taking a
place among the other children of earth. Being put to the test, no such
lack appeared, but only aptitude, mental health, mental vigor, equal at
least to those of the white man. The European ruled, then, because he
had a larger share of the brute in him, because he had a sensual
ambition to rule, because his taste found pleasure in humiliating and
exploiting others, because he had a tougher conscience, and because
luck had been on his side. Of any essential, irradicable, structural
difference between race and race there was not an indication. What the
Asiatic really lacked was opportunity, not intellect; and liberty, not
character.
He came to these conclusions without haste, because his was a mind that
worked deliberately and over stretched-out periods of observation. He
has left a record of them: of the time when they caused him to believe
that the Malayan mind must really be better than the Caucasian; of his
final conviction that between mind and mind there is no racial
distinction with which reasoning men will bother themselves; that all
the children of mother earth under the same conditions will average
about the same results. In the end he came to discard the whole theory
of races; to his mind it was nothing but the manufacture of prejudice,
ignorance, or profit-mongering. Mankind he saw not separated by
perpendicular lines into races but by horizontal lines into strata.
[35] Everywhere some groups of men, favored by conditions, by liberty
first of all, by institutions, by opportunity, had climbed to higher
strata; everywhere other groups of men less fortunate as to conditions,
having less liberty, worse institutions, and narrower opportunity,
remained still in the lower strata. But everywhere it was, first of
all, conditions that determined whether men should climb or remain, and
not blood nor the color of skin nor the texture of hair.
It appears that he would make full allowance for individuals of unusual
gifts, for the Shakespeares and Hugos, Goethes and Voltaires. What he
was considering was men in the mass, not individuals. If we may judge
from his writings and the testimony of his friends he was singularly
free from vanity; certainly from the little vanities of self-seekers.
He could hardly have failed to perceive even then that he himself was
of the order of the exceptional; at the same time he saw plainly enough
that his own attainments were won by hard and systematic toil rather
than the rare blessings of the gods dropped into his lap. Still looking
upon men in the mass, he saw that to assign special qualities as
special inheritances out of the reach of other complexions was wrong in
science and foolish in practice. One race could not possibly inherit
the right to rule another; one race could not possibly be dearer than
another to the Omnipotence that he believed had created all.
Equality, then, was not a dream of enthusiasts, like those of France;
equality was the scientific fact. Liberty was not a rare chrism with
which were touched the lips of a few peoples set apart by their
complexions for this distinction; liberty was the indefeasible right of
all.
Manila, Philippine Islands, year 1876—this was. He found nothing in the
text-books put into his hands then that bred any of these ideas; above
all, there was nothing of the kind in the tuition he was receiving.
When he was a student at the Ateneo and later at the University of
Santo Tomas, the trend of thought there and elsewhere ran all the other
way. By his own mental processes he had worked out, when he was hardly
more than a boy, the theory to which gray-beard science was to come a
few years later. What he felt then the best schools teach now; a fact
that if there were nothing else would establish his precocity. But we
are to remember that he had formed early a habit of independent
thinking and had been stimulated to form it. This accounts for much.
Walls of convention that shut in upon and crushed the intellectual
machinery of so many other youths (there and elsewhere) had no terrors
for him; despite all weight of eminent authority he would at all times
and on all subjects think for himself. To be thus erect intellectually
in a university, even of these days and in these nations of ours
abreast with the front line of human advance, is still not so easy that
we fail to mark it if ever we find it. In his day, in his nation, then
intellectually dragged along at the moldering chariot-wheels of antique
formality, behold a marvel and no less.
This habitual attitude of mind was a great asset in his make-up—the
complete intellectual emancipation of the querist that will take
nothing for granted, but without bias or passion will investigate,
consider, weigh, seek, and decide. Being without feeling, it was
curiously counterpoised against another asset that was all feeling,
deep and real. His mind might climb into abstraction’s chilly heights;
his heart would be hot for Filipinas. He was an example of that
enlightened patriotism that has redeemed the word from its cheap and
reactionary definitions. It was no mere instinct of attachment to the
walls wherein he was born that moved him, the instinct that causes
goats to come home and cows to low when they are sold. He saw a people
of whom he was a member bowed under monstrous injustice, denied the
birthright of opportunity, slandered by oppressors, and contemned by a
world that took these slanderous inventions for a true coinage. In a
soul that worshiped justice and loved equity, he revolted against these
abominations, as it was certain he would have revolted against the same
wrongs practised against another people.
Not in the same degree; for at home the brand had been thrust deep into
him. He might not even have come, so far in advance of his time, upon
the modern theory of races if he had not started with a sense of
resentment against the suffering of his own. But when he had satisfied
himself of the truth of his theory, he naturally applied it to his own
people and felt more than ever the yoke that galled and hobbled them.
If the Filipino was not in fact made of different stuff from the marl
that made up the white man; if he was held in subjection not because he
was inferior in capacity but because he was shouldered out of his due
share of the world’s light and hope, again how much more terrible was
his plight! An aspiring soul, as fine and sure as any other, held as a
brother to the ox, Rizal began to perceive even in those early days
that the Filipinos were like a river that some great arbitrary force
had closed in and dammed back. He could see the water rising and hear
it struggling, and knew that some time it would break through the
barriers and run its due course. To his thinking, the real powers of
his people were latent, but of a kind the world would have to admit
when these powers should be set free. And what should set them free?
Education and political liberty.
