“EL FILIBUSTERISMO”
For Spanish or Filipino ears, “filibuster” has nothing of the comic or
disreputable suggestion that it bears to the American. In the
Philippines of Rizal’s day it denoted a person opposed to the existing
régime, an insurgent, whether advocating peaceful or violent means of
separation from Spain. “El Filibusterismo” means a movement for
Philippine independence.
In this novel again, the chief figure is Ibarra, the hero of “Noli Me
Tangere.” It was Elias, not Ibarra, that was struck with the bullets of
the Civil Guards when they were pursuing his banca; Ibarra escaped
unhurt. He made his way out of the country and now returns after some
years, disguised and under an assumed name, to seek the revenge upon
which all this time his heart has been brooding. The difference between
the Ibarra that refused Elias’ prayer to lead the people and this
Ibarra become now hopeless of any peaceful remedy betrays once more the
change we have already noted as coming over Rizal’s most cherished
convictions and in spite of himself. A struggle was going on between
what he still wished to believe and what his judgment told him was
inevitable, and in the conflict he grew in hardihood. From the savage
vengeance that pursued his sisters, brothers, father, and mother when
it had failed to reach him, he was beginning to learn how idle was the
hope to win reform by merely ladylike appeals. Yet the book was not of
purpose any signal to popular revolt. What he intended was solemn
warning. So far the Filipino has stood and asked for justice, still
patient, still holding out the friendly hand. Wronged hearts will not
always accept scurvy affronts; men will not always put up with kicks
when they ask fair play. This Filipino whom you despise and trample on
nineteen years in twenty and who, in the twentieth, throws you into a
panic, is not the human dish-cloth you are pleased now to imagine him.
He has in him the capacity for a great and memorable revenge, and upon
your heads he will pull down your structure if you do not hear him.
Other characters of the first book reappear in this. Father Salvi, the
lascivious friar whose machinations brought about Ibarra’s downfall;
Capitán Tiago, Doña Victorina, and Basilio, the son of Sisa. Ibarra
calls himself Mr. Simoun. His pretended business is that of a traveling
merchant of jewelry and laces; his real occupation is to spy out the
land, to lay plots against the governing class that ruined him, and, if
possible, to release Maria Clara from her convent prison. The narrative
is chiefly concerned with these plots and their failure; but behind
them always seems to show a grim figure telling Government that such
plots will not always fail.
The book starts with a gibe at the people with whose tardiness to
respond to progressive ideas Rizal was becoming impatient.
One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending
the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of
passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily
built steamer, almost round, like the taboo from which she derived
her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretentious whiteness,
majestic and grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was
held in great affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog
name, or from the fact that she bore the characteristic impress of
things in the country, representing something like a triumph over
progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism,
stolid, imperfect, yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose
as being rankly progressive, proudly contented itself with putting
on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely
Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might
have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as she had
been, under the inspection of Reverendos and Ilustrísimos.
As before, Rizal uses with photographic accuracy the materials of
Philippine life that had passed under his own observation. The
wanderings of Simoun the jeweler give him the needed occasions; he
hangs upon them startling pictures of actual conditions, the power of
the friars, the brutality and cowardice of the governing class, the
terrible wrongs of the people; even the story of Maria Clara’s
parentage he had from an incident in his own neighborhood. Poverty,
chastity, [149] and obedience were the oath of the degenerate
successors to a noble race of Christianity’s pioneers. How lightly they
regarded the second item in this creed he had shown in “Noli Me
Tangere.” As to poverty, their corporations had become the wealthiest
institutions in the Islands. He is now about to show how they had
obtained the wealth that made their power supreme and pervasive.
Tandang Selo is a native wood-cutter that by industry and self-denial
has saved a little money. He has a son, Tales, industrious and thrifty
like himself. Tales works for a rich landowner and saves enough to buy
two carabaos, to marry, and to accumulate a capital of several hundred
pesos. He has ambition; he wishes to rise in the world. There is the
jungle, unclaimed, untilled, but fertile. With his father, his wife,
and children he goes into it, clears away the forest, and makes
tillable fields.
