“NOLI ME TANGERE”
The story is of a young Filipino, Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra, whose father
had wealth, was respected by the Spaniards, and wielded much influence
among his own people. Juan, still in his boyhood, is sent to a school
in Europe, that his education may be of the best. All prosperous
Filipinos hoped to send their sons, if they had any, on this quest for
the classical golden fleece. While Juan is gone his father becomes
involved in a dispute with the local friar magnate, the virtual
dictator of all the region about, as always; but this man brutal,
arrogant, revengeful, and lawless beyond the average of his peers. The
quarrel is about land; most quarrels with the friars had to do with
land or rents or fees or graft or some fancied lack of crawling
humility toward overblown pomp. As a rule the ill will of a friar meant
for the layman involuntary exile taken at utmost speed or a persecution
to the grave and without defense; it being part of the friars’ system
of government that of any person that dared to offend them a salutary
warning should be made. In the pursuit of this serviceable design, men
put to death for alleged sedition but really because they had fallen
out with the friars were sometimes quartered and hideous fragments of
their bodies nailed up in the towns, [72] as in Spain five hundred
years before.
Father Damaso is the friar that the elder Ibarra has offended. The
power of the System has been put forth. Ibarra, though innocent of any
crime, is arrested and thrust into prison, where he is kept without
examination or trial until he wilts away and dies, crying out the name
of his son. All ignorant of these events, Juan comes home; he knows his
father is dead, but he suspects nothing of foul play. Gradually the
truth is unfolded to him. He has returned full of hope for the Islands,
full of faith in their Government. Gradually he is disillusioned, as
one ugly development after another shows him the blight under which his
people drag out their lives.
Still he knows nothing against Father Damaso. That dark and scowling
figure he greets as his father’s friend.
The views of Island life, sharp, vivid, are like those of a
stereopticon or the wizard Zola. There is a native woman, Sisa, married
to a worthless dog of a husband who beats her, robs her, and gets
drunk. All her life centers in her two boys, Basilio and Crispin. They
earn a pittance each, working for the sacristan of a church in another
village, ringing the bells and cleaning the chancel. They are to come
home to-night, and Sisa has been preparing something to please them, a
supper with things they like to eat, earned by her hard work and
self-denial. She has bought some small fishes, picked the most
beautiful tomatoes in her little garden (for she knows how fond Crispin
is of tomatoes), and begged from a neighbor some slices of dried wild
boar’s meat and a leg of wild duck. To this she adds the whitest of
rice, which she herself has gleaned from the threshing-floors.
Then her worthless husband comes in and eats most of the boys’ supper.
Sisa says nothing, although she feels as if she herself were being
eaten. His hunger at last appeased, he remembers to ask for the boys.
Then Sisa smiles happily and resolves that she will not eat that night
because what remains is not enough for three. The father has asked for
his sons; for her that is better than a banquet.
The boys do not come, and the father goes away. At the church serious
trouble has fallen upon Basilio and Crispin. The curate has accused
Crispin of stealing and demands restitution; otherwise, the boy, says
the humane curate, will be beaten to death. That night while their
mother waits for them they are kept ringing the great bells in the
church tower, for a storm is raging and it is well known that the sound
of church-bells ringing keeps off the lightning. In the midst of this
employment, the sacristan suddenly appears, fines the boys for not
ringing in tune, renews the accusation of theft (which is quite
groundless), and drags Crispin off to punishment, locking Basilio in
the tower. He hears his brother’s cries for help dying out in the
distance. Then he climbs the belfry, unties the ropes from the bells,
ties them to the railing, lets himself out of a window to the ground,
and runs home. But Crispin never appears. He has been shot and killed
by a Civil Guard.
Two or three days later Civil Guards come to Sisa’s house and arrest
her for Crispin’s alleged theft. She is paraded through the streets as
a common malefactor and locked in the common jail. Basilio has crept to
the woods. Sisa begins to learn of Crispin’s fate. When she is released
from jail she has become insane.
She wanders about the country, living on alms and sleeping in the
woods. Basilio comes home to find her gone and starts in search of her.
