Noli Me Tangere PDF - José Rizal

 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction Epigraph CHAPTER 1 - A GATHERING CHAPTER 2 - CRISÓSTOMO IBARRA CHAPTER 3 - DINNER Jele jele bago quiere CHAPTER 4 - HERETIC AND SUBVERSIVE CHAPTER 5 - A STAR IN THE DARK NIGHT CHAPTER 6 - CAPTAIN TIAGO CHAPTER...

 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction Epigraph CHAPTER 1 - A GATHERING CHAPTER 2 - CRISÓSTOMO IBARRA CHAPTER 3 - DINNER Jele jele bago quiere CHAPTER 4 - HERETIC AND SUBVERSIVE CHAPTER 5 - A STAR IN THE DARK NIGHT CHAPTER 6 - CAPTAIN TIAGO CHAPTER 7 - IDYLL ON A TERRACE CHAPTER 8 - MEMORIES CHAPTER 9 - NATIONAL AFFAIRS CHAPTER 10 - THE VILLAGE CHAPTER 11 - SOVEREIGNTY CHAPTER 12 - ALL SAINTS CHAPTER 13 - THE STORM BREWS CHAPTER 14 - TASIO, MADMAN OR PHILOSOPHER CHAPTER 15 - THE SEXTONS CHAPTER 16 - SISA CHAPTER 17 - BASILIO CHAPTER 18 - SOULS IN TORMENT CHAPTER 19 - ADVENTURES OF A SCHOOLMASTER CHAPTER 20 - THE MEETING AT CITY HALL CHAPTER 21 - A MOTHER’S TALE CHAPTER 22 - LIGHT AND SHADOW CHAPTER 23 - A FISHING EXPEDITION CHAPTER 24 - IN THE FOREST CHAPTER 25 - AT THE PHILOSOPHER’S HOUSE CHAPTER 26 - FESTIVAL EVE CHAPTER 27 - AT NIGHTFALL CHAPTER 28 - CORRESPONDENCES CHAPTER 29 - MORNING CHAPTER 30 - IN THE CHURCH CHAPTER 31 - THE SERMON CHAPTER 32 - THE CRANE CHAPTER 33 - FREEDOM OF THOUGHT CHAPTER 34 - THE BANQUET CHAPTER 35 - COMMENTS CHAPTER 36 - THE FIRST CLOUD CHAPTER 37 - HIS EXCELLENCY CHAPTER 38 - THE PROCESSION CHAPTER 39 - DOÑA CONSOLACIÓN CHAPTER 40 - RIGHT AND MIGHT CHAPTER 41 - TWO VISITORS CHAPTER 42 - THE DE ESPADAÑAS CHAPTER 43 - PLANS CHAPTER 44 - AN EXAMINATION OF CONSCIENCE CHAPTER 45 - THE PERSECUTED CHAPTER 46 - THE COCKPIT CHAPTER 47 - TWO LADIES CHAPTER 48 - AN ENIGMA CHAPTER 49 - VOICE OF THE PERSECUTED CHAPTER 50 - ELÍAS’S FAMILY CHAPTER 51 - CHANGES CHAPTER 52 - THE CARD OF THE DEAD AND THE SHADOWS CHAPTER 53 - IL BUON DÍ SI CONOSCE DA MATTINA CHAPTER 54 - QUID QUID LATET CHAPTER 55 - CATASTROPHE CHAPTER 56 - WHAT IS SAID AND WHAT IS BELIEVED CHAPTER 57 - VAE VICTIS! CHAPTER 58 - THE ACCURSED CHAPTER 59 - HOMELAND AND INTERESTS CHAPTER 60 - MARÍA CLARA WEDS CHAPTER 61 - PURSUIT ON THE LAKE CHAPTER 62 - FATHER DÁMASO EXPLAINS HIMSELF CHAPTER 63 - CHRISTMAS EVE EPILOGUE APPENDIX Notes NOLI ME TANGERE (TOUCH ME NOT) JOSÉ RIZAL was born in Calamba, Philippines, in 1861, the son of a prosperous family, and was educated at the best schools and universities in Manila and in Europe. At the age of twenty-one, he left the Philippines to pursue medical and humanities studies in Spain, where he earned a degree in medicine with a specialty in ophthalmology. While in Spain, he worked with Philippine exiles to organize and develop groups opposed to the continuation of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, though it has been argued that he never advocated complete independence. In Europe from 1882 to 1887, Rizal wrote his first novel, Noli Me Tangere, which he published in Berlin at his own expense. Upon returning to the Philippines, he was suspected of treason, so, in 1888, he returned to Europe, where he continued his anticolonial activities. In 1890, he published a new edition of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las islas Filipinas (History of the Philippine Islands), a 1609 compendium of pre-Hispanic Philippine life and customs; and in 1891, Rizal’s second novel, El filibusterismo (Subversion), was published. Upon returning to the Philippines that year, he was exiled to Dapitan, a town on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, where he continued to write, practice medicine, and design public works. In 1896, when anticolonial hostilities broke out in the Spanish colony of Cuba, he volunteered to serve as a doctor for the Spanish army, perhaps to relieve himself of exile. Though his offer was accepted, before he was allowed to leave the Philippines, he was removed from the transport ship and imprisoned. Within days he was tried for treason and sentenced to death. On December 30, 1896, Rizal was executed by firing squad in Manila. During his life, José Rizal was an important member of the colonial opposition in the Philippines. After his death, he became the foremost symbol of Philippine nationalism. HAROLD AUGENBRAUM is executive director of the National Book Foundation. Among his books are Growing Up Latino and Encyclopedia Latina (both with Ilan Stavans), The Latino Reader and U.S. Latino Literature: A Critical Guide for Students and Teachers (both with Margarite Fernández-Olmos), and the revised translation of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition for Penguin Books.  PENGUIN BOOKS Published by Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England This translation first published in Penguin Books 2006 Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © Harold Augenbraum, 2006 All rights reserved LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Rizal, José, 1861-1896. [Noli me tangere. English] Noli me tangere = Touch me not / José Rizal ; translated, with an introduction and notes by Harold Augenbraum. p. cm.—(Penguin classics) eISBN : 978-1-440-64937-0 http://us.penguingroup.com  For Carla O, femme, plus aimée que la clarté du jour!  Introduction Ano panga, t, ualang di nasisiyasat, ang pagiisipco sa touang cumupas sa cagugunita, luha, i, lalagaslas sabay ang taghoy cong, “¡O, nasauing palad!” Indeed, nothing is left unturned by the mind that leafs through faded mirth, and remembering brings a rush of tears as I sob out, “O my wretched fate!” —Francisco Baltazar, “To Celia” from The History of Florante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania1 In the early morning hours of December 30, 1896, on a greensward overlooking the South China Sea on the western edge of Manila, Spanish soldiers took aim at a short, vigorous man in a black suit whom they had just marched from Fort Santiago in slow steps. Just the day before, after a perfunctory trial, José Rizal had been sentenced to death by firing squad. That morning, Rizal dressed simply, in his black suit and tie, white shirt, and black shoes, and completed the ensemble with a bowler. The Spaniards took him from his cell and walked him to Bagumbayan, near what is now known as Rizal Park. A crowd had gathered. The squad’s lieutenant asked if he wanted a blindfold, but he refused. According to legend, he asked to face his executors, but the request was denied. Traitors are shot in the back so they fall ignominiously forward, face in the dirt. The order was given, and a few seconds later, José Rizal was shot and killed. The Philippine Revolution had taken hold; more than three centuries of colonial resentment, a simmering cauldron of ragtag resistance, had found its martyr. The Spanish had arrived in 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese sailing under the Spanish flag in search of spice islands, landed on the island of Cebú, where he and the native Cebuanos became fast friends. The Cebuanos were having a problem with a man named Lapu- Lapu, the king of the small island of Mactan to the northeast, who had declined to convert to Catholicism and prevented another Mactan king from paying tribute to Spain. When Magellan and several men crossed the narrow strait separating the two islands, the Mactans warned them off. Magellan and his small band disembarked and, according to the expedition’s historian, Antonio de Pigafetta, within a few hours they had been routed. On a beach near where their ships were anchored, the Mactans separated Magellan from his men, surrounded him, and killed him. Yet the Spanish refused to give up. An expedition under the command of Ruy López de Villalobos claimed the islands of Leyte and Samar for the Crown and named them las islas Filipinas after the crown prince Felipe, the future King Philip II. The Philippines would become Spain’s only major colony in Asia. Then, in 1565, Miguel López de Legaspi, history’s Conqueror of the Philippines, arrived with three ships and six Augustinian friars. By that time Spain had already undergone a half-century of self-examination regarding its treatment of the indigenous people of its colonies, focused primarily on the larger colonies of the Americas. The encomienda laws of Isabela la Católica (1503) had attempted to abolish slavery, though arguments about whether encomienda actually eased the natives’ burden continued. The Laws of Burgos (1512) made the encomendero responsible for the well- being of his charges, and the so-called Laws of Valladolid (1513) restricted who might work and under what employment conditions the work should be managed. Finally, in 1550 and 1551, a major debate was held in Valladolid between Dominican missionary Father Bartolomé de las Casas, a staunch defender of native rights, and Father Juan Gines de Sepúlveda, a secular priest. Though the debate generally focused on the force used in the American colonies to bring the indigenous peoples into the religious fold of Catholicism, it had wider-ranging philosophical implications. Both de las Casas and Sepúlveda based their arguments on a cross between Aristotelian and Thomist concepts of the nature of indigenous peoples and whether the Spanish, as a result of their superior doctrine and philosophy, were meant to rule or to guide, to govern as tyrant or as father (servil versus heril). The resulting attitudes, as well as Spanish priests’ ideology based on racial differences, would direct Spain’s attitude toward its colonies and their inhabitants. Spanish rule continued virtually unabated through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (with the exception of a brief British interregnum in 1762). In the pre-Panama Canal Americas, the Philippines’ main contact with the motherland passed through Mexico. Atlantic galleons would arrive from Havana into Veracruz, on Mexico’s east coast, where goods were off- loaded and then shipped west through Mexico City to Acapulco, whence Pacific galleons would carry them to Manila; the voyage would then be reversed. As in the Americas, language and religion became primary components of Philippine change, but “hispanization” of the archipelago never truly took hold. Beneath Jesuit, Dominican, and Augustinian religious domination lay a pre-Christian multiplicity. Native gods, called anitos, were often not abandoned, but instead were transformed into saints and were often venerated in small chapels attached to private homes. Island languages persisted, as well, with analogously linguistic transformations. Tagalog, primary among them, now counts an estimated four thousand Spanish words, as does Cebuano. The anomaly of Chabacano, a Spanish creole dialect made up of roughly 90 percent Castilian Spanish vocabulary and the remainder Austronesian, with an Austronesian or simplified Castilian grammar depending on where it is spoken and whose scholarly articles one reads, today is still spoken by as many as a million people on the Zamboanga Peninsula and some other Mindanao locales (and a few on Luzon). The seeming interplay of cultures belies a political turmoil and ongoing tension not only between native Filipinos and Spaniards but between Spanish secular and religious colonial administrations. The biographer and translator León Ma. Guerrero begins Rizal’s story by saying, “The history of the Philippines is the history of the friars,” but this is too simplistic and reflects more Guerrero’s greater focus on Rizal than on the country’s general political situation. Civil and military authorities maintained a presence on several islands, especially those with a tradition of anti-Spanish activities, and Rizal’s political writings speak to civil repression. His novels say otherwise, however, as his characters react to the personal affronts they regularly suffer at the hands of the friars. Personal effrontery becomes political estrangement (and engagement). Power certainly emboldened the friars. In 1719, angry at an attempted civil undermining