To cut for the first time the jungle turf is supposed to release a
dangerous malaria. Of this, Tales’s wife and eldest child fall ill and
die. The others continue to plant and to cultivate.
As they begin to harvest the first crop, an agent of the friars
appears, notifies them that the land belongs to one of the orders, and
levies on the crop for the rent.
Tales has every reason to believe that the claim is fraudulent, but he
is only an Indio; the courts are organized against him and his people,
and he pays tribute rather than risk a lawsuit.
The next year the crops are good and the friars double the rent.
Nevertheless the family works hard and saves a little money. The desire
of the father’s heart is to send his eldest daughter, Juli, to school
in Manila. Next year the rent is again increased, and the hope of
education begins to fail.
When the rent has risen from thirty to two hundred pesos, Tales refuses
to pay the latest increase. Then the friars’ agent tells him to prepare
to be evicted, for another tenant will come and till the fields Tales
has won from the jungle.
Tales applies to the courts for relief and is at once despoiled of his
savings to pay the fees; likewise to satisfy the cormorants that batten
upon every court proceeding.
The farm is exposed to the raids of the tulisanes, or robbers. The
invisible government has energy enough to play eavesdropper upon its
own people, but makes scarcely an effort to restrain the banditti that
hover in all the forests and often descend upon the towns, even large
towns.
To protect his fields from these vultures, Tales patrols them with a
shot-gun and so terrifies the friars’ agents and the new tenant that
the benevolent intention of turning him into the road must be abandoned
until the lawsuit shall be decided.
Under the code his case is unassailable. Even by their own charter the
friars cannot own land. The judges know that this is so, but one of
their number loses his place for giving a decision in favor of a
native; the rest have no desire to share his fate and so to go back to
Spain humiliated as well as impoverished. They advise Tales to
surrender and pay what is demanded of him. The fighting blood of the
Malay is up within him: he stands in his place and demands that the
friars produce some evidence of ownership—title-deeds, documents,
papers, anything. None of these have the friars to show; their claim
here, as so often in such cases, rests upon the tradition of a
concession. Nowhere else would such a plea, unsupported and
unwitnessed, be seriously considered in a court of justice. In the
Philippines it outweighs everything else, and the judges decide in
favor of the friars.
Tales with his gun continues to patrol his land. The friars obtain a
decree from the governor-general ordering all arms to be surrendered,
and so they take away the shot-gun. Tales patrols his fields with a
bolo.
The bolo is taken from him on the pretext that it is too long and
therefore comes within the prohibition of the decree about arms. Tales
patrols his fields with an ax.
Then the tulisanes come and capture him and hold him for five hundred
pesos ransom.
To get the money, Juli sells herself into slavery in the neighboring
town. It is not called by that name, her servitude; but that is what it
amounts to.
She is engaged to a young man whom she dearly loves. The sale of
herself is likely to end her chance of marriage.
With the money so raised, her father is ransomed. He comes home to find
the friars’ agent and the new tenant walking over the fields that with
so much labor the Tales family has cleared.
Tales steals a revolver and joins the tulisanes. That night the friars’
agent and the new tenant and the new tenant’s wife are murdered. [150]
The substance of this story, as you perceive, is taken from the
experiences of the tenants of Calamba, among them Rizal’s own folk.
There is terrible irony in a description of how the governor-general
governs; how he transacts business and promotes the welfare of the
Islands. He has been on a hunting expedition in which he has shot
nothing and returns ill tempered to Los Baños, where he has his bath,
drinks his cocoanut milk, and sits down to a game of cards with three
friars. From this reasonable occupation his chief secretary tries to
divert his attention to matters of public business. This annoys the
governor-general.
“The petition about sporting arms,” suggests the secretary.