When at last he comes in sight of her, she in her madness believes him
to be another enemy and flees. He runs after her and overtakes her in
time to hold her in his arms as she dies.
The story of Sisa is interwoven with the development of the story of
Ibarra.
Gradually the truth is unfolded to him, the legalized murder of his
father, the dishonor to his father’s ashes; for, buried in a cemetery,
the body of the elder Ibarra has been, at the friar’s orders,
disinterred [73] and cast into the lake. Still he does not quite
perceive what part Damaso has played in this nor understand that he
himself is pricked next upon the roll of death. Soon or late, he must
learn all. Then will devolve upon him the duty of vengeance. For
safety’s sake the friar plans to silence him betimes.
Meanwhile, the youth, in whom Rizal has typified the large generous
notions he himself once entertained of Utopia under the rule of Spain,
gives himself to projects for the elevation of his countrymen. He is
impressed with the darkness of ignorance around him, with the almost
comic futility of the educational system, which is no system at all.
Meeting an old schoolmaster, he discusses these conditions, and thus is
laid bare to us the means by which the native mind is kept in its
prison-house.
“How many pupils have you now?” asked Ibarra, with interest, after
a pause.
“More than two hundred on the roll, but only about twenty-five in
actual attendance.”
“How does that happen?”
... The schoolmaster shook his head sadly. “A poor teacher
struggles against not only prejudice but also against certain
influences. First, it would be necessary to have a suitable place
and not to do as I must do at present—hold the classes under the
convento by the side of the padre’s carriage. There the children,
who like to read aloud, very naturally disturb the padre, and he
often comes down, nervous, especially when he has his attacks,
yells at them, and even insults me. You know that one can neither
teach nor learn under such conditions....”
The curate is the same Father Damaso, the friar with whom Ibarra’s
father had quarreled. In his overbearing arrogance he has wantonly
insulted the poor schoolmaster, who goes on thus with his narrative:
“What was I to do with only my meager salary, to collect which I
have to get the curate’s approval and make a trip to the capital of
the province—what could I do against him, the foremost religious
and political power in the town, backed up by his order, feared by
the Government, rich, powerful, sought after and listened to,
always believed and heeded by everybody? Although he insulted me, I
had to remain silent, for if I had replied he would have had me
removed from my position, by which I should lose all hope in my
chosen profession. Nor would the cause of education gain anything,
but all to the contrary; for everybody would take the curate’s
side, they would curse me and call me presumptuous, proud, vain, a
bad Christian, uncultivated; and if not those things, then
‘anti-Spanish’ and ‘a filibuster.’ Of a schoolmaster neither
learning nor zeal is expected; only resignation, humility, and
inaction are demanded. May God pardon me if I have gone against my
conscience and my judgment, but I was born in this country, I have
to live, I have a mother; so I have abandoned myself to my fate
like a corpse tossed about by the waves.”
He has tried to abolish whipping in his school. “I endeavored to make
study a thing of love and joy, I wished to make the primer not a black
book bathed in the tears of childhood but a friend that was going to
reveal wonderful secrets; of the school-room not a place of sorrows but
a scene of intellectual refreshment. So, little by little, I abolished
corporal punishment, taking the instruments of it entirely away from
the school and replacing their stimulus with emulation and personal
pride.”
The innovation was regarded as sacrilege and heresy.
“The curate sent for me, and, fearing another scene, I greeted him
curtly in Tagalog. On this occasion he was very serious with me. He
said that I was exposing the children to destruction, that I was
wasting time, that I was not fulfilling my duties, that the father
who spared the rod was spoiling the child—according to the Holy
Ghost—that learning enters with the blood, [74] and so on. He
quoted to me sayings of barbarous times as if it were enough that a
thing had been said by the ancients to make it indisputable,
according to which we ought to believe that there really existed
those monsters which in past ages were imaged and sculptured in the
palaces and temples. Finally, he charged me to be more careful and
return to the old system, otherwise he would report me to the
alcalde of the province.”
So in despair he brought out the whips again, and sadness reigned in
the school where he had introduced happiness and work. The number of
his pupils was reduced to a fifth of the former attendance.
