CHAPTER VIII

THE GRAPES OF WRATH

Though all this time out of the sight of his enemies in Manila, he seems never to have been out of their minds; authoritative evidence that in his novel he had told the truth about them. Theirs was a hatred not unmixed with reasonable fears of his popularity and of his powerful pen. They waited until he was at a safe distance before they moved against him, and then in a way that verified the ancient adage concerning the union of the essential qualities of bully and coward. They struck at him through his family, left now without defense.

His sister Lucia was married to Mariano Herbosa, who in Manila had been Rizal’s dear friend. Herbosa died soon after Rizal’s departure, and his death gave to the friars an opportunity for a revenge as uncouth and revolting as far-fetched. On the ground that Herbosa had not received final absolution before his death, they ordered his body to be dug up and cast out of the church where it had been buried. [108] To the family of a sincere Catholic this involved an almost insupportable grief, an almost maddening wrong. That they might give to their action the semblance of legality the friars had telegraphed the archbishop at Manila that Rizal’s brother-in-law had died after neglecting his church duties and abandoning the confessional. [109] Then they hypocritically asked what they should do in the case, knowing full well that on such a presentation only one response was possible. Protests and appeals by the family won no mitigation of the harsh sentence; they are said to have been stifled or diverted on the way, so that the archbishop never saw them; and the wife and children must bear the taunts their impotence invited as well as the indignity to the memory of husband and father. It appears that the charges against Herbosa were mere inventions; he had with fidelity performed all his religious duties.

No one connected even remotely or nominally with the bold delineator of friar government was safe; through the persecution of his relatives he himself could be made to suffer. His brother Paciano was now banished to Mindoro on some blown-up charge of thinking sedition. The pretext was nothing; anything would serve, from barratry to simony. Another brother-in-law was still available, Manuel Hidalgo by name. Him the authorities caught on a charge of sacrilege. A child of his had died of cholera, and he had buried it without the ceremonies of the church. The civil law prescribed in cholera cases immediate burial, and the health-officers demanded it. A poor man in such an emergency might well have been distracted between conflicting decrees of church and state. It seems that in other such cases when the head of the family obeyed the civil precepts he heard nothing of sacrilege. But they were not brothers-in-law of Rizal. Pounce, came the church upon the wretched offender. The next thing he knew he was deported. [110]

Next two of Rizal’s sisters fell into the same net. Sedition and sacrilege were handy offenses. They could be preferred against anybody for anything.

His father was the next victim. In his case the plain purpose was ruin, to be achieved by means suggested to ill minds through an out-cropping of one man’s childish malice. Mr. Mercado raised prize turkeys. The intendant, or manager, of the Dominican estate, which claimed ownership in all the land in the region of the Mercado homestead, had a nice taste in these birds when skilfully cooked, and it was his pleasing habit to demand from time to time gifts of the choicest of the Mercado turkeys to adorn his own table. The time came when it was no longer possible thus to propitiate the petty tyrant; disease had carried off the firstlings of the flock, and what were left were absolutely needed to replenish the breed.

From homely incidents like these we see the Philippines as they were and illuminate again the unforgettable pages of Rizal’s stories. The intendant made no secret of his purpose to revenge himself; they had at least the virtue of candor, these little satraps. He conceived that his immortal dignity had suffered because he had been refused turkeys when there were no turkeys, and nothing would ease the sting of that burning wrong but retribution. When the next rent-day came, Mr. Mercado found that his rent had been doubled. He paid the increase and made no complaint. The next rent-day he found that again the rate had been doubled. This likewise he paid without protest. When the next rent-day came and he found the rate was again increased he made the fatal blunder of appealing to the courts. [111]

Aggrieved members of the governing class must have joyed to learn of so excellent an opportunity to salve their hurts, also, in this medicament of revenge. Here was the father of the hated José Rizal delivered into their hands. They took the case from the justice of the peace at Calamba, in whose jurisdiction it rightfully belonged, and sent it before a judge whose decision they must have felt sure they could control. There had now become involved in the case a question of broader moment. Mr. Mercado’s sturdy resistance had heartened the other tenants to revive the ancient and unsettled issue of the title to the lands. For many years careful men had held that the Dominicans, who assumed to own all this region and to collect all rents from it, had no right to any of it. The select judge before whom came these questions lost no time in deciding them against Mercado and the other tenants. Mercado appealed, and thereby precipitated one of the strangest incidents of the story.