“Forbidden!” says the governor-general and goes on playing. The
secretary tries to intimate that this is not wise. He only arouses the
wrath of the executive.
The schoolmaster at Tiani has petitioned for a better location for his
school. The old store-room he is using has no roof: he has bought with
his own funds books and pictures, and he wishes them not to be ruined.
“I’ve heard several complaints against this schoolmaster,” says his
Excellency. “I think the best thing would be to suspend him.”
“Suspended!” [151] says the secretary.
“In the future,” says the governor-general, “all that complain will be
suspended.”
The well known fact is developed that there are not nearly enough
school-houses. Somebody suggests that the cockpits might be used for
schools when not needed for the more exalted purpose to which they are
dedicated. Horror meets the proposal to interfere, for the sake of mere
education, with reasonable sport and with the Government’s revenue.
It is probably the worst Government in the world.
At the end of the card game the secretary whispers to his Excellency
that that woman is around again, the daughter of Cabesang Tales, with
her petition. When Tales fled to the tulisanes the authorities, true to
form, arrested his aged father in his stead and now hold him in prison.
His Excellency looked at him with an expression of impatience and
rubbed his hand across his broad forehead. “Carambas! Can’t one be
left to eat one’s breakfast in peace?”
“This is the third day she has come. She’s a poor girl——”
The governor-general scratched the back of his ear and said, “Oh,
go along! Have the secretary make out an order to the lieutenant of
the Civil Guard for the old man’s release. They sha’n’t say that
we’re not clement and merciful.”
He looked at Ben-Zayb. The journalist winked. [152]
You can see that it is cartoon-making with a vengeance. The mirth is
savage. It gives one the shivers. This man taught the methods of peace
and rejected every suggestion that reform could be won by physical
violence. Yet the way he was walking is clear. In ten years if he had
kept on he would himself have been leading an insurrection. It has
always been so; in the cloister the sweet gentle spirit dreaming of
oppression overcome by reason, and in the streets rude weapons beating
off the shackles.
As Simoun the jeweler, Ibarra brings dramatic vengeance upon the head
of Father Salvi. In Manila is an American prestidigitator who is
exhibiting the trick known as the talking head. In this instance the
head is supposed to be that of an ancient Egyptian. In the midst of
gruesome settings to enhance the effect, it tells to an audience in
which Salvi is seated the story of Maria Clara, disguised as an event
of four thousand years ago. Salvi, conscience-stricken, falls in a fit.
[153]
Simoun’s purpose from the beginning has been to excite the people to an
uprising by which he hopes to win his revenge on friars and Government
alike and to free Maria Clara from the nunnery where she has been
virtually a prisoner since Ibarra’s arrest, as told in “Noli Me
Tangere.” The actual situation in the Islands is illuminated by
picturing Simoun as telling some persons that the insurrection is
desired by the governor-general to free himself from the friars, and
telling others that the friars are planning it to rid themselves of the
governor-general. In the chaos through which the social order was
drifting, either story was plausible. Simoun in his ceaseless
intriguing has manœuvered within his power Quiroga, an influential
Chinaman, also a type in those days, who has secret and unseemly
dealings with the Government. Through this connection Simoun is able to
have his rifles passed through the custom-house as some of Quiroga’s
illicit importations. He spreads his nets and lays his plans, tutors
his accomplices, distributes his arms, and when all is ready for his
explosion he is stunned with the news that so far as Maria Clara is
concerned it is too late. She is dead in the convent.
There are two other love-stories in the book, both unhappy, both
reflexes of Rizal’s own great unhappiness.
One is of Basilio and Juli. Basilio is the son of Sisa, the native
woman in “Noli Me Tangere,” driven insane by misfortunes and
persecutions; Juli is the daughter of Cabesang Tales, driven into
brigandage by the exactions of the friars.