“So then I am now working to the end that the children become
changed into parrots and know by heart so many things of which they
do not understand a word.”
It is doubtless a perfect picture of education in the Philippines and
outlines the size of the task that Rizal had shouldered. [75]
“Let us not be so pessimistic,” said Ibarra.
He resolves to build and endow for the town a modern school-house. As
the time comes for the laying of the corner-stone, at which ceremony he
is to officiate, he receives a mysterious warning that an attempt will
be made upon his life. This he seemingly disregards; and yet, when he
must descend into the trench and stand beneath the corner-stone
suspended from the scaffold, he looks anxiously above him, watches the
apparatus, and is tense for a leap. There is a sound of cracking
timber; in an instant the great stone falls, but he has sprung aside
and saved his life.
At the dinner with which the day’s ceremonials are concluded, Padre
Damaso is a conspicuous guest. Not even yet is Ibarra, despite certain
intimations, aware that Damaso was his father’s remorseless enemy, that
the gloomy, vindictive friar had put forth the hidden powers of the
orders and dragged his father to death. But at the dinner Damaso, stung
with baffled hate because Ibarra has escaped the gin so cunningly
spread for his life, loses all self-control and utters against Ibarra’s
father an insult no son could be expected to endure. Ibarra springs at
his throat, knocks him down, and stands glowering over him. In the eyes
of the petrified spectators murder is about to be done, when Maria
Clara, Capitán Tiago’s reputed daughter, throws herself between the
infuriated youth and the prostrate friar.
Maria Clara is Ibarra’s sweetheart. She pleads with him with her eyes,
and he recovers enough self-command to take himself away.
But the assault upon the friar is his ruin. He has committed the
unpardonable sin, the blackest crime in the calendar: he has laid
“violent hand upon a friar, representative at once in his own person of
the might of the church and the majesty of the realm.” That day he is
excommunicated, a punishment that in the Philippines, nineteenth
century, retained all the poignancy it had in Darkest Europe, 1000 A.D.
He has become a moral leper.
Capitán Tiago breaks off the engagement with his daughter; in his view
the word of the friars is sacred, oracular, final. He is one of the
great portraits of the book, this Capitán Tiago; a typical Filipino of
the class that bent assiduously at the feet of power. The drawing is
like many a sketch in Rizal’s note-books, a piece of startling realism.
Tiago is a living, talking, sputtering, foolish thing of flesh and
blood that we see and hear. Even though we have never seen another
being of his kind anywhere, we see him in this picture-making. He is
vain, pretentious, fearful, abjectly superstitious, filled with strange
notions about the influences of graven images and the grandeur of
Spain; a Filipino perverted by some wealth, the allurements of a social
ambition, and an education grotesquely awry. Against the ills of the
flesh and the chances of loss in the cockpit, he has recourse to the
same arcana: so many candles burned before this shrine or that, so many
bombs to be exploded at a fiesta, or so many masses bought at current
rates. In all things, to cultivate the favor of the friars is the
boundary of his more earthly philosophy. Ibarra, rich and eminent,
newly returned from Spain with the gloss of a European education fresh
upon him, is in his eyes a delectable son-in-law. Ibarra under the ban
of the friars is an object of horror.
The affection between Ibarra and Maria Clara has the welcome fragrance
of purity and exaltation in the midst of these miasmas. They had been
playmates in childhood, they had grown up together, they had really
plighted their troth when Ibarra went to Europe. He had been
chivalrously true to her in all his seven years of travel. He has come
back to her sure of her love and looking forward to an early marriage.
Upon all such dreams Tiago sets his foot; he not only forbids any
further communication with Ibarra, but he favors another lover, one
Linares, a feeble-willed young Spaniard brought forward with suspicious
haste by Father Damaso. With this candidate, against the vehement
protests of Maria Clara, an engagement is quickly made.
Meantime, the governor-general comes to the town and hears about the
troubles of Ibarra, whose father he had known and admired. The
governor-general is a type of many that Spain sent to the Philippines,
excellent in purpose, well aware of the malignant fever of friarism,
resolved to withstand it, and invariably finding his good resolutions
crumbling under him. Yet, in this instance, he will save if he can the
son of his old friend from the clutches of the modern Inquisition.