Of a sudden appeared at Calamba a battery of artillery and a company of soldiers, who ostentatiously took possession of the town as if it had been in a state of armed revolt. At this the inhabitants blinked and gasped, for nowhere on earth lay a more peaceable community. They were not left long in doubt as to what was toward. The commandant of the troops issued a curt order to Mercado and the other tenants involved in the litigation to remove within twenty-four hours all their buildings from the land they had occupied. An appeal was pending, a fact that in all civilized countries would have been sufficient to stay proceedings until the appeal could be decided. It was of no such validity here. To comply with the savage order was physically impossible; there were not hands enough in Calamba nor in all the country around. At the end of the next day the agents of the authorities set fire to all the houses, and among them perished from human sight and treasuring the house where José Rizal was born. [112]

Across this repulsive story glowers a face permanently evil in history. The governor-general that connived at these barbarities where he did not order them was Emiliano Weyler, immortal in the records of Cuba as “The Butcher,” accused of deeds there so horrible they can never be put into print, accused in the Philippines of huge peculations as well as stupid cruelties, a man that seemed to delight in cruelty as other men delight in kindness. It was he that thought, “in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things,” of the expedient of overawing Calamba and the courts with artillery and martial law upon the heads of the litigants; it was he that had made the most show of a violent hatred of Rizal and furnished the proof that the persecution of Francisco Mercado was revenge upon Francisco Mercado’s son. When Weyler transferred his rule of blood and iron to Cuba, he left in the official archives evidence of the real nature of the proceedings. He can have had no suspicion that he was preparing evidence of his own iniquity to be given to the world through the nation he most hated. His papers were still in the archives August 13, 1898, when Manila surrendered to Dewey and Merritt. Among them was a copy of a letter he had sent at this time to certain of the friar landlords, expressing his full sympathy with them and (with a characteristic touch) the pleasure he had in serving them against the tenantry. [113]

In the spot from which it had been thus evicted the Mercado family had lived for many years. There could have come upon these kinsfolk of Rizal no sterner test of their fortitude. Before it they went their way undaunted. At Los Baños was a small house to which Mr. Mercado had title. There he led his family to a refuge and continued his fight against the friars.

Rizal was in London when the news reached him of the petty vengeance wreaked upon the body of his brother-in-law. There had been launched some months before by the Filipino colony in Madrid a semimonthly magazine called “La Solidaridad,” the object of which was to arouse and unify the Filipinos and wrest reforms from the Spanish Government. With impunity it could be published in Madrid but could not have lived a day in Manila, a fact sufficiently indicating the power and value of publicity. Spain, with the eyes of Europe upon her, did not dare to do at home the things she did daily in the Philippines; dared not to do them or dared not to avow them. Distance, creating an impenetrable screen, created also in effect a transition from the modern to the antique world. There was much freedom of the press in Spain, a freedom, as we have remarked, partly sustained by the incessant threat of rebellion in Barcelona. Therefore, as a singular fact and almost comically incongruous, “La Solidaridad,” [114] with its acrid criticism of the Spanish Government, circulated freely in Spain and was not allowed to enter the Philippines. One of its editors was Marcelo H. del Pilar, a resolute and restless man, type of the intransigent, the indomitable and professional revolutionist. Before long he and Rizal quarreled, [115] for he was all for revolution by physical force and Rizal was always asserting its futility. A few years later del Pilar died on his way home to start his long meditated uprising. Untimely was his death if any man’s ever was. He would have reached the Philippines to find in full swing a revolution wherein his tireless energies and fiery spirit would have found an outlet at which men might have wondered.