So slight a thing as a frolic of students brings Basilio and Juli to
their tragedy. Some of the students have a supper. It is innocent and
insignificant, but the spies watch it. That night pasquinades are
pasted upon the doors of the university, pasquinades that the nervous
authorities deem seditious. To overwrought minds the bad verses and
cheap jocularity of these compositions indicate that the treason must
be connected with the students’ supper. Therefore, arrest all the
students. The order includes Basilio, who had not attended the fiesta,
and whose rooms when searched yield nothing but text-books on medicine.
In the rural region where Juli is living, terrible reports are current
as to the fate of these students. At one moment they are condemned to
be shot; at another the sentence has already been carried out. Then
comes news that with the help of influential and wealthy relatives they
hope to escape the death-penalty; all except Basilio, who has no
wealthy friends nor influence of any kind.
There is in the town where Juli lives a friar, Father Camorra, of great
power in the Government. An old woman urges Juli to go to the convento
[154] and beg the intercession of Father Camorra. A word from him will
be enough to save Basilio’s life. Juli knows well enough what is the
real nature of the sacrifice demanded of her; so many a Filipino girl
has walked or been dragged along that road to destruction. The reports
about the students grow worse. At last it appears that Basilio has been
condemned to death and in twenty-four hours will stand before the
firing-squad. Not a hope remains except through the intercession of
Father Camorra. The old woman beseeches; still Juli refuses. At last
she is forced to the door of the convento. That night a woman,
screaming wildly, throws herself from an upper window of the house.
When help comes to her she is dead. The body is recognized as that of
Juli. [155]
Basilio escapes the executioner. When he learns of the fate of Juli he
joins Simoun, the disguised Ibarra, who has tried in vain to interest
him in the plans for a revolution.
The other story concerns Isagani, type of the educated and ambitious
young Filipino, and Paulita, type of the exquisite native beauty.
Isagani is deeply in love. Nevertheless, he puts fidelity to his
country above even the idol of his heart. He is a leader among the
discontented students. They do not think of sedition but only of
reforms peacefully achieved, the Rizal idea of progress. An opportunity
arising, Isagani speaks with the greatest frankness to Father
Fernandez, a Dominican friar, and one of the instructors at the
university. Their conversation gives the author a chance to expose the
defects in the system of higher education—so called. He does more than
expose it; he blasts and withers it. [156] Isagani never hesitates to
speak his opinions about these things, though always professing perfect
loyalty. He is arrested with the other students in the dog-day fit that
has seized upon the authorities. At the news the relatives of Paulita
insist that she shall cast over a lover so notorious and so dangerous.
It is Rizal and Leonora again. Paulita yields to them; she allows
herself to be engaged to Isagani’s rival and the date is fixed for her
wedding. It is the date that Simoun selects for the consummation of his
plot. Basilio agrees to help him.
Paulita’s relatives are rich; they have invited the most eminent
persons in the colony, including the governor-general himself. Simoun,
the wealthy jeweler, will be there. He has arranged with bands of
tulisanes and certain discontented peasants to gather on that date to
attack the city. An explosion like the firing of a cannon is to be
their signal.
The guests come bearing or sending beautiful gifts. Simoun presents a
lamp of strange and beautiful design—burning. In it is a charge of
dynamite sufficient to blow up the house and all in it. This will
furnish the signal for the attack. He has told this to Basilio. Outside
the house of festival, Isagani lingers, hoping to catch one farewell
glimpse of the sweetheart he has lost. Basilio sees him and tries to
lead him away before the explosion. Isagani refuses to move. In despair
Basilio tells him what is afoot about the lamp. Isagani, overwhelmed
with horror at the thought that the woman he loves is about to perish,
runs into the house, seizes the lighted lamp, throws it into the river,
and follows it there before any one has a chance to stop him. [157]
Great excitement follows, in which something of the plot is revealed;
and Simoun is unmasked, but not until he has had a chance to escape. He
is pursued and wounded. He dies in the house of a Filipino family where
he has found refuge. On his death-bed he confesses to a priest his real
name and story. [158]
“God will forgive you, Señor Simoun,” says the priest. “He knows that
we are fallible. He has seen that you have suffered, and in ordaining
that the chastisement of your faults should come as death from the very
ones you have instigated to crime, we can see His infinite mercy. He
has frustrated your plans one by one, the best conceived, first by the
death of Maria Clara, then by a lack of preparation, then in some
mysterious way. Let us bow to His will and render Him thanks!”
