Capitán Tiago breaks off the engagement with his daughter; in his view the word of the friars is sacred, [[105]]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 [[106]]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 [[107]]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 [[108]]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 [[109]]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 [[110]]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. [[111]]
“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 [[112]]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.
DRAWINGS BY RIZAL
Intended to be illustrations for his novels
“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, [[113]]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? [[114]]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.