Between the friars and the archbishops of Manila is a smoldering feud,
for the archbishop is usually chosen outside of the four orders. The
governor-general nudges the archbishop; the archbishop cancels the
excommunication; and Ibarra, escaped from this damnation, is doomed by
the friars to another still worse.
With Tiago the lifting of the ban upon Ibarra makes no difference; he
is still anathema to the all-powerful orders. The campaign for Linares
and against Ibarra is waged vigorously with the aid of many candles on
many shrines and the promises of many bombs. At fiestas, it should be
explained, the custom was to burn great quantities of fireworks by day
and night; and the piety of the devout, as expressed in squibs,
crackers, rockets, pin-wheels, and bombs, was supposed to insure their
salvation. In this form of divine worship, the friars had a commercial
interest; it may be believed that if a doubt of its perfect efficacy
occurred to them they managed to master it.
Under the Spanish social system, Philippine maidens of all complexions
married whomsoever their parents told them to marry and silenced their
objections, if they had any; hence, in the Tiago household the
preparations for the marriage of Maria Clara and the half-witted
Linares are urged with a sweet confidence. Maria Clara herself
contributes the only flaw in these proceedings. She falls desperately
ill.
News of her condition is brought to Ibarra by the person in the book
called “the Pilot Elias,” who is one of the pivots on which the
narrative turns. It was Elias that warned Ibarra of the plot to crush
out his life with the corner-stone. In a picnic fishing expedition
Ibarra had saved Elias from the jaws of a cayman (crocodile) and Elias
had sworn his gratitude. He is evidently much above his caste, which is
that of a boatman; he has had an education. In and out of the story he
flits mysteriously until his true vocation is revealed; he is a man
with a history, a victim of the prevailing despotism, forced by his
sufferings to ponder the ills of his people and become at last a
secret, restless, wary, and intelligent agitator against the System of
his day.
It is through him that Rizal voices his protests. As the plot unfolds,
Ibarra wins Elias’ story. We shall repeat it here, but with a preface
of warning. In these times, the average reader, the more if he is an
American, will look upon the tale as a wild extravagance, so easily are
the conditions of one generation obliterated in the next, and so
difficult is it to believe the life of one country is not like the life
of all countries. Yet what Elias is fabled here to have told Ibarra
might have been taken with changes of names from veritable records.
Exactly these things happened in the Philippine Islands in the
nineteenth century, even in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
They happened in many regions and to many persons. Still worse things
happened, if worse can be conceived; for lust and greed and reversion
ran savage riot under two conditions that have always been hothouses
for such growths: autocracy, and distance from the world’s observation.
ELIAS’ STORY
“Some sixty years ago my grandfather dwelt in Manila, being
employed as a bookkeeper in a Spanish commercial house. He was then
very young, was married, and had a son. One night, from some
unknown cause, the warehouse burned down. The fire was communicated
to the dwelling of his employer and from there to many other
buildings. The losses were great, a scapegoat was sought, and the
merchant accused my grandfather. In vain he protested his
innocence, but he was poor and unable to pay the great lawyers; so
he was condemned to be flogged publicly and paraded through the
streets of Manila. Not so very long since they still used the
infamous method of punishment which the people call ‘caballo y
vaca,’ and which is a thousand times more dreadful than death
itself. Abandoned by all except his young wife, my grandfather saw
himself tied to a horse, followed by an unfeeling crowd, and
whipped on every street-corner in the sight of men, his brothers,
and in the neighborhood of numerous temples of a God of peace. When
the wretch, now for ever disgraced, had satisfied the vengeance of
man with his blood, his tortures, and his cries, he had to be taken
off the horse, for he had become unconscious. Would to God that he
had died! But by one of those refinements of cruelty he was given
his liberty. His wife, pregnant at the time, vainly begged from
door to door for work or alms in order to care for her sick husband
and their poor son, but who would trust the wife of an incendiary
and a disgraced man? The wife, then, had to become a prostitute!”
Ibarra rose in his seat.