“According to you, then,” feebly responded the sick man, “His will
is that these Islands——”
“Should continue in the condition in which they suffer?” continued
the priest, seeing that the other hesitated. “I don’t know, sir, I
can’t read the thought of the Inscrutable. I know that he has not
abandoned those peoples who in their supreme moments have trusted
in Him and made Him the judge of their cause. I know His arm has
never failed when, justice long trampled upon and every recourse
gone, the oppressed have taken up the sword to fight for home and
wife and children, for their inalienable rights, which, as the
German poet says, shine ever there above, unextinguished and
inextinguishable, like the eternal stars themselves. No, God is
justice; He cannot abandon His cause, the cause of liberty, without
which no justice is possible.”
Nothing could be plainer: Rizal is enforcing with a final warning the
lesson of his book.
“Why, then, has He denied me His aid?” asked the sick man in a
voice charged with bitter complaint.
“Because you chose means that He could not sanction,” was the
severe reply. “The glory of saving a country is not for him that
has contributed to its ruin. You have believed that what crime and
iniquity have defiled and deformed another crime and another
iniquity can purify and redeem. Wrong! Hate never produces anything
but monsters; crime never produces anything but criminals. Love
alone realizes wonderful works; virtue alone can save! No, if our
country is ever to be free it will not be through vice and crime;
it will not be so by corrupting its sons, deceiving some and
bribing others; no! Redemption presupposes virtue, virtue
sacrifice, and sacrifice love!”
“Well, I accept your explanation,” rejoined the sick man, after a
pause. “I have been mistaken, but, because I have been mistaken,
will that God deny liberty to a people and yet save many who are
much worse criminals than I am? What is my mistake compared to the
crimes of our rulers? Why has that God to give more heed to my
iniquity than to the cries of so many innocents? Why has He not
stricken me down and then made the people triumph? Why does He let
so many worthy and just ones suffer and look complacently upon
their tortures?”
“The just and the worthy must suffer in order that their ideas may
be known and extended! You must shake or shatter the vase to spread
its perfume; you must smite the rock to get the spark! There is
something providential in the persecutions of tyrants, Señor
Simoun!”
“I knew it,” murmured the sick man, “and therefore I encouraged the
tyranny.”
“Yes, my friend, but more corrupt influences than anything else
were spread. You fostered the social rottenness without sowing an
idea. From this fermentation of vices loathing alone could spring,
and if anything were born overnight it would be at best a mushroom,
for mushrooms only can spring spontaneously from filth. True it is
that the vices of the government are fatal to it; they cause its
death, but they kill also the society in whose bosom they are
developed. An immoral government presupposes a demoralized people,
a conscienceless administration, greedy and servile citizens in the
settled parts, outlaws and brigands in the mountains. Like master,
like slave! Like government, like country!”
A brief pause ensued, broken at length by the sick man’s voice.
“Then, what can be done?”
“Suffer and work!”
“Suffer—work!” echoed the sick man bitterly. “Ah, it’s easy to say
that, when you are not suffering, when the work is rewarded. If
your God demands such sacrifices from man, man who can scarcely
count upon the present and doubts the future, if you had seen what
I have, the miserable, the wretched, suffering unspeakable tortures
for crimes they have not committed, murdered to cover up the faults
and incapacity of others, poor fathers of families torn from their
homes to work to no purpose upon highways that are destroyed each
day and seem only to serve for sinking families into want. Ah, to
suffer, to work, is the will of God! Convince them that their
murder is their salvation, that their work is the prosperity of the
home! To suffer, to work! What God is that?”