It has become a habit among some writers and speakers to look upon
Rizal as a kind of superman, a creature of abnormal gifts, a brilliant
exception to the common endowment of the Filipino. Some have described
him as a bright, strange meteor flashing against a background of
Malayan incapacity. [36] As this narrative of a wonderful life unfolds
it will probably show that the man thus pedestaled was only human and
that the secret of his great works, enduring influence and pre-eminence
in so many walks was nothing mysterious but plainly understandable. He
had a twofold inspiration. First, he developed a habit of ceaseless
industry, carefully ordered, carefully followed. Second, and even
better than this, from his youth he had been overmastered, fired and
whirled along by a vision of his people redeemed. So then to their
redemption he consecrated his life. He did it in his closet, quietly,
without theatrics and without telling anybody. Macaulay’s theory that
every great man has something of the charlatan in him falls short in
this instance. For him the grand stand never existed. Whatever he did
was dedicated first in his heart to Filipinas; whatever he thought,
planned, dreamed, or hoped for had some reference to her and her
service, and now when he studied it was to fit himself to serve her
better.
We come back to him, knocking at the gate of Ateneo, eleven years old,
small for his age, and all a boy still; for we have shot far ahead of
that day to deal with the development of the ideas of which he was
slowly possessed. It was not with a head full of philosophy that he
made his application to the famous school, but, as he tells us in his
short notes on his life, a heart full of misgivings. The day was June
10, 1872, and he was to take his entrance examinations at the College
of San Juan de Letran, Manila. Christian doctrine, arithmetic, and
reading were the branches of human erudition required of youth that
sought to enter those doors. It is to be supposed that José could have
passed them with his eyes shut. He received the required mark and spent
the next few days at home. When he returned to Manila to begin his
studies at the Ateneo, “even then,” he says, “I felt that unhappiness
was in store for me.” [37]
For all his good passing-mark, he came near to miss the opening he
sought. Father Fernando, the Jesuit priest then in charge of the
Ateneo, looked upon him without favor. He had come late in the term,
for one thing; and then he was so small and slight. Only at the
intercession of Dr. Manuel Burgos, a nephew of the priest officially
murdered on Bagumbayan Field, the rules were relaxed and the midget
from Calamba allowed to come in. For the moment he forgot his
forebodings. With joy he put on the school uniform, the white coat
called an americana, the necktie, and the rest. When he found himself
in the chapel of the Jesuit fathers to hear mass, surrounded with
strange faces, a new boy in a new school, he prayed fervently. Then he
says he went to the class-room and appraised his teachers and
school-fellows, on whom he seems to have looked with preternaturally
keen eyes.
Father José Bech was a tall man, thin and somewhat stooping, but
quick in his movements. His face was ascetic, yet animated. The
eyes were small and sunken, the nose sharp and Grecian. His thin
lips curved downward. He was a little eccentric, at times being out
of humor and intolerant and at other times amusing himself by
playing like a child.
Some of my schoolmates were interesting enough to warrant
mentioning them by name. A boy, or rather a young man from my own
province, Florencio Gavino Oliva, was of exceptional talents but
only average application. The same was true of Moisés Santiago. He
was a mathematician and penman. Also it was true of Gonzalo
Manzano. The last named then held the position of Roman Emperor.
The title seems incongruous, but Rizal explains that to stimulate the
boys in Jesuit colleges the custom was to divide them into two
“empires,” one Roman, the other Carthaginian or Greek. These were
continually at war—academic. The battles fought were in the class-room,
over recitations. Points were scored by discovering errors in the work
of the hated foe. Rizal was placed at the bottom of the cohorts of one
of these “empires,” a private in the rear ranks. Within a month he was
emperor; he had outstripped everybody else.
Paciano was there that first day and took him in charge. He would not
allow the sensitive little artist to lodge in the Walled City or
ancient part of Manila, “which seemed very gloomy to me,” says Rizal, a
judgment others might echo. In another quarter of the town, twenty-five
minutes away, he was lodged with an old maid, who seemed to have a
superfluity of other lodgers and a scarcity of room to stow them in. “I
must not speak of my sufferings,” says José, with pious resignation.
[38]
The Ateneo was not an easy school in which to gain distinction or to
win favor; Rizal speedily achieved both. By the end of the first week
he was going up in his class. In a month he had captured his first
prize and seems to have looked upon it with rapture. At the end of the
first quarter he had won another prize and the grade of “excellent.” He
confesses that for the rest of that year he did not care to apply
himself. He had taken on a boyish resentment to something a teacher had
said, he explains. Possibly he was not yet inured to the prevailing
method of driving instruction into the heads of the young with the aid
of sarcasm and shouts. At the end of the year he says as if with a kind
of sigh, “I had only second place in all my subjects.” He received the
grade of “excellent” but no prizes, and the lack seems to have goaded
him to remorse.
It must have been efficacious, for when he returned to school he flung
himself with something like passion into the race for these laurels,
and it was said of him that no student there had ever equaled his
performance. The fathers began to look with wondering pride upon this
premier medal winner. For all that, he was a boy still and no mere
Johnny Dighard; he had fights and he read novels and he even found time
for social amenities, so called. At these latter he seems not to have
won distinction, though the records are meager; but at least it may be
said for him that he managed to fall in love. [39] One of the first
works of fiction he read was Dumas’s “Count of Monte Christo” in
Spanish. He says that it gave him “delight,” but it did more than that
for him. The wrongs and sufferings of Edmond Dantes bore in upon him
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.