of their control, they assassinated the Spanish governor of the archipelago, Fernando Bustamante, thereby delivering a strong message to future civil administrators. Political relationships evolved. By the late eighteenth century, Spain’s power in Europe had all but disappeared. In 1762, during the Seven Years War, for a brief period it lost the Philippines to the British, who occupied Manila and Cebu, its commercial and military centers. Meanwhile, Spanish colonies in the Americas, seeing the example of the recent independence of British North America, began their own independence movements. In 1802, Napoléon conquered Spain and placed his brother on the throne, which further eroded the Spanish empire’s cohesion. In 1815, the decreasingly lucrative galleon trade ceased and Manila was opened to free trade. In 1821, Mexico became independent, while colonies in South America and the Caribbean were fraught with subversive activities on behalf of their own freedom. Then in 1833, Mexico, which at the time included the future U.S. states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Colorado, secularized the remaining missions under its control, which further eroded the power of the colonial Church. In the Philippines, however, well removed from Spain, the friars continued their domination of both secular and religious life. This long-term influence was more political than cultural or linguistic, but in the strictest sense secular power in the colony was subordinate, and the effect of such control was that civil government was subordinated to a “friarocracy.” Spanish friars in the Philippines had taken particular note of political developments in Spain and the Americas. In 1821, the year of Mexican independence, they barred native Filipinos from the priesthood. In 1840, a Filipino lay priest, Apolinario de la Cruz, led a successful movement to “Filipinize” the country’s clergy, which later led to a backlash from the ambitious Spanish clergy, who worried that a Philippine-dominated priesthood would erode their control: they preferred to blame Philippine inferiority for their own repressive attitudes. In 1871, only 171 of the 782 parishes in the Philippines were led by native or mestizo priests, but by that time pro-independence movements had emerged among Filipino residents in Spain and European post-Enlightenment liberalism had filtered into the islands. Despite the friars’ limits on native Filipino education, a select few of these Filipinos formed an intellectual base from which to theorize independence. Then, in January 1872, a brief revolt by Filipino workers and soldiers took place at the navy yard in Cavite (or Kabite), across the bay from Manila. The Cavite Mutiny lasted only a few days, but its repercussions led directly to the Philippine Revolution of 1898. It was not the first such rebellion.2 It did, however, provide the government with an excuse to arrest and execute prominent local leaders, among them Filipino priests Mariano Gómez, Jacinto Zamora, and José Burgos, who were active in trying to have the parishes turned over to “secular priests,” the only order Filipinos could join at the time. Of the three, Burgos was the most distinguished, and the last to die. He had just turned thirty-five (coincidentally, José Rizal’s age when he was executed). He had earned two doctorates, one in theology and one in canon law. A prolific and highly respected writer, he was the purported author of the anonymous La loba negra (The Black She-Wolf), based on Bustamante’s murder, and was connected with the Manila Cathedral. He refused a seat in the Commission on Censorship and was a good swordsman and boxer. As the Spanish friars attempted to regain complete control of the Philippine clergy, undoing de la Cruz’s work, Burgos vehemently protested, becoming a symbol of intellectual resistance to the Spanish friars. Burgos’s death was the most dramatic. In the account by French writer Edmond Plauchut, Burgos suddenly stood up from the garrote seat and shouted, “What crime have I committed to deserve such a death? Is there no justice in the world?” A dozen friars pushed him back down and told him to accept a Christian death. Burgos seemed to calm down, but then quickly shot up to shout, “But I haven’t committed any crime!” One of the friars holding him hissed, “Even Christ was innocent!” The executioner then broke his neck with one swift twist of the garrote handle.  The executions galvanized a small but already radicalized elite. Conspirators, real or potential, were exiled to Hong Kong or the Marianas Islands. Rizal’s brother, Paciano, who (it has been said) had once shared a house with Burgos, was not allowed to take his exams, and protested by leaving school altogether (or perhaps his family called him home, afraid that an association with Burgos - could prove fatal). Paciano’s minor involvement in the Cavite drama would play an important role in shaping José’s political ideals; for José Rizal the personal metamorphoses into the political. His subversives often experience a radicalizing event in their lives (in the case of women, radicalization combines with power-lessness to form a trope of female madness and self-destruction). Indeed, Rizal dedicated his second novel, El filibusterismo (Subversion), to the three Tagalog priests. José Pacienza Mercado y Rizal (also known as José Alonso y Rizal) was born on June 19, 1861, in Calamba, about thirty-seven miles south of Manila, to an ilustrado (upper-middle-class and educated) family; several critics have ascribed his attitudes toward autonomy, independence, and revolution to an upbringing in such a haute-bourgeoisie family. His father, Francisco Mercado (the name Rizal was added later), was a gentleman farmer with a large house and many servants. His mother, Teodora Alonso, was the cultured daughter of a prominent family who raised her children to believe in the value of education. To her, José was a special child. Before his birth she had made a pilgrimage to Antípolo to ask the Virgin for a son. She often told José Tagalog tales (as well as reading him Castilian books), recited Tagalog poetry, and sang traditional songs. He also learned Tagalog folk superstitions from a nanny. Rizal’s more formal education began in Calamba with private tutors, including family members. At the age of nine he went to Biñan, where he lived with relatives and studied at a local academy, but returned several months later when, according to several biographers, the teacher said he had nothing left to teach him and that he should study in Manila. A short while later, a curious incident occurred. While his mother’s half-brother José Alberto was out of the country, his wife abandoned their home, along with her children. Enraged by such unfaithfulness upon his return, José Alberto announced he would divorce her. Though Rizal’s mother helped pacify her half-brother, his wife falsely accused him of poisoning her, and named Teodora as an accomplice. She was arrested, and forced to walk thirty kilometers to jail, where she languished for two and a half years on various trumped-up charges, an incident Rizal would use in Noli Me Tangere. A few months before he turned eleven, José, accompanied by Paciano, went to Manila to continue his education at the Jesuit school Ateneo Municipal. At that point, Paciano advised José to add the name of Rizal, because Paciano’s association with Burgos had made their family name somewhat undesirable politically. José later attended the Universidad de Santo Tomás, winning various prizes in literature and philosophy. Finally, in 1882, frustrated by the friars’ treatment of native Filipinos and wishing to test the academic freedom of a Spanish education, he left the country for Europe. Both the voyage and the stay in Europe proved to be watershed events in Rizal’s life. There he took a degree in ophthalmology (such irony has not been lost on Filipino critics) and met with young artists and political opposition figures such as the painters Juan Luna and Felix Resurrección Hidalgo and the writers Pedro Alejandro Paterno (whose novel Ninay may have influenced Rizal’s desire to write a novel of his own), Gregorio Sancianco, Graciano López Jaena, and Marcelo Hilario del Pilar. There his education was also less limited, and he began to write in earnest. Surrounded by pro-independence intellectuals and artists, in 1884 Rizal began work on the novel that would become Noli Me Tangere. Dicit ei Iesus noli me tangere nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum. “Jesus saith unto her, touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father.” Rizal took the title of his first novel from the Gospel of St. John;3 it rings with irony, both broadly comic and narrowly serious, a foretaste of the novel’s themes and style. In the verse, Jesus is speaking to Mary Magdalen, who has approached him just after his resurrection, during the transition between corporeal corruption and spiritual apotheosis. This reference to John adds a delicious quality to the book. The most political of the apostles, John is an unwitting harbinger of Father Salví, the Catholic friar whose scheming in Rizal’s novel will push a slippery situation into its final slough. Throughout the book, Rizal layers politically suppressed Enlightenment ideals onto prevailing Filipino actualities, and though cynicism often raises its ugly head, the energetic optimism of the book’s twenty-five-year-old author trumps any despair, the novel’s somewhat treacly melodrama notwithstanding. Rizal began Noli Me Tangere with the basic models of both Tagalog and European literature at hand. The stories and poetry his mother had read and recited to him as a child; Francisco Baltazar’s great poem The History of Florante and Laura, which Rizal carried with him in Europe as he wrote Noli Me Tangere; and La loba negra (The Black She-Wolf), the 1860s novel attributed to Father Burgos, which laid out the basic themes of Filipino oppression through a retelling of the killing of General Bustamante, were all obvious inspirations. But Rizal, the representative bicultural colonial subject, was also influenced by the great European writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Stendhal, and, especially, Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. The echoes of Hugo’s Les Misérables on the Noli and Dumas père’s Count of Monte Cristo on Rizal’s second novel, the Fili, are unmistakable. With Tasio the Philosopher, Rizal creates both an artistic and political dialectic. The intercalation of Tasio’s discourses relieves the melodramatic tension of the central plot, an artistic device put to brilliant use in Hugo’s Les Misérables. The Count was a popular stage production in the 1880s, when Rizal traveled throughout Europe. Rizal’s influence undoubtedly also extended to the great Spanish writers of his time, as well as to German-language authors such as Johann Friedrich von Schiller, whose poetry provided the epigraph for Rizal’s first novel. Ostensibly a love story, the Noli is set against the backdrop of colonial politics. Rizal wrote to one of his former teachers that he “wanted to awaken [his] countrymen from their profound lethargy, and whoever wants to awaken does not do so with soft and light sounds but with explosions, blows, etc.”4 From the beginning one understands that in the Philippines a gulf yawns between peoples who live side by side, and nuance rarely covers Rizal’s literary palette. Rizal had an agenda: art in the service of politics. Though the constrictions of a political novel could indeed undermine his concern for aesthetics, he is able to achieve an important artistic dialogue with his time, not through the novel’s main story, but through its offset characters, wherein lies the work’s genius. The story is simple; the main part of the action runs from just before All Souls’ to Christmas, with an epilogue that takes place later. Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra, a young, affluent, second-generation Filipino of mixed ancestry, returns to the Philippines after seven years of European travel and study. His memories of the friars, who control the Church and much of Filipino polity, are inconsistent with the current situation. He has come back for several reasons: to see his father, to claim his heritage as a force for moral and social good in his own country, and to marry his childhood sweetheart, María Clara. But all is not right in the Philippines. Crisóstomo is soon informed of his father’s jailhouse death after a year’s imprisonment, the victim of false charges and witness. Despite his anger and sorrow, in order to follow his father’s teachings and to better his community he rejects bitterness. In his blindered naiveté Crisóstomo ignores every sign, every counsel to abandon his plans to improve his countrymen’s lot, which old Philippine hands tell him are doomed; they warn him that even the attempt will be punished. He undermines clerical authority, and is excommunicated. His childhood love, María Clara, rejects him without explanation. Still he persists, heartened by a naïve belief in his own idealism. In the end, he, María Clara, and almost everyone who tried to warn him disappear into the black hole of colonialism: Crisóstomo an outlaw; María Clara entombed in a convent; Elías, the uncertain rebel, Tasio, the old philosopher, and Sisa, the mad mother, dead, killed by what Rizal portrays as colonialism’s dark irony, established first as light satire, which then gradually becomes malign. Readers solely seeking political content in the Noli often overlook Rizal’s talent at metamorphosing broad, satirical comedy into tragedy (or melodrama). While early in the novel the reader laughs at Doña Victorina’s ripping out her husband’s false teeth, later the same act censures, and her malice elicits grimaces rather than smiles. When Father Dámaso, one of the novel’s darkest figures, fractures Tagalog in his sermon the scene is comic, but when he violently forbids a schoolmaster from teaching Spanish to his Filipino students, broken Tagalog becomes a political weapon. The satire is never extended to Crisóstomo or María Clara, however, who suffer as fictional characters from the heavy layer of melodramatic irony for which critics have often faulted Rizal’s literary artistry (along with the shrillness of political discussions, which, with the perspective of a century of political diatribe, seem hopelessly outdated). After seven years in Europe, Crisóstomo is an outsider, the past more vivid than the present. If he had ever understood the Philippine system, he no longer does. In all his dealings with former friends, he might be speaking another language, and if indeed the success of Spanish colonization relied on substitutions of Catholicism and Spanish for native Filipino religion and language, in the Noli this three-hundred-plus-year experiment in colonization has failed. Few people in the book communicate—or pray—effectively, and Rizal’s portrait of linguistic and religious infirmity languishes on both banks of colonialism’s broad gulf. The Spanish friars, administrators, and colonists will not, or cannot, speak their neighbors’ language and most Filipinos do not learn Spanish (estimates were that three in a thousand Filipinos were given Spanish-language education in the nineteenth century). As a parish priest, Father Dámaso spends decades hearing confession in smaller Filipino towns without ever learning enough Tagalog to understand what he hears. In his Tagalog-language church sermon few of his parishioners understand what he is saying; as Rizal puts it, they “fish for words” and reel up just one or two. When they hear “civil guards” and “bandits” in the same sentence, they take heart, believing it to be a promise to rid them of both oppressors. A recently arrived Spaniard, making notes for a book to be published in Spain, completely misinterprets the signals he gets at Crisóstomo’s welcome-home party and concludes that “In the current state of things, not allowing them to leave the country—or even teaching them to read—would actually be doing them a favor.” On a simple picnic in the forest, María Clara comes across an idyllic glade with flowers that “had not yet been given their Latin names, though they were undoubtedly known to the golden insects, butterflies of all sizes and colors, blue and gold, black and white, multihued, brilliant, pale blue with rubies and emeralds on their wings, and the thousands of coleopters, of metallic sheen, dusted with a fine gold.” Doña Victorina, a pretentious Filipina, butchers Castilian - every time she opens her mouth. Her husband, the quack Doctor de Espadaña, has a terrible stutter and false teeth. Doña Consolación, the ensign’s wife, is an almost preliterate harpie, grunting as she watches political arrestees being tortured. Sisa, the mother who has lost two sons, wanders the pathways singing songs and babbling mostly incoherent sentences. On the first evening of his return to the Philippines, Crisóstomo himself tells partygoers he used the local language to communicate in the countries he visited in Europe: they are stunned he can do this. Even María Clara loses the ability to speak to Crisóstomo until almost the end of the story, when she explains to him why they cannot marry. Finally, in desperation, when she attempts to communicate with someone, anyone, from the convent in which she has been kept a virtual prisoner, the only two people who hear her are soldiers, one from the Spanish upper classes and one from the lower. They not only fail to comprehend her words, but in their minds her incoherence is demonizing. In the Noli, even the eloquent are inarticulate. Written in Spanish, the Noli was published in Germany in 1887, at José Rizal’s expense, with loans from his friend Dr. Maximo Viola. It was held up in customs at various borders, including the frontier between France and Spain. Its reception in the Philippines (or lack thereof, since only samizdat copies seem to have existed) made Rizal a marked man, though at first no official condemnations were made. Much has been written about José Rizal’s political objective in writing the Noli, whether he wished Filipino independence, autonomy, or simply equal treatment with other Spanish provinces, and more will be written. The result of the Noli’s publication, however, was explosive. The Noli’s existence made the dream of Philippine independence possible, and both the friars and the civil government now, more than ever, considered Rizal a subversive. The effect on the Philippines was certainly enormous. Within weeks of its arrival, the Noli had sparked patent unrest when the heads of local government in Manila signed the petition known as the Manifestación de 1888, which demanded the expulsion of the friars, and for which twenty- eight signers were imprisoned. The Manifestación was later debated in the Spanish Senate, with the harshest words reserved for the author of the Noli. Open expressions of discontent spread throughout the archipelago, despite condemnation of the book in churches everywhere. By then Rizal had returned to Europe, but his friend Valentín Ventura wrote from Paris that “[your] campaign in the Philippines has not been completely in vain. Everything that has happened and is happening... is the result of your propaganda.” But perhaps the most meaningful long-term result in terms of José Rizal’s life and career was that its publication re-created Rizal as the historical “guiding saint” of the Philippine revolution, a rallying image, a malleable figure whom Filipinos and others, including the American occupiers in post-Spanish-American War Philippines, could meld with their own hopes and dreams. Within a few years of his death, the Rizal legend would already take root, aided to some degree by Rizal’s own desire to leave a romantic legacy. In an 1890 letter to his friend Mariano Ponce he wrote, “One only dies once, and if one does not die well, a good opportunity is lost and will not present itself again.” Historians, critics, and conspiracy theorists have combed his juvenilia for predictions of his own mortality, and then characterized them as serious prophetic discourse. According to another legend, when he asked to be shot facing his executioners, rather than in the back, as was the custom with “traitors,” when the request was denied, “at the moment the rifles fired, he used his tremendous bodily will to twist, so that he would fall with his face to the sky,” according to the biographer Austin Coates.5 A Hollywood script, lacking only the orchestral crescendo. He—and his characters—still appears in Filipino novels today, most of which are written in English or Tagalog. Filipinos still name their children after María Clara and debate the long-term effects of her selfless character on Filipino views of women. In the past century, Rizal’s own character, religious feeling, patriotism, and radicalization have come under intense scrutiny, and counterlegends to “the perfect Filipino” have been bruited about, including one that on the day before he died Rizal renounced his anti-Church feelings and embraced the Catholic faith (this was highly improbable and might have been concocted by later Catholic clerics). Some have suggested that just before his death he married his common-law wife, an Irish woman, others that he swore allegiance to the Spanish crown. The “use” of José Rizal is a never-ending pastime, from the international, multichapter organization Knights of Rizal to leftist university professors in search of tenure. The new Rizalian ambiguity has grown to such an extent that it has created an Ur-Rizal theory, known in the Philippines as “the enigma syndrome,” i.e., the man cannot be known; he is a santo. Nowadays an incorporeal José Rizal floats through the Philippines and its diaspora, his very nature hovering somewhere between man and spirit, an ineffable essence permeating the history of a renewed Philippines. He has become the spiritual descendant of Lapu-Lapu, a secular messiah who expels the invaders with the stroke of his mighty pen, a martyr, an avenging saint, an anito in whom one invests the atom of identity. Whoever he was then, he is now a prisoner of his own legend. Beyond the constant re-creation and debunking, Rizal was by any measure an extraordinary man. Over the years, the strength of his personal will, his extraordinary self-erudition, his dedication to social causes, and his artistic and linguistic accomplishments have all assumed outsized proportions. He spoke twenty-two languages and wrote correspondence in six. In Germany for a year, according to a friend he learned the language by memorizing six words a night (not five or seven). He sculpted in clay and painted in oils. In exile in Dapitan, he designed a waterworks for the local population. He was one of the foremost ophthalmologists in Asia, and even performed cataract surgery on his own mother. When you add to this biography the Noli and the Fili, the earliest artistic expressions of the Asian colonial experience from the point of view of the oppressed, it is no surprise that Rizal has taken center stage in the pantheon of Filipino demigods. They named towns after Alejandro Mabini and Emilio Aguinaldo. They named a province after Rizal. The Fili was completed on Rizal’s second European trip, where he also finished a new edition of Antonio de Morga’s 1609 Sucesos de las islas Filipinas (History of the Philippine Islands), which focused on the pre- Magellan archipelago. Soon after his return in 1891, he was exiled to Dapitan on the southern island of Mindanao, where he was confined for four years, his family persecuted for his sins, which continued to hurt him terribly. In 1896, in a final attempt to escape from governmental persecution and relieve the pressures on his family, he volunteered for active medical duty in the Spanish army in the war theater of Cuba. He got as far as boarding a ship in Manila Bay bound for Havana, but the friars would not let him go. He was removed from the ship, charged with subversion, and quickly sentenced to death. A photograph of Rizal’s execution came to light in the 1920s. Taken from a distance, it shows a man in a dark suit and bowler standing several paces from a firing squad, with tall, straight trees in the background. Several historians have questioned its authenticity—eyewitnesses have claimed there were no trees in Bagumbayan at the time—but it is often printed as the only extant photograph of Rizal’s execution. Like most Rizaliana, that is open to interpretation. Whether Rizal’s life or death had a more galvanizing effect on the Philippine Revolution is a matter of debate. In 1898, the United States of America went to war with Spain over its last colonies in the Caribbean, and took away with it Spain’s sole Asian colony, the Philippines. Along with the Spanish went the power of the friars. America took charge, moving its own governor-general into the Malacañang Palace and its own troops into position. They appropriated José Rizal as their symbol of freedom, of Philippine nationalism, and promoted him to Official Martyr. English replaced Spanish as the language of choice, and not until after the American war with Vietnam would the Philippines push out the final American military presence.  