“Oh, don’t get excited! Prostitution was not now a dishonor for her
or a disgrace to her husband; for them honor and shame no longer
existed. The husband recovered from his wounds and came with his
wife and child to hide himself in the mountains of this province.
Here they lived several months, miserable, alone, hated and shunned
by all. The wife gave birth to a sickly child, which fortunately
died. Unable to endure such misery and being less courageous than
his wife, my grandfather, in despair at seeing his sick wife
deprived of all care and assistance, hanged himself. His corpse
rotted in sight of the son, who was scarcely able to care for his
sick mother, and the stench from it led to their discovery. Her
husband’s death was attributed to her, for of what is the wife of a
wretch, a woman who has been a prostitute besides, not believed to
be capable? If she swears, they call her a perjurer; if she weeps,
they say she is acting; and that she blasphemes when she calls on
God. Nevertheless, they had pity on her condition and waited for
the birth of another child before they flogged her. You know how
the friars spread the belief that the Indians can only be managed
by blows: read what Padre Gaspar de San Agustin says!
“A woman thus condemned will curse the day on which her child is
born, and this, besides prolonging her torture, violates every
maternal sentiment. Unfortunately, she brought forth a healthy
child. Two months afterward, the sentence was executed to the great
satisfaction of the men who thought that thus they were performing
their duty. Not being at peace in these mountains, she then fled
with her two sons to a neighboring province, where they lived like
wild beasts, hating and hated. The elder of the two boys still
remembered, even amid so much misery, the happiness of his infancy,
so he became a tulisan as soon as he found himself strong enough.
Before long the bloody name of Bâlat spread from province to
province, a terror to the people, because in his revenge he did
everything with blood and fire. The younger, who was by nature
kind-hearted, resigned himself to his shameful fate along with his
mother, and they lived on what the woods afforded, clothing
themselves in the cast-off rags of travelers. She had lost her
name, being known only as the convict, the prostitute, the
scourged. He was known as the son of his mother only, because the
gentleness of his disposition led every one to believe that he was
not the son of the incendiary and because any doubt as to the
morality of the Indios can be held reasonable.
“At last, one day the notorious Bâlat fell into the clutches of the
authorities, who exacted of him a strict accounting for his crimes,
and of his mother for having done nothing to rear him properly. One
morning the younger brother went to look for his mother, who had
gone into the woods to gather mushrooms and had not returned. He
found her stretched out on the ground under a cotton-wood tree
beside the highway, her face turned toward the sky, her eyes fixed
and staring, her clenched hands buried in the blood-stained earth.
Some impulse moved him to look up in the direction toward which the
eyes of the dead woman were staring, and he saw hanging from a
branch a basket and in the basket the gory head of his brother!”
“My God!” ejaculated Ibarra.
“That might have been the exclamation of my father,” continued
Elias coldly. “The body of the brigand had been cut up and the
trunk buried, but his limbs were distributed and hung up in
different towns. If ever you go from Calamba to Santo Tomas you
will still see a withered lomboy-tree where one of my uncle’s legs
hung rotting—nature has blasted the tree so that it no longer grows
or bears fruit. The same was done with the other limbs, but the
head, as the best part of the person and the portion most easily
recognizable, was hung up in front of his mother’s hut!”
Ibarra bowed his head.
“The boy fled like one accursed,” Elias went on. “He fled from town
to town by mountain and valley. When he thought that he had reached
a place where he was not known, he hired himself out as a laborer
in the house of a rich man in the province of Tayabas. His activity
and the gentleness of his character gained him the good will of all
that did not know his past, and by his thrift and economy he
succeeded in accumulating a little capital. He was still young, he
thought his sorrows buried in the past, and he dreamed of a happy
future. His pleasant appearance, his youth, and his somewhat
unfortunate condition won him the love of a young woman of the
town, but he dared not ask for her hand from fear that his past
might become known. But love is stronger than anything else, and
they wandered from the straight path; so, to save the woman’s
honor, he risked everything by asking her in marriage. The records
were sought, and his whole past became known. The girl’s father was
rich and succeeded in having him prosecuted. He did not try to
defend himself but admitted everything, and so was sent to prison.