But before they quarreled Rizal had written much for del Pilar and “La Solidaridad;” poems, articles, editorials, all directed toward Philippine reforms. When he heard of the indignity put for his sake upon the name and clay of Herbosa, he took up his pen and poured out for his journal an account of the incident and his feelings about it that scalded the church authorities with a flood of the short, hot sentences he knew so well how to write—scoriæ and hot lava from the volcano. When the news of the attack upon his father came he was living in Ghent, whither he had retired to write his new novel “El Filibusterismo.” The effect upon him of the persecution of his family is to be observed in the work he was doing at the time; in one place he makes direct reference to it. He has been telling the story of Cabesang Tales, a peaceful Filipino farmer, driven to brigandage by the extortions of the friars and the savageries of the Civil Guards. Then he says, with mingled rage and sarcasm:

Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Calamba! None of you is named Tales, none of you has committed any crime.... You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the labor of your whole lives, your savings, your vigils and privations, and you have been despoiled of them, driven from your homes, with the rest forbidden to show you hospitality! Not content with outraging justice, they have trampled upon the sacred altars of your country! You have served Spain and the king, and when in their name you have asked for justice you were banished without trial, torn from your wives’ arms and your children’s caresses! Any one of you has suffered more than Cabesang Tales, and yet not one of you has received justice. Neither pity nor humanity has been shown to you—you have been persecuted even beyond the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa. Weep, or laugh, there in those lonely isles, where you wander vaguely, uncertain of the future! Spain, the generous Spain, is watching over you and soon or late, you will have justice! [116]

It is the bitter sarcasm of a soul stung beyond endurance with the sense of great wrong.

As a work of fictional art, “El Filibusterismo” is not equal to “Noli Me Tangere.” It is likely that Rizal knew this and as likely that he cared not, having now another purpose than to tell a story powerfully. He is working with rather less of a connected story and rather less of the clear dramatic prevision. The fates of such characters as he left unrelated in “Noli Me Tangere” he follows to the end, but on the way stops to picture lives and conditions not vitally interwoven with the climacteric. Yet in one way this book is the superior in interest, for it reveals the change that had been coming over him in these two years. Slowly there had been erased in his creed the belief in the good intentions of Spain; slowly (and reluctantly, no doubt) he had come to face the thought that to appeal to Spain for reforms was useless and the Filipinos must achieve by their own efforts the changes that would lead to their redemption. That these efforts must be of a peaceful character was a sheet-anchor of faith to which he still clung, or tried to cling, and yet there is evidence that he felt it dragging as more and more the hopeless stupidity of Spain was revealed to him. [117]

Evidence of the change in his essential point of view may be found even in the dedication of the new book. It is boldly and uncompromisingly to the men that, perishing on Bagumbayan Field, in 1872, the gored victims of the System, made their names immortal.

To the memory of the priests [it reads], Don Mariano Gomez (85 years old), Don José Burgos (30 years old), and Don Jacinto Zamora (35 years old), executed in Bagumbayan Field, February 28, 1872.

The church, by refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime that has been imputed to you; the Government, by surrounding your trials with mystery and shadows, causes the belief that there was some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the Philippines, by worshiping your memory and calling you martyrs, in no sense recognizes your culpability. In so far, therefore, as your complicity in the Cavite mutiny is not clearly proved, as you may or may not have been patriots, and as you may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty, I have the right to dedicate my work to you as victims of the evil that I undertake to combat. And while we await expectantly under Spain some day to restore your good name and cease to be answerable for your death, let these pages serve as a tardy wreath of dried leaves over your unknown tombs, and let it be understood that every one that without clear proof attacks your memory, stains his hands in your blood!

Here is a foretaste of the strange, new, and passionate bitterness that was coming upon him, not heretofore discernible in his writings nor in his life, the nettle smart of a growing disillusion. Something there is, too, that in another man would surely savor of cynicism. “You may or may not have been patriots,” “You may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty,” are phrases not of a piece with his old-time faith. The wormwood that flavors these few lines is perceptible throughout the book. In “Noli Me Tangere” the stern arraignment of the friars and the Spanish officers is modulated with many good-natured pictures of Philippine life, with descriptions of the beautiful Philippine country-side, and with gentle fun-making of popular follies. In the sequel [118] there are no relieving touches. It is hot metal always overflowing and burning whatever it touches.

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