A Note on the Translation The translation is based on the original text published in Berlin in 1887, reprinted by the José Rizal National Centennial Commission in 1961 in Manila. Just before publication, Rizal removed chapter 25, entitled “Elías and Salomé,” which has been included as an appendix to this volume. The chapter was published as an appendix to the 1961 edition. Though Rizal wrote a clear Castilian Spanish, he included many Tagalog words and phrases, especially of flora and fauna of the Philippines, which had no Castilian equivalent. In order to provide a similar experience for the English-language reader, I have left the Tagalog words and provided translations, definitions, explanations, or Linnean binomial nomenclature, where necessary. In some cases, Rizal provided his own Castilian translation of a Tagalog word in the text, which I have translated into English. In most cases, I have left place-names, proper names, and sometimes the names of food in original Castilian or Tagalog as well as most honorifics (Señor, Señora) and have provided explanations when I felt it was necessary for textual understanding. Orthography has also changed over the years. The Spanish c and v have been altered to k and b in many cases (hence, Cavite becomes Kabite; see Introduction). I have retained the spellings Rizal used in the original, published in the colonial period. Rizal also overused several adjectives, especially alegre (lively, happy, gay) and switched between present and past tense within one paragraph and sometimes one sentence. I have chosen to retain such idiosyncrasies, to allow the reader to gauge the meaning of Rizal’s style. I have also employed English contractions in dialogue, which, though they do not match the elision of pronouns in Castilian, accomplish a similar evenness of speech. Special thanks to Luis Francia for his encouragement, expertise, and basic thoughtfulness throughout this project.  Suggestions for Further Reading Most books on José Rizal have been published in the Philippines, including many English translations of the Noli; at least six translations have appeared in the United States. One should be judicious in reading about Rizal, since many books about him are more encomium than history. Some of the following books are available in major research libraries in the United States. TRANSLATIONS OF NOLI ME TANGERE OF INTEREST Rizal, José. The Social Cancer. Translated by Charles Derbyshire. 1912. ———. Noli Me Tangere. Translated with explanatory notes by Feliciano Basa. Manila: Oriental Commercial Company, 1933. ———. The Lost Eden. Translated by León Ma. Guerrero. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1961. ———. Noli Me Tangere. Translated by Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin. Hong Kong: Bookmark, 1996. Reprint: University of Hawaii Press, 1996. OTHER WORKS BY RIZAL Morga, Antonio. Sucesos de las islas Filipinas. 1609. Reprint edition, edited by José Rizal. London, 1890. Rizal, José. The Complete Poems and Plays of José Rizal. Translated by Nick Joaquín. Manila: Far Eastern University, 1976. ———. El filibusterismo. Paris, 1891. Trans. Charles Derbyshire, The Reign of Greed. Manila: Philippine Education Company, 1912. ———. Epistolario Rizalino: Vol. I, 1877-1887, issued Vol. II, 1887-1890, issued 1931; Vol. III, 1890-1892, issued 1933. Vol. IV, 1892-1896, issued 1936; Vol. V, Cartas de Rizal a Blumentritt en Aleman, Part I, 1886-1888; Part II, 1888-1896, issued 1938.  BOOKS ABOUT JOSÉ RIZAL AND NOLI ME TANGERE Blumentritt, Ferdinand. Biography of Dr. José Rizal. Translated by Howard W. Bray. Singapore: Kelly and Walsh, 1898. Coates, Austin. Rizal: Philippine Nationalist and Martyr. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1968. Craig, Austin. Lineage, Life and Labors of José Rizal. Manila: Philippine Education Company, 1913. Guerrero, León Ma. The First Filipino: A Biography of José Rizal. Manila: National Historial Commission, 1974. Reprint edition. Laubach, Frank C. Rizal: Man and Martyr. Manila: Community Publishers, 1936. Quirino, Carlos. The Great Malayan. Manila: Philippine Education Committee, 1940. Reprint. Tahanan Books, 1997. Retana, W. E. Vida y escritos del Dr. José Rizal. Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez, 1907. BOOKS ABOUT PHILIPPINE AND RELATED CULTURE AND HISTORY Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983. Arcilla, José S., editor. Understanding the Noli: Its Historical Context and Literary Influences. Quezon City: Phoenix Publishing House, 1988. Artigas y Cuerva, Manuel. The Events of 1872: A Historico-bio- bibliographical Account. Translation and notes by O. D. Corpuz. Diliman, Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 1996. Baltazar [Balagtas], Francisco. The History of Florante and Laura in the Kingdom of Albania. Manila: Ramirez and Giraudier, 1861. Bowring, John. A Visit to the Philippine Islands. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1859. Dauncey, Mrs. Campbell. The Philippines: An Account of Their People, Progress and Condition. Boston: J. B. Millet Company, 1910. De la Costa, Horacio. The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581-1768. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Jagor, F. Travels in the Philippines. London: Chapman and Hall, 1875. Mojares, Resil B. The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940. Quezon City: University of Philippines Press, 1983. Ocampo, Ambeth R. Rizal without the Overcoat. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 2000. Phelan, John Leddy. The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959. Philippine Commission of Independence. Beautiful Philippines: A Handbook of General Information. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1923. Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988. Rodríguez Bachiller, Angel. Rizal, Filipinas y España. Madrid: Ediciones del Orto, 1996. Russell, Florence Campbell. A Woman’s Journey through the Philippines. Boston: Page & Co., 1907. San Juan, Epifanio, Jr. Rizal in Our Time: Essays in Interpretation. Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 1997. “What? Does no Caesar, does no Achilles appear on your stage now, Not an Andromache e’en, not an Orestes, my friend?” “No! there is naught to be seen there but parsons, and syndics of commerce, Secretaries perchance, ensigns, and majors of horse.” “But, my good friend, pray tell me, what can such people e’er meet with That can be truly called great?—what that is great can they do?” —Friedrich Schiller, “Shakespeare’s Ghost,”6 translated by John Bowring  TO MY COUNTRY Recorded in the history of human suffering are cancers of such malignant character that even minor contact aggravates them, engendering overwhelming pain. How often, in the midst of modern civilizations have I wanted to bring you into the discussion, sometimes to recall these memories, sometimes to compare you to other countries, so often that your beloved image became to me like a social cancer. Therefore, because I desire your good health, which is indeed all of ours, and because I seek better stewardship for you, I will do with you what the ancients did with their infirmed: they placed them on the steps of their temples so that each in his own way - could invoke a divinity that might offer a cure. With that in mind, I will try to reproduce your current condition faithfully, without prejudice; I will lift the veil hiding your ills, and sacrifice everything to truth, even my own pride, since, as your son, I, too, suffer your defects and shortcomings.  CHAPTER 1 A GATHERING Toward the end of October, Don Santiago de los Santos, who was generally known as Captain Tiago, gave a dinner party that, despite its having been announced only that afternoon, which was not his usual practice, was the topic of every conversation in Binondo and neighboring areas, and even as far as Intramuros.7 In those days Captain Tiago was considered the most liberal of men, and it was known that the doors of his house, like those of his country, were closed to no one but tradesmen or perhaps a new or daring idea. The news surged like a jolt of electricity among the parasites, spongers, and freeloaders that God, in his infinite goodness, has so lovingly multiplied in Manila. Some went looking for boot-black, and others in search of collar-buttons and cravats, but everyone, of course, spent time deciding on the best way to greet the master of the house with just the right amount of familiarity to make him believe in a past friendship, or, if necessary, how exactly to make excuses for not having come by sooner. The dinner was to be given in a house on Analoague Street,8 and since we no longer remember its number, we will describe it in such a way that it can still be recognized, if earthquakes haven’t destroyed it. We don’t believe the owner would have torn it down, because usually this sort of work is reserved for God or nature, which has, it appears, many projects of this type under contract with our government. It is quite a large structure, of a style similar to many others in the country, located near a section that overlooks a branch of the Pasig9 often called the Binondo Creek, which plays, like many rivers in Manila, the multiple roles of bathhouse, sewer, laundry, fishing hole, thoroughfare, and even drinking water, if that serves the interests of the Chinese water-seller. It is important to note that this vital district artery, where traffic is so bustling and bewildering, for over a length of almost a kilometer is served by just one wooden bridge, which for half the year is under repair on one end and for the remainder closed to traffic on the other, so that in the hot months horses take advantage of this permanent status quo to jump from it into the water, to the great surprise of the daydreaming individual as he dozes... or philosophizes on the century’s progress. The house in question is somewhat squat, its lines fairly uneven. Whether the architect who built it could not see very well or this resulted from earthquakes or typhoons no one can say for sure. A wide, partly carpeted staircase with green balusters leads from the tiled doorway and vestibule to the main floor, flanked by Chinese porcelain flowerpots and vases of various colors and fantastic scenes, sitting on pedestals. Since no butlers or maids request invitation cards, or even inquire about them, let us go upstairs, my reader, my friend or foe, if you find the strains of the orchestra or the lights or the great clinking of the glasses and plates intriguing, and you wish to see a gathering in