“A very just God, Señor Simoun,” replied the priest. “A God who
chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which
we hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make
ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it; and it is just,
very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer
them. It is the God of liberty, Señor Simoun, who obliges us to
love it, by making the yoke heavy for us—a God of mercy, of equity,
who while He chastises us betters us and only grants prosperity to
him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of suffering
tempers, the arena of combat strengthens the soul.
“I do not mean to say that our liberty will be secured at the
sword’s point, for the sword plays but little part in modern
affairs, but that we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of
it, by exalting the intelligence and the dignity of the individual,
by loving justice, right, and greatness, even to the extent of
dying for them; and when a people reaches that height God will
provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, the tyranny will
crumble like a house of cards, and liberty will shine out like the
first dawn.
“Our ills we owe to ourselves alone, so let us blame no one. If
Spain should see that we were less complaisant with tyranny and
more disposed to struggle and suffer for our rights, Spain would be
the first to grant us liberty, because when the fruit of the womb
reaches maturity woe unto the mother who would stifle it! So, while
the Filipino people has not sufficient energy to proclaim, with
head erect and bosom bared its rights to social life, and to
guarantee it with its sacrifices, with its own blood; while we see
our countrymen in private life ashamed within themselves, hear the
voice of conscience roar in rebellion and protest, yet in public
life keep silence or even echo the words of him who abuses them in
order to mock the abused; while we see them wrap themselves up in
their egotism and with a forced smile praise the most iniquitous
actions, begging with their eyes a portion of the booty—why grant
them liberty? With Spain or without Spain they would always be the
same, and perhaps worse! Why independence, if the slaves of to-day
will be the tyrants of to-morrow? And that they will be such is not
to be doubted, for he who submits to tyranny loves it.
“Señor Simoun, when our people is unprepared, when it enters the
fight through fraud and force, without a clear understanding of
what it is doing, the wisest attempts will fail, and better that
they do fail, since why commit the wife to the husband if he does
not sufficiently love her, if he is not ready to die for her?”
Padre Florentino felt the sick man catch and press his hand; so he
became silent, hoping that the other might speak, but he merely
felt a stronger pressure of the hand, heard a sigh, and then
profound silence reigned in the room. Only the sea, whose waves
were rippled by the night breeze, as though awaking from the heat
of the day, sent its hoarse roar, its eternal chant, as it rolled
against the jagged rocks. The moon, now free from the sun’s
rivalry, peacefully commanded the sky, and the trees of the forest
bent down toward one another, telling their ancient legends in
mysterious murmurs borne on the wings of the wind.
The sick man said nothing; so Padre Florentino, deeply thoughtful,
murmured: “Where are the youth who will consecrate their golden
hours, their illusions, and their enthusiasm to the welfare of
their native land? Where are the youth who will generously pour out
their blood to wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much
abomination? Pure and spotless must the victim be that the
sacrifice may be acceptable! Where are you, youth, who will embody
in yourselves the vigor of life that has left our veins, the purity
of ideas that has been contaminated in our brains, the fire of
enthusiasm that has been quenched in our hearts? We await you, O
youth! Come, for we await you!”
Feeling his eyes moisten, he withdrew his hand from that of the
sick man, arose, and went to the window to gaze out upon the wide
surface of the sea. He was drawn from his meditation by gentle raps
at the door. It was the servant asking if he should bring a light.
When the priest returned to the sick man and looked at him in the
light of the lamp, motionless, his eyes closed, the hand that had
pressed his lying open and extended along the edge of the bed, he
thought for a moment that he was sleeping, but noticing that he was
not breathing touched him gently, and then realized that he was
dead. His body had already commenced to turn cold. The priest fell
upon his knees and prayed.
So Ibarra dies with his revenge unaccomplished, and the priest takes
the box in which the dead man’s great wealth is supposed to be
contained and without opening it throws it into the sea.
Only an artist would have thought of such an ending.