The woman gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, who were nurtured
in secret and made to believe that their father was dead—no
difficult matter, since at a tender age they saw their mother die,
and they gave little thought to tracing genealogies. As our
maternal grandfather was rich our childhood passed happily. My
sister and I were brought up together, loving one another as only
twins can love when they have no other affections. When quite young
I was sent to study in the Jesuit College; and my sister, in order
that we might not be completely separated, entered the Concordia
College. After our brief education was finished, since we desired
only to be farmers, we returned to the town to take possession of
the inheritance left us by our grandfather. We lived happily for a
time, the future smiled on us, we had many servants, our fields
produced abundant harvests, and my sister was about to be married
to a young man whom she adored and who responded equally to her
affection.
“But in a dispute over money and by reason of my haughty
disposition at that time, I alienated the good will of a distant
relative, and one day he cast in my face my doubtful birth and
shameful descent. I thought it all a slander and demanded
satisfaction. The tomb which covered so much rottenness was again
opened, and to my consternation the whole truth came out to
overwhelm me. To add to our sorrow, we had had for many years an
old servant who had endured all my whims without ever leaving us,
contenting himself merely with weeping and groaning at the rough
jests of the other servants. I don’t know how my relative had found
it out, but the fact is that he had this old man summoned into
court and made him tell the truth—that old servant, who had clung
to his beloved children, and whom I had abused many times, was my
father! Our happiness faded away, I gave up our fortune, my sister
lost her betrothed, and with our father we left the town to seek
refuge elsewhere. The thought that he had contributed to our
misfortunes shortened the old man’s days, but before he died I
learned from his lips the whole story of the sorrowful past.
“My sister and I were left alone. She wept a great deal, but, even
in the midst of such great sorrows as heaped themselves upon us,
she could not forget her love. Without complaining, without
uttering a word, she saw her former sweetheart married to another
girl; but I watched her gradually sicken without being able to
console her. One day she disappeared and it was in vain that I
sought everywhere, in vain I made inquiries about her. About six
months afterward I learned that about that time, after a flood on
the lake, there had been found in some rice-fields bordering on the
beach at Calamba the corpse of a young woman who had been either
drowned or murdered, for she had had, so they said, a knife
sticking in her breast. The officials of that town published the
fact in the country round about; but no one came to claim the body,
no young woman apparently had disappeared. From the description
they gave me afterward of her dress, her ornaments, the beauty of
her countenance, and her abundant hair, I recognized in her my poor
sister.
“Since then I have wandered from province to province. My
reputation and my history are in the mouths of many. They attribute
great deeds to me, sometimes calumniating me, but I pay little
attention to men, keeping ever on my way. Such in brief is my
story, a story of one of the judgments of men.”
Elias fell silent as he rowed along.
“I still believe that you are not wrong,” murmured Crisóstomo
[Ibarra] in a low voice, “when you say that justice should seek to
do good by rewarding virtue and educating the criminals. Only, it’s
impossible, Utopian! And where could be secured so much money, so
many new employees?”
“For what, then, are the priests who proclaim their mission of
peace and charity? Is it more meritorious to moisten the head of a
child with water, to give it salt to eat, than to awake in the
benighted conscience of a criminal that spark which God has granted
to every man to light him to his welfare? Is it more humane to
accompany a criminal to the scaffold than to lead him along the
difficult path from vice to virtue? Don’t they also pay spies,
executioners, Civil-Guards? These things, besides being dirty, also
cost money.”
“My friend, neither you nor I, although we may wish it, can
accomplish this.”
“Alone, it is true, we are nothing, but take up the cause of the
people, unite yourself with the people, be not heedless of their
cries, set an example to the rest, spread the idea of what is
called a fatherland!”
“What the people ask for is impossible. We must wait.”
“Wait! To wait means to suffer!”
“If I should ask for it, the powers that be would laugh at me.”
Elias desires Ibarra to put himself at the head of the people and
secure their emancipation from these horrors. Ibarra draws back; all
the instincts of his class and the prejudices of his education are
against anything of that kind.
“But if the people support you?” said Elias.
