CHAPTER XII

“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.

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