the Pearl of the Orient.10 If it were up to me, I would spare you a description of the house, but it is too important. We mortals are, in general, like tortoises: we value and classify ourselves according to our shells; but the people of the Philippines are like tortoises in other ways as well. If we go upstairs, we will suddenly find ourselves in a broad expanse called the caída (I am not sure why),11 which tonight will serve both as a dining and music room. In the middle, a long table, abundantly and luxuriously appointed, seems to wink sweet promise at the freeloader while it threatens the simple dalaga12 with two deadly hours in the company of strangers whose language and conversation often take on a very odd character. In contrast to these worldly concerns is the assortment of paintings on the wall, which represents such religious scenes as purgatory, hell, the last judgment, the death of the righteous, and the death of the sinner. On the end wall, imprisoned in an elegant, splendid frame in a Renaissance style that Arévalo13 might have carved, is a curious canvas of grand dimension in which two old women are seen... The inscription reads: “Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage, who is venerated in Antipolo, visits the pious and famous Capitana Inés during her illness, disguised as a beggar.”14 The composition, which shows little taste or artistry, is, on the other hand, excessively realistic: the use of certain yellows and blues on her face makes the sick woman seem like a corpse in a state of putrefaction; the drinking glasses and other objects, the trappings of a long illness, are reproduced in such detail that one can even make out their contents. In contemplating these paintings, which whet the appetite and inspire bucolic thoughts, one might think that the perverse owner of the house was well aware of the character of most of those who were to sit at his table. And to further illuminate his thinking he has hung from the ceiling beautiful Chinese lamps, empty birdcages, frosted-glass balls in red, green, and blue, withered hanging plants, dried, inflated fish called botetes,15 and other objects, surrounding it all on the side that overlooks the creek with fanciful half-Chinese, half-European wooden arches, which allow us to glimpse trellises and arbors on the terrace, dimly lit by multicolored paper lanterns. Over there in the room are the dinner guests, among colossal mirrors and brilliant chandeliers; over there, on a pine platform, is a magnificent grand piano worth a fortune, even more precious this evening because no one is playing it. Over there is a large oil portrait of a handsome man in a frock coat. He is stiff, straight, and as symmetrical as the tasseled mace he holds in his stiff, ring-covered fingers. The portrait seems to say, “So, look how well dressed and dignified I am!” The furniture is elegant, if uncomfortable and not suited to the climate; the owner of the house would never put his guests’ health before luxury. “Dysentery is terrible, but you are sitting in European chairs, which you don’t get to do every day!” he would tell them. The room is almost full, the men separated from the women like in Catholic churches and synagogues. The women’s group is composed of a few young ladies, Filipinas and Spaniards: they open their mouths to stifle a yawn, but then immediately cover them with their fans; they barely whisper a few words, and any ventured conversation dies in monosyllables, like the nocturnal sounds of mice and lizards one hears in a house. Perhaps the various Our Ladies hanging on the walls have obliged them to be quiet and maintain a religious modesty, or is it that these women are different from most others? The only person to welcome these ladies was an old woman, a cousin of Captain Tiago, who had an open, friendly face and who spoke Castilian rather badly. Her notion of courtesy and sophistication was limited to offering the Spanish women a tray of cigarettes and buyos16 and extending her hand to be kissed, just as a friar might do. The poor old woman became bored and, taking advantage of the noise made by a plate breaking, quickly left the room muttering: “Jesus! Just you wait, you good-for-nothing... !” She never returned. The men were noisier. A few cadets were engaged in a lively conversation in a corner, though quietly. From time to time they would look up at various people in the room, point at them, and laugh among themselves, though they tried to hide their laughter. Nearby, two foreigners dressed in white, their hands clasped behind their backs, strolled from one end of the room to the other without saying a word, taking large steps like bored passengers aboard a ship. Much of the interest and certainly the most animation came from a group composed of two friars, a soldier, and two laymen seated around a small table laid with bottles of wine and English biscuits. The soldier was an old lieutenant, tall and severe; he looked like a Duke of Alba17 abandoned in the ranks of the Civil Guard;18 he spoke little, and brusquely even then. One of the friars, a young Dominican, handsome, graceful, and as bright as his gold-rimmed glasses, was prematurely serious. He was Binondo’s parish priest, who in years past was a professor in San Juan de Letrán.19 He had a reputation for being a consummate casuist, so much so that when the Sons of Guzmán20 dared argue subtleties with lay brothers, even the agile debater Benedicto de Luna21 could not draw them in or catch them out: the subtle arguments of Fray Sibyla left them like the fisherman who tried to catch an eel on a string. The Dominican spoke little and seemed to weigh his words carefully. In contrast, the other was a Franciscan who spoke a great deal and gesticulated even more. Though his hair was beginning to gray, his constitution seemed to have remained robust. Regular features, a disquieting mien, a square jaw, and a Herculean frame made him look like a Roman patrician in disguise. We are reminded unfortunately of one of the three monks in Heine’s The Gods in Exile who crossed a Tyrolean lake at midnight on the day of the autumnal equinox, each time leaving an ice-cold silver coin in the terrified boatman’s hand.22 Unlike the monks, however, Fray Dámaso was not mysterious; he was lively, and if his voice had the quality of someone who has never held his tongue, who thinks of himself as holy and what he says memorable, his gay, open laughter erased that disagreeable impression. One could even excuse the sight of bare feet and hairy legs that would have made the fortune of a Mendieta in the fairs at Quiapo.23 The only distinguishing characteristic of one of the civilians, a short man with a black beard, was his nose, which, judging by its dimensions, should never have been his; the other, a young blond man, seemed to have only recently arrived in the country. The Franciscan was engaged in lively conversation with him. “You’ll see,” he was saying, “after a few months here you’ll understand what I’m talking about. It is one thing to govern in Madrid, and another to be in the Philippines.” “But—” “Take me, for example,” Fray Dámaso continued, raising his voice to keep the young man from getting a word in, “I have had twenty-three years of rice and bananas, and I can speak with authority. Don’t give me your theories or rhetoric. I know the indio. 24 You have to understand that when I arrived in this country I was posted to a small town. Though it was small, its people were extraordinarily hardworking farmers. To this day I cannot understand Tagalog very well, but still I heard confession from the women there, and we were able to make ourselves understood. They came to love me so much that three years later, when I was transferred to the curacy of a larger town, which had become vacant because of the death of the indio priest, everyone cried, they showered me with gifts, they saw me off with music...” “But that only shows—” “Just a minute, just a minute, not so fast! My successor stayed less time, and when he left he had more people see him off, more tears, and more music, even though he had beaten them more than I had and had almost doubled the parish taxes.” “If you will allow me—” “Even more so, I was in the town of San Diego for twenty years. I left there only a few months ago...” At this point he seemed to become disgusted. “Twenty years is more than enough to know a town, and no one can convince me otherwise. San Diego had six thousand souls, and I knew all the townspeople as if I myself had given birth to them and I myself had nursed them. I knew on which foot this one limped, which shoe was too tight for that one, who was courting which young woman, which sins this one had committed and with whom, who was the real father of that child, and so on, since I heard everyone’s confession and they certainly knew better than to ignore that responsibility. Ask our host, Santiago, if I am wrong. He has a great deal of property there, which is where we became friends. You will see what the indio is like; when I left there only a few old women and a few tertiary brothers saw me off, after I had been there for twenty years!” “But I don’t know what this has to do with the end of the tobacco monopoly,”25 replied the blond man, taking advantage of a pause when the Franciscan drank a glass of sherry. Fray Dámaso was so surprised he nearly dropped his glass. He stared at the young man for a moment. “What? What?” he exclaimed histrionically. “It’s as clear as day and you can’t see it? You are a child of God, and yet you can’t see that all this is palpable proof that the ministerial reforms are irrational?” The blond man was stunned. The lieutenant frowned even more deeply. The little man shook his head either in agreement with Fray Dámaso or in disagreement. The Dominican had to be satisfied with virtually turning his back on all of them. In the end, looking at the friar with curiosity, all the young man could say with any seriousness was, “Do you believe...” “Do I believe? As I believe in the Gospel! Indios are incredibly lazy!”26  “Ah, excuse me for interrupting,” said the young man, lowering his voice and bringing his chair a little closer. “You have used a very interesting word. Are these natives truly indolent by nature, or is it, as a foreign traveler has said, that we make excuses for our own indolence, our backwardness, and our colonial system by calling them indolent? It has been said of other colonies whose inhabitants are of the same race...” “Bah! Jealousy! Ask Señor Laruja, who also knows the country well. Ask him if the indio’s ignorance and indolence are equaled anywhere!” “In fact,” answered the little man, who was the man in question, “nowhere else in the world will you find anyone lazier than indios, nowhere else!” “Or more vicious! Or more ungrateful!” “Or more ill-bred!” The young blond man began looking around uncomfortably. “Gentlemen,” he said quietly, “I believe we are in the house of an indio. These young ladies—” “Bah! Don’t be so nervous! Santiago doesn’t think of himself as indio, and, besides, he’s not here, and even if he were! The foolishness of these newcomers. Let a few months go by. They’ll change their minds after they have been to a few parties and bailújan ,27 slept on a few cots, and eaten a lot of tinola.”28 “Is it plausible the idea that what you call tinola is a fruit of the lotus family that makes men... well... forgetful?” “Neither lotus nor lottery,” replied Padre Dámaso, laughing, “Don’t be absurd! Tinola is a gulai29 of chicken and pumpkin. When did you get here?” “Four days ago,” replied the young man, a bit irritated. “Did you come out here with a job?” “No, sir, I came on my own account, to get to know the country.” “Lord, what a rare bird!” exclaimed Fray Dámaso, looking at him curiously. “To come on your own account, and with such lunatic notions. What an idea! When there are so many books... with just a little intelligence... and many men have written great books in this way!... Just a little intelligence—” “You have said, your reverence, Father Dámaso,” the Dominican hastily interrupted, cutting the conversation short, “that you spent twenty years in the town of San Diego and then left. Were you unhappy with the town, your reverence?” Fray Dámaso, upon hearing the question posed with such an innocent, almost impassive, tone, suddenly forgot his liveliness and stopped laughing. “No!” he grunted dryly, and dropped heavily against the back of the chair. The Dominican went on, even more indifference in his voice. “It must be painful to leave a town where you have been for twenty years and you know as well as you know your own habit. For my part, at least, I was very sorry to leave Camiling,30 and I was only there a few months... but my superiors did it for the community’s own good... and for my own.” For the first time that evening Fray Dámaso seemed preoccupied. Suddenly he smashed the arm of the chair with his fist and, breathing heavily, exclaimed: “Either there is religion or there isn’t, and that’s that, either priests are free or they aren’t! The country is being lost... it is lost!” And with that he punched the arm of the chair a second time. The whole room was surprised, and turned toward the group: the Dominican lifted his head to peer at him from under his glasses. The two foreigners who were strolling back and forth stopped for a moment, looked at each other, grinned slightly, baring their incisors, and then quickly resumed their stroll. “He’s in a bad mood because they haven’t treated him with the proper respect,” the young blond man whispered into Señor Laruja’s ear. “What do you mean, your reverence, what’s the matter?” the Dominican and the lieutenant asked, with different tones of voice.  “That’s why there are so many calamities! The governors support the heretics against God’s own ministers!” the Franciscan continued, raising his powerful fists. “What do you mean?” asked the frowning lieutenant again, who rose halfway out of his chair. “What do you mean?” Dámaso repeated, raising his voice even higher and facing the lieutenant. “I am telling you what I mean! I mean that when a priest tosses the body of a heretic out of his cemetery, no one, not even the king himself, has the right to interfere, and has even less right to impose punishment. And a general, a little general whose very name connotes calamity...”31 “Father, His Excellency is Vice Royal Patron!”32 shouted the soldier while rising from his seat. “Some Excellency, some Vice Royal Patron!” answered the Franciscan, getting up as well. “In any other time they would have kicked him down the stairs, as the religious orders once did with that impious Governor Bustamante.33 Those were times of faith!” “I warn you that I will not permit... His Excellency represents His Majesty the King!” “King or rook or nobody! To us there is no other king than the rightful —”34 “Stop!” yelled the lieutenant menacingly, as if he were addressing his soldiers. “Either you retract what you have just said or tomorrow morning I will report it to His Excellency.” “Why not do it right now, go ahead!” Fray Dámaso replied sarcastically, coming toward him, his fists clenched. “Do you for a moment think that because I wear a habit that I lack... ? Go ahead, I’ll even lend you my carriage!” The situation was taking a comical turn. Fortunately the Dominican intervened. “Gentlemen!” he said with authority and with that nasal voice so sweet to a friar’s ears. “There is no need to confuse matters or seek offense where none exists. In Father Dámaso’s words we must make distinctions between those of the man and those of the priest. Those that proceed from the latter, as they are, per se, can never be offensive, because they are born from absolute truth. In those of the man one must make a further subdistinction: those that he says ab irato, those that he says ex ore but not in corde, and those in corde. The last of these are the only offensive ones and even that depends: if they are premeditated in mente, or result per accidens in the heat of the discussion, if there is—”35 “Well, for accidens and for me I know his motives, Father Sibyla,” interrupted the soldier, who found himself mixed up in so many distinctions that he was afraid he himself would not emerge from the conversation blameless. “I know the motives and the ones you are going to distinguish, your reverence. While Father Dámaso was away in San Diego, the coadjutor buried the body of a very distinguished person, a very distinguished person. I have had many dealings with him and have been a guest in his home. So what if he never went to confession. So what? I don’t go to confession either. But to claim that he committed suicide is a lie, a slur. A man like him, with a son in whom he has placed all his hopes and affections, a man with faith in God, who understands his responsibilities to society, an honorable and just man, does not commit suicide. This is what I say, and I will say nothing else about what I think, and I thank you, your reverence.” Turning his back on the Franciscan, he went on: “Then this priest returned to the town and, after mistreating the poor coadjutor, had the body exhumed and taken out of the cemetery in order to bury it who knows where. The townspeople of San Diego were too cowardly to protest, and the truth is that very few of them knew about it: the dead man had no family, and his only son was in Europe. But His Excellency knew about it and because he is an upstanding man, he requested such a punishment... and Father Dámaso was transferred to a more appropriate town. That’s it. Now go ahead and make your distinctions.” With that, he left the group.  “I am sorry that without knowing it I touched upon such a delicate matter,” said Father Sibyla. “But in the end if something has been gained by the changing of towns...” “Gained? And what is lost when one is transferred? And the papers... and what is misplaced?” Fray Dámaso stammered, unable to contain his anger. The gathering slowly returned to its earlier tranquility. In the meantime, a few other people had arrived, among them an old, lame Spanish man with a sweet, inoffensive look, who was supported under one arm by an old Philippine woman. Her face was made up and her hair had been curled, and she wore European-style clothes. The group greeted them warmly. Doctor de Espadaña and his wife La Doctora Doña Victorina36 sat among our friends. A few reporters and shopkeepers greeted one another and roamed about from one side to the other without knowing what to do. “Can you tell me, Señor Laruja, what is the master of the house like?” asked the young blond man. “I haven’t been introduced to him yet.” “They say he has gone out. I haven’t seen him yet either.” “There is no need for introductions here,” Fray Dámaso interjected. “Santiago is a good sort.” “Very even-tempered and calm. Certainly not the sort of man who would, say, invent gunpowder, for instance,”37 added Laruja. “Señor Laruja!” exclaimed Doña Victorina with a mild reproach. “How could he invent gunpowder if, according to what they say, it was invented by the Chinese centuries ago?” “The Chinese? Are you daft?” exclaimed Fray Dámaso. “A Franciscan invented it, one of my order, some Fray Savalls or something like that, in the... seventh century!” “A Franciscan! Well, then he must have been a missionary in China, this Father Savalls,” replied the señora, who was not willing to let go of her notions.  “Schwartz,38 you mean, madam,” put in Fray Sibyla, without looking at her. “I have no idea. Fray Dámaso said Savalls. I’m only repeating what he said!” “All right. Savalls or Chevas, who cares? Change one letter and he’s no longer Chinese,” the Franciscan replied, now in a bad mood. “And in the fourteenth century, not the seventh,” corrected the Dominican in such a way as to take the other man down a notch. “Well, one century more or less still doesn’t make him a Dominican!” “Please, don’t make his reverence angry!” said Father Sibyla with a smile. “Maybe he did invent it. At least it saved his brothers from having to do it.” “So, Father Sibyla, you say that it was the fourteenth century?” Doña Victorina said with great interest. “Before or after the birth of Christ?” Happily for the man who had been asked that question, two - people then entered the room.  CHAPTER 2 CRISÓSTOMO IBARRA It wasn’t beautiful, handsomely dressed young women who commanded everyone’s attention (even that of Fray Sibyla). It wasn’t His Excellency the Captain General and his adjutants who drew the lieutenant out of his reverie and made him come forward a few steps, or that stopped Fray Dámaso in his tracks as if petrified, it was merely the original of the portrait of the man in tails leading by the hand a young man dressed in deep mourning. “Good evening, gentlemen! Good evening, Father,” was the first thing Captain Tiago said, kissing the hands of the priests, who forgot to give him their blessing. The Dominican had removed his glasses in order to get a look at the young man who had just arrived, and a pale, gaping Father Dámaso. “I have the great pleasure of introducing to you Don Crisóstomo Ibarra, the son of my late friend,” Captain Tiago continued. “The gentleman has just arrived from Europe and I went to welcome him.” At the sound of the name, a few cries could be heard. The lieutenant forgot to greet his host. Instead, he approached the young man—who by then was exchanging the customary greetings with the whole group—and examined him from head to toe. There seemed nothing particularly striking about him in that room, except for his black suit. Nevertheless, his commanding height, his features, and his movements gave off that scent of healthy youth in which both the body and the soul have been equally cultivated. One - could see in his frank and lively expression, through a handsome brown color, a few traces of Spanish blood, and a bit of pink in his cheeks, perhaps the remnants of time spent in a colder climate. “Why, for heaven’s sake,” he exclaimed with happy surprise, “it’s my village priest! Father Dámaso, a close friend of my father’s!” Everyone looked toward the Franciscan, who did not move. “Excuse me, but perhaps I have made a mistake,” added Ibarra, somewhat confused.  “You are not mistaken,” was all he was finally able to answer, his voice altered. “But your father was never a close friend of mine.” Ibarra slowly withdrew the hand he had extended and looked at him with astonishment. Then he turned and found himself face-to-face with the severe figure of the lieutenant, who had been watching him all the while. “Young man, are you Don Rafael Ibarra’s son?” The young man bowed. Father Dámaso sat partway down on the chair and fixed his gaze on the lieutenant. “Welcome home! May you be happier here than your father was!” exclaimed the soldier in a trembling voice. “I knew him and worked with him and may I say he was one of the most upstanding and honorable men in all the Philippines.” “Sir!” answered Ibarra, clearly moved. “The elegy you have just given my father dispels any doubts I may have had about his fate, which I, his son, still do not know.” The old man’s eyes filled with tears. He turned around and hurried away. The young man found himself alone in the center of the room. The owner of the house had disappeared and there was no one to introduce him to the young ladies, many of whom were looking at him with great interest. After vacillating for a few seconds, he went toward them with a simple, natural grace. “If you will allow me,” he said, “I hope we can leap over the rules of strict etiquette. I have not been in my home country for seven years, and now that I am back, I cannot refrain from greeting its most beautiful attribute, its women.” Since no one dared reply, the young man was obliged to retire. He went toward a group of gentlemen who, upon seeing him approach, formed a semicircle. “Gentlemen,” he said, “in Germany there is a custom: when a newcomer comes to a gathering and cannot find anyone to introduce him, he says his name and introduces himself, and they respond in kind. Allow me to do this, not in order to introduce foreign customs here, since our customs are certainly just as beautiful as theirs, but because I find myself in need of doing so. I have paid tribute to the heavens and to my homeland’s women; now I would like to pay tribute to its citizens, my compatriots. Gentlemen, my name is Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra y Magsalin!” They said their names, which were more or less insignificant, and more or less unknown. “And my name is A.... !” said a young man dryly, with a slight bow. “Do I have the honor of speaking with the poet whose work has helped sustain my enthusiasm for my homeland? I’ve been told you’re no longer writing, but no one has been able to tell me why...” “Why? Because one does not invoke inspiration in order to humiliate oneself and to lie. One fellow has been brought up on charges for having included a certain figure of speech in his verse. I may be a poet, but I am not crazy.”39 “And may I ask what figure of speech it was?” “He said that the son of a lion is also a lion. He was almost exiled.” The strange young man then left the group. A young man with a pleasant disposition came toward him, almost running. He was attired in the native dress of the country, with shiny buttons on his bib. He approached Ibarra and extended his hand saying: “Señor Ibarra, I wanted so much to meet you. Captain Tiago is a friend of mine and I knew your good father... My name is Captain Tinong, I live in Tondo,40 where you have a house. I hope you will honor me with a visit. Please come have dinner with us tomorrow.” Ibarra found such amiability enchanting. Captain Tinong smiled and rubbed his hands together. “Thank you,” he answered with affection, “but I am leaving for San Diego tomorrow...” “What a shame! Then perhaps when you return.” “Dinner is served,” announced a waiter from the Café La Campana. 41  The people began to file in, though the women needed a great deal of prodding, especially the Philippine women.  CHAPTER 3 DINNER Jele jele bago quiere42 Fray Sibyla seemed content. He wandered about serenely, his thin lips pressed firmly together, though they had not yet begun to show their disdain. He even deigned to speak to the cripple, Doctor de Espadaña, who replied in monosyllables because he had a bit of a stutter. The Franciscan was in a frightful mood. He kicked aside the chairs in his way and even elbowed aside a cadet. The lieutenant had a serious look about him; everyone else chatted animatedly and gushed over the magnificence of the table. Doña Victorina, however, had crinkled up her nose. Suddenly she wheeled about, as angry as a trodden snake: the lieutenant had stepped on her train. “Don’t you have eyes?” she said. “Yes, ma’am, better ones than you, but I couldn’t take them off your curls,” the ungallant soldier replied, and then walked away. Instinctively, or perhaps out of habit, the two priests went - toward the head of the table. As one might have guessed, the same thing occurred that occurs between rivals for a bishop’s chair. First they exaggerate the merits and superiority of their opponent. Then they express just the opposite, and finally they moan and groan when they don’t get it. “After you.” Father Dámaso. “After you.” Father Sibyla. “Our host’s oldest friend... the late mistress’s confessor... your age, your integrity, your position...” “Let’s not say ‘very’ old. On the other hand, you are the parish priest,” hissed Father Dámaso, without letting go of the chair, however. “Since these are your orders, I will obey,” Father Sibyla said finally, getting ready to sit down. “I did not order you to do anything,” the Franciscan protested, “I did not order you to do anything!”  Father Sibyla, ignoring these protests, had already begun to sit down when his eyes met those of the lieutenant. The highest-ranking officer is somewhat lower on the social scale than the lay brother who prepares meals at the parish house. Cedant arma togae, said Cicero43 in the Senate; cedant arma cottae,44 say the friars in the Philippines. But Father Sibyla was a cultured person, so he offered: “Lieutenant, here we are in the world, not in the church. Here the seat is yours.” To judge by the tone of his voice, however, even in the world the seat belonged to him. The lieutenant, either not wanting to be bothered or to avoid having to sit between two friars, curtly declined. Neither of the two remaining candidates had remembered their host. Ibarra saw him watching events unfold and smiling. “Don Santiago, are you not joining us?” But all the seats were occupied. Lucullus would not eat in the house of Lucullus.45 “Stay there, don’t get up!” Captain Santiago said, putting his hands on the young man’s shoulder. This party is meant to give thanks to the Virgin for your arrival. Hey, there! Bring in the tinola. I ordered tinola specially for you, since it has been so long since you have had any.” A steaming tureen was brought in. The Dominican, after murmuring the Benedicite,46 to which no one knew the proper response, began to dish out the contents. Owing to carelessness or some other reason, Father Dámaso ended up with a plate in which a naked chicken neck and a tough wing floated among a plateful of squash and broth. Meanwhile everyone else was eating legs and breasts, and Ibarra had the great luck to have been given the giblets. The Franciscan took in the whole scene, mashed the squash, sipped a bit of broth, dropped his spoon, which made a loud noise, and brusquely pushed his plate away. The Dominican was distracted by his conversation with the young blond man. “How long have you been away?” Laruja asked Ibarra. “Almost seven years.”  “Well, you must have forgotten a great deal!” “On the contrary. And even though it seems to have forgotten me, home has always been on my mind.” “What do you mean?” the blond man asked. “I mean that for a year I have had no news from here, so much so that now I feel like a stranger. I still don’t know how or when my father died!” “Ah!” exclaimed the lieutenant. “And where were you that no one sent you a telegram?” asked Doña Victorina. “When we were married, we sent a telegram to the Peñínsula.”47 “I spent the past two years in northern Europe, madam, in Germany and Russian Poland.” Doctor Espadaña, who until then had not dared open his mouth, thought it appropriate to do so now. “Wuh-wuh... once in Spain I knew a Pole from Wa-wa-Warsaw, named Stadtnitzki, if I remember correctly. You didn’t come across him by any chance, did you?” he asked timidly, about to blush. “It’s possible,” Ibarra replied amiably, “but I don’t recall at the moment.” “But you couldn’t possibly muh-muh... mix him up with anyone else,” replied the doctor, who had perked up, “he was as blond as gold and spoke terrible Spanish.” “That’s an excellent description but, unfortunately, the only time I spoke even a word of Spanish was in a few consulates.” “Then how did you get by?” asked Doña Victorina, with admiration in her voice. “I used the local language, madam.” “Do you speak English, as well?” the Dominican asked. He had been to Hong Kong, where he mastered Pidgin-English, the adulteration of the language of Shakespeare by the children of the Celestial Empire.48 “I spent a year in England among people who only spoke English.” “And what was your favorite country in Europe?” the young blond man asked.  “After Spain, which I consider my second home, any country in free Europe.” “You have traveled a great deal... what made the greatest impression on you?” Laruja asked. Ibarra stopped to think. “Greatest impression in what sense?” “For example... the life of the people... social life, political life, religious life, life in general, life in its essence, life as a whole...” Ibarra mulled this over. “Frankly, the surprising thing about these peoples, when you set aside everyone’s national pride... before visiting a country, I tried to study its history, its Exodus,49 so to speak, and in the end I found they all followed a common course. In every instance I noted that a people’s prosperity or misery lay in direct proportion to its freedoms or its inhibitions and, along the same lines, of the sacrifice or selfishness of its ancestors.” “That’s it?” the Franciscan asked with a mocking laugh. Since the beginning of dinner he had not said a word; perhaps he had been distracted by the food. “It doesn’t seem worth it to waste all that money just to find out such an insignificant thing. Any schoolboy knows that.” Ibarra did not know what to say. Everyone else was shocked. They looked from one to another, afraid there would be a scene. “Dinner is coming to an end and I think you have had your fill, your reverence,” the young man was going to say, but he reined himself in, saying only the following: “Ladies and gentlemen, do not be too concerned about the familiarity with which our old curate treats me. This is how he treated me when I was a boy, and though many years have passed they add up to little for him. I thank him for bringing back to me the days when he visited our house and often honored my father’s table with his presence.” The Dominican looked furtively at the Franciscan, who was now trembling. Ibarra went on, rising to his feet:  “If you will permit me, I will now take my leave. I have just arrived and I am leaving tomorrow morning so there are a great many things to take care of. The bulk of the dinner is over, I have had a little wine, and brandy is not my drink. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Spain and the Philippines!” He drained the glass, which until then he had not touched. The old lieutenant followed suit, but without saying a word. “Don’t go!” Captain Tiago whispered to him. “María Clara will be here in a minute. I sent Isabel to fetch her. Your village’s new parish priest will be coming. He is a saint.” “I’ll come by tomorrow before I leave. Tonight I have a very important call to make.” He left. In the meantime, the Franciscan had recovered. “Did you see that?” the young blond man said, gesturing with a dessert knife. “That’s pride for you. They can’t stand to be set to rights by the priest. And yet they still consider themselves decent - people. That’s the bad side of sending young people to Europe. The government should not allow it.” “And the lieutenant,” said Doña Victorina, seconding the Franciscan. “He didn’t stop frowning the whole night. A good thing he left. At his age still a lieutenant.” The lady would not forget his insolent allusion to her curls and his stepping on the folds of her skirt. That night, among the things the young blond man would write was the next chapter in his Colonial Studies: “How a neck and wing in a friar’s plate of tinola can spoil the happiness of a celebration.” Among his observations were the following: “In the Philippines the person of least use is the one who gives the dinner or the party. The host could be tossed out into the street and everything would still proceed swimmingly.” “In the current state of things, not allowing them to leave the country—or even teaching them to read—would actually be doing them a favor...”  