The hero of the Filipinos

by Charles Edward Russell; Eulogio Balan Rodriguez

Farewell, father and mother and brother, dear friends of the fireside!

Thankful ye should be for me that I rest at the end of the long day.

Farewell, sweet, from the stranger’s land—my joy and my comrade!

Farewell, dear ones, farewell! To die is to rest from our labors!

Before his murderers, before the jeers and savage exultations of the well dressed mob clamoring for his death, throughout the hearing, at the moment of the unjust verdict, he had maintained the same attitude of perfect serenity described as wonderful by all that observed it. Other condemned men have simulated this self-possession; this man had it in truth and not [[299]]in seeming. Calmly he heard his condemnation, calmly he reëntered the prison where for his last night on earth quarters had been made for him in the chapel. A newspaper reporter came to interview him. He was like a prosperous and well bred host entertaining a cultured friend;[5] no eyes, however searching, could discover a joint in that perfect armor of the soul sustained and possessed, without a tremor and without a gloomy thought. To the reporter and to others that had watched him this bearing seemed not bravado but something mystical and inexplicable, but it seemed so only because the source of it was beyond their understanding. He was calm because he had long before in effect given his life to this cause and the shooting of the next day would be only the last incident in a sacrifice already made. Of this there is every indication. What men call the joy of living had since his youth meant to him the joy of serving Filipinas. He seems to have had since the day of his exile to Dapitan a feeling that in other ways his service[6] was at an end, but there remained the service of his death. All the hard tests of life had left him unshaken and uncorrupted, a man truly without fear and without reproach. With the same faultless and unpretentious courage he walked forward to meet the end.

As was to have been expected in the conditions attending his fate, the power that had dragged him down with so much of trickery and deceit attempted to soil with other deceit the name he should leave to his countrymen. To the newspaper reporter he said that [[300]]“Noli Me Tangere” had been much misunderstood because the authorities had selected from it only passages that seemed to indicate sacrilegious or seditious purpose, whereas when read in their proper places with the context they had no such appearance. This statement was so distorted as to appear as an expression of regret that he had written the book. When he said that the Republicans in Spain had mistaken their strength and their opportunities, this was distorted into a petulant charge that the Spanish Republicans had been the cause of all his troubles. When he spoke with characteristic modesty of his own work as feeble and of small avail, the remark was twisted into a dubiety of his basic faith.

Attempts were made to wrest from him something that could be called a retraction of his political opinions; even the last solemn offices of the church were utilized toward an end so base. All his life he had remained a true Catholic,[7] despite his sharp condemnation of the friars. He now desired to partake of the holy sacrament, and priests were sent to him. What took place when they gathered around him was so perverted that no man may feel sure he has the truth of the story. According to one account the priests [[301]]refused him the sacrament until they should satisfy themselves of his orthodoxy, and a long examination followed. They demanded a signed statement affirming his belief in revealed religion. He readily consented to give it; he could have given it truthfully at any time. Of this affirmation two irreconcilable versions were subsequently reported, a fact that dealing with a thing so simple must serve to discredit both. As to one, no other evidence is needed than its style and content to show that Rizal never wrote it. As to the other reputed statement, opinions differ; reasonably, one might say, since there is extant no original copy, and no one now pretends to have seen such a copy. The style in the second statement is Rizal’s or an imitation of his; the expressions in it are in line with his general convictions;[8] and if throughout this phase of the story we met with less of manifest treachery and lying the probable authenticity of some such declaration might well be admitted.

On the basis of evidence so untrustworthy the tale was fabricated that he had retracted his political views. It was brazen impudence that put out this fable and simple credulity that believed it. Much that happened in the last scenes of his tragedy is and always will be uncertain, but the one thing about which is no doubt is that he went to his death unshaken in his loyalty to the great causes to which he had dedicated his life and labors, to the rights, emancipation, and progress of his country.

If from the tangled accounts now available to us we [[302]]wish to build a surmise, it is likely that Rizal affirmed his religious faith, renounced masonry,[9] was reconciled to the church, received the sacrament, and then had[10] performed the ecclesiastical marriage rites [[303]]between him and his wife that he had so desired in vain at Dapitan. Even as to this there is no record, but the correlative facts are strong. To his mother and sisters he now said the last farewell; said it with the calm and gentle resignation that from the first had marked his conduct. Even in that crux of his sufferings his command upon himself and all his faculties seems never to have wavered. He knew well that all his effects would be searched and any papers he might leave would be seized and destroyed; yet he desired to give to his countrymen the song of parting he had written for them. At the interview with his mother and sisters they were kept separated from him by a space of some feet under the pretended fear that poison might be passed to him and so might he cheat revenge of blood-drops for which it thirsted. To transmit the poem, therefore, was difficult, but the resourceful mind of Rizal did not fail him now. The little alcohol lamp by which he had written his song and read and studied in his cell had been the gift of a friend in Europe. In the Islands it was something of a curiosity. This he managed to bequeath to his sister Trinidad and when he told her about it he added quickly in English, “There is something inside.”[11]

Even in these last hours efforts were made by his friends to rescue him from the jaws that had opened to rend him. Relatives and friends besieged the governor-general; [[304]]he would not even admit them to his presence. In Spain fervent appeals were made to the National Government. All scientific and sympathetic Europe was horror-stricken at the impending murder of one of the most learned men of the age. There is a story that the Spanish prime minister wished to yield to these demands. It was the queen regent that he found implacable. Something in one of Rizal’s books had mortally offended her. She, too, was determined to have his blood.