“Never! I will never be the one to lead the multitude to get by
force what the Government does not think proper to grant, no! If I
should ever see the multitude armed I would place myself on the
side of the Government, for in such a mob I should not see my
countrymen. I desire the country’s welfare; therefore I would build
a school-house. I seek it by means of instruction, by progressive
advancement; without light there is no road.”
“Neither is there liberty without strife!” answered Elias.
“The fact is that I don’t want that liberty!”
“The fact is that without liberty there is no light,” replied the
pilot with warmth.
It is like a conversation in Rizal’s own heart between the spirit of
the college and the spirit of his country. Into it, beyond a doubt, he
put the conflict that was torturing his soul. The spirit of love and
good will in him grappling like Jacob with the soul that told him that
from oppressions by violence could come only revolt by violence.
It may be profitable to follow this farther. It is a page of Rizal’s
own revealing always overlooked by those that insist he was opposed to
Philippine independence.
“You may say [the pilot goes on] that you are only slightly
acquainted with your country, and I believe you. You don’t see the
struggle that is preparing; you don’t see the cloud on the horizon.
The fight is beginning in the sphere of ideas, to descend later
into the arena, which will be dyed with blood. I hear the voice of
God—woe unto them who would oppose it! For them history has not
been written!”
No one can believe Rizal wrote this without feeling it in his heart and
soul.
Elias was transfigured; standing uncovered, with his manly face
illuminated by the moon, there was something extraordinary about
him. He shook his long hair and went on:
“Don’t you see how everything is awakening? The sleep has lasted
for centuries, but one day the thunderbolt struck, and, in
striking, infused life.”
He means the slaying of the guiltless priests, Fathers Burgos, Gomez,
and Zamora, victims to the homicidal mania that descended upon the
Government after the revolt of 1872.
“Since then [the pilot continues] new tendencies are stirring our
spirits, and these tendencies, to-day scattered, will some day be
united, guided by the God who has not failed other peoples, and who
will not fail us, for his cause is the cause of liberty!” [76]
The trap the friars have prepared for Ibarra is a thing infamous in
Philippine history, and yet so common that in fact and not in fiction
it has sent scores of innocent men to their deaths. It had never been
known to fail. Agents provocateurs stage a pretended revolt. Nothing is
easier; the materials are always to hand; likewise the occasion. It is
but necessary to take the latest outrage by the Civil Guard and stir
some one to object to it. The rest follows automatically. In this
instance Ibarra is the pretended instigator, although he has never
heard of the wrong he is supposed to resent.
Elias warns him of what is afoot and urges him to escape; innocent as
he is, he shall have no chance for his life before the tribunal that
will try him if he waits for arrest. He will not go until he has had
word with Maria Clara. The last scene between them is excellent drama;
he gets under her window in a boat and climbs up the vines. For the
charge of complicity in the stage rebellion is no basis except a letter
that seven years before he had written to her. Some phrases that might
be construed to suggest a vague discontent with conditions in the
Philippines make up the entire case. On slighter evidence many a man
has been tortured first and gone next to the Golgotha at Bagumbayan
Field. The friars have this letter. How did they get it when for so
many years it had been one of the dearest possessions of Maria Clara?
Ibarra can surmise only that she has willingly surrendered it and so
betrayed him. In that last interview he learns that it was filched from
her by the friar Silva, whose interest in her has been more than
ecclesiastical and who on the same occasion has disclosed to her the
facts as to her own parentage.
She is not the daughter of Capitán Tiago but of Father Damaso—an
illegitimate daughter.
Satisfied that she is innocent, Ibarra now consents to escape from his
foes. Elias, the pilot, who has so often befriended him, is waiting
below in the banca. They row up the Pasig River. When they approach a
soldier, Ibarra hides himself in the bottom of the boat under the
freight. At last the Civil Guards are in pursuit. Elias tries to escape
by hard rowing. The Guards begin to fire. Elias slips overboard. Taking
him for Ibarra, the Guards follow in their banca, firing constantly.
The hunted man is seen to sink. When the Guards come up they think they
see blood. They take the news back to Manila that Ibarra, the desperate
revolutionist, trying to escape, has been shot and killed. At the word
Maria Clara gives up all earthly hope and flees to a nunnery.