CHAPTER 4 HERETIC AND SUBVERSIVE Ibarra could not decide what to do. The night wind, which was already rather cool that time of year, seemed to lift the light cloud from his head. He took off his hat and breathed deeply. Coaches passed like lightning, rented carriages at a deathly slow pace; people of various nationalities strolled by. Walking at the uneven pace generally associated with distracted or idle - people, the young man headed toward La Plaza de Binondo,50 looking around as if he were searching for something. The same streets, the same white and blue houses, with walls either whitewashed or painted in fresco style and made to look like granite. The church tower was still crowned by the clock with its translucent dial; the same Chinese shops with their dirty curtains and iron rods, one of which he had bent one night, the way Manila’s more mischievous boys did. It was still bent. “Things move so slowly,” he murmured and went along Calle de la Sacristía.51 The sherbet vendors were shouting, “Sherrberrt!” Huepes52 still shed their light onto the booths run by the Chinese and women, which sold foodstuffs and fruit. “It’s wonderful!” he exclaimed. “That’s the same Chinese man from seven years ago, and the same old woman! You could say I dreamed about this every night of my seven years in Europe. My God, this paving stone is still broken, the same as when I left!” It was true. The flat stone that formed the corner of Calle San Jacinto and Sacristía was still loose. While he contemplated such wonderful urban stability in a country of instability, someone laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. He looked up to find the old lieutenant watching him, and almost smiling, without the hard expression or the harsh eyebrows that were his identifying characteristic.  “Young man, you should be careful, and learn from your father’s experience,” he said. “Excuse me, but it seems you had a great deal of respect for my father. Perhaps you can tell me what happened to him?” Ibarra asked, looking at him. “You mean you don’t know?” the soldier asked. “I asked Don Santiago, but he refused to talk about it until tomorrow. Do you know by any chance?” “Of course I do, everyone does. He died in jail.” The young man took a step back and eyed the lieutenant up and down. “In jail? Who died in jail?” he asked. “Why, your father! He was a prisoner!” the soldier replied, somewhat surprised. “My father... in jail... a prisoner in jail? What are you saying? Do you know who my father was? Are you... ?” asked the young man, grabbing the soldier’s arm. “I don’t believe I am mistaken: Don Rafael Ibarra.” “Yes, Don Rafael Ibarra,” the young man repeated weakly. “But I thought you knew,” murmured the soldier, his voice full of compassion upon seeing the turmoil in Ibarra’s soul, “I assumed you knew... but you must be brave. In the Philippines you are not considered to be honorable unless you have been to jail.” “I have to believe you are not toying with me,” offered Ibarra in a weak voice, after a few moments of silence. “Can you tell me why he was in jail?” The old man stopped to think. “It seems odd to me that you have not been told about your family’s affairs.” “His last letter arrived a year ago. He told me not to worry if he didn’t write, since he would be very busy. He told me to keep studying... and he gave me his blessing.”  “Then he wrote that letter just before he died. It is coming up on a year since he was buried in his village.” “Why was my father imprisoned?” “For a very honorable reason. But walk with me, I have to go to my barracks. I’ll tell you about it on the way. Take my arm.” For a while they walked along in silence. The old man seemed to be mulling something over and asking for inspiration from his goatee, which he stroked. “As you well know,” he began by saying, “your father was the richest man in the province, and even though many people loved and respected him, others hated and envied him. Unfortunately, the Spaniards who come to the Philippines are not always the ones who should. I say this as much about one of your grandparents as about your father’s enemies. Frequent changes, lack of morale in high places, favoritism, and the inexpensiveness and brief length of the voyage are all to blame. The worst parts of the Peninsula come here, and if a good one does arrive, the country quickly corrupts him. Well, between the priests and the Spanish your father had many enemies.” He paused briefly. “A few months after you left, the unpleasantness with Father Dámaso began, though I cannot figure out why. Father Dámaso accused him of not going to confession. Before that he didn’t go to confession either, but they were still friends, as you well remember. In addition, Don Rafael was an honest man, more just than many men who go to confession. He held himself up to a rigorous moral standard and when the unpleasantness began he often said to me: ‘Señor Guevara, do you think God pardons a crime, a murder, for example, solely because one tells it to a priest, who is, in the end, a man, and who has the duty to keep it to himself, and who is afraid of burning in hell, which is an act of attrition, who is a coward, and certainly without shame? I have another conception of God,’ he would say, ‘to me one does not correct one wrong by committing another, nor is one pardoned by useless weeping, or by giving alms to the church.’ He gave me this example: ‘If I kill the head of a family, if I make a woman into a destitute widow and happy children into helpless orphans, will I have satisfied eternal justice if I let them hang me, or confide my secret to someone who has to keep it to himself, or give alms to the priests, who need it the least, or buy myself a papal pardon, or weep night and day? And what about the widow and children? My conscience tells me I should replace as much as possible the person I have murdered and dedicate myself completely and for my whole life to the welfare of the family whose misfortune I have created. And even then, even then, who will replace the love of a husband and father?’ This was your father’s reasoning. He always acted out of such moral stringency, and one could say that he never offended anyone. On the contrary, through his own good works, he tried to erase certain injustices that he said your grandparents had committed. But getting back to the unpleasantness with the priest. It took on an evil character. Father Dámaso made veiled allusions to him from the pulpit and it was a miracle he didn’t mention him by name, since with a character like his anything is possible. Sooner or later it had to end badly.” The lieutenant again paused briefly. “In those days there wandered throughout the province an ex- artilleryman who had been thrown out of the ranks for being loutish and stupid. Though the man had to make a living, they - wouldn’t let him do any physical labor, which would hurt the army’s prestige, so someone or other got him a job collecting vehicle taxes. The unhappy fellow had no education whatsoever and the indios got wind of it pretty quickly. A Spaniard who cannot read or write is quite a phenomenon here. They made fun of the poor fellow, who paid with mortification for the taxes he collected after he came to the realization that he was the butt of their jokes, and it made an already rude and gross personality even more bitter. They would intentionally write backwards. He would make a great show of reading it, and when he would reach a blank space, he would sign it with a sort of scrawl that in the end gave him a semblance of dignity. The indios paid up, but they made fun of him. He swallowed his pride and made his collections, but his spirits were such that he respected no one. He had exchanged strong words with your father. “It happened one day that, while he was going over and over a piece of paper that he had been given in a shop, trying to get it right-side up, a schoolboy began to gesture to his friends, laugh, and point at him. The man heard the laughter and saw the joke making the rounds of the serious faces of those present. He lost his patience, whirled around, and began chasing the boys, who were running around shouting, ‘Ba, be, bi, bo, bu.’53 Blind with anger and unable to catch up with them, he throws his stick, which smashes one of them in the head and knocks him down. He runs over to him and stomps on him. None of those who had been making fun of him had the courage to intervene. Unfortunately, at that moment your father was passing by. Indignant, he runs over to the collector, grabs him by the arm, and reproaches him in no uncertain terms. He, who by that time could see only red, raises his hand, but your father didn’t give him a chance, and with the typical strength of the grandson of a Basque... some say he hit him, others that he only pushed him. In any event the man stumbled a few steps away and fell, hitting his head on a rock. Don Rafael calmly picks him up and takes him to the courthouse. Blood was spurting out of the ex- artilleryman’s mouth. He never regained consciousness and he died a few minutes later. As is usually the case, justice intervened, your father was imprisoned, and all his enemies emerged from hiding. Slanders rained down on him. They accused him of heresy and subversion. To be a heretic anywhere is a great disgrace, especially at that time, when the mayor made a great show of his religious devotion and prayed in the church with his servants and said the rosary in a great loud voice, perhaps so that everyone could hear him and pray with him. But to be a subversive is worse than being a heretic and killing three tax collectors who know how to read, write, and sign their names. Everyone deserted him. His papers and books were confiscated. They accused him of subscribing to the Overseas Mail,54 of reading the Madrid newspapers, of having sent you to German Switzerland, of having been in possession of letters and a portrait of a condemned priest, and who knows what else! They found accusations in everything, even of his wearing a peninsular-style shirt.55 If he had been anyone other than your father, he would have been set free almost immediately, especially since a doctor had attributed the death of the unfortunate tax collector to a blockage. But because of his wealth, his confidence in justice, and his hatred of anything that was not legal or just, they ruined him. I myself, in spite of the repugnance I feel in asking for mercy for anyone, went to the Captain General, a predecessor to the one we have now. I maintained that no one could be a subversive who took in any Spaniard at all and gave him a roof over his head and food to eat, and in whose veins the generous blood of Spain still flowed. But I ran into a brick wall. I swore on my poverty and my honor as a soldier, and I only succeeded in getting a poor reception, an even worse dismissal, and the nickname of ‘crack-pot. ’” The old man stopped to take a breath and, seeing the silence of his companion, who was not even looking at him, went on. “I went through the appeals process on your father’s behalf. I hired the well-known Filipino attorney, the young A., but he refused to take the case. ‘I would just lose,’ he told me. ‘And my defense would only give them a reason to bring new charges against him and perhaps against me. Try Señor M., who is a fiery speaker, articulate, from the Peninsula, and who enjoys a great deal of prestige.’ I followed this advice and this famous lawyer took on the case, which he argued with skill and brilliance. But your father’s enemies were legion, and some... clandestine and unknown. There was a great deal of false testimony, and slander that anywhere else would have been dismissed with an ironic or sarcastic phrase was now given weight and substance. If the lawyer was able to bring out contradictions in the testimony itself, other accusations rose immediately thereafter. They accused him of having illegally acquired several properties, and they requested indemnities for damages and loss. They said he kept up relations with tulisanes56 so that his fields and animals would be protected. In the end, they entangled the affair to such an extent that at the end of a year no one could even understand it. The governor had to leave his post. Another one came who had a reputation for being upstanding, but he was here only a few months and the one who succeeded him had too great a love for horses. “The suffering, the unpleasantness, the discomfort of prison or the pain of seeing so much cruelty undermined his iron constitution, and he fell ill with a disease that only the grave can cure. And just when he was about to be exonerated, when he